Must be Crazy

Left Pensacola Beach Friday evening around 7 for the drive to New Orleans, arriving around 10:15. It was actually a pretty nice drive along good 'ol I-10, except for the extensive construction in Slidell that had traffic backed up for a few miles. Switched the cassette over to the wheels that I use for time trials, bolted on the aero bars, and then spent a while cleaning the lovebug guts off the bike -- one of the little hazards of a roof rack in the Fall. Still, it wasn't until around 1 am that I finally got to sleep, and since the alarm was set for 5:30, that didn't allow for much sack time. Saturday I was up with the alarm, although I kind of wandered around aimlessly like a zombie for a while until I really woke up. I made the drive up to Baton Rouge, by way of the Gonzalez Starbucks, and arrived at the Team Time Trial start on River Road in plenty of time. It looked like a pretty good turnout as I worked my way through the riders clogging the road. Our 35+ team, consisting of Charlie, Steve, Jaro and myself, went out on a couple of short warmup runs, and then presented ourselves at the start/finish about four minutes before our start. We got off to a pretty good start and by the time we had gone five miles we had passed two teams. Of course, since the start order was completely random, that didn't mean very much. Even so, we were cruising rather well, I thought.

On the first tailwind section we were up to 30 mph consistently, and even in the headwind stretch we didn't drop below 26 hardly at all. My legs were feeling pretty good, and the first lap seemed too good to be true. It was. We weren't too far into lap 2 when Steve told me he was really having trouble. I had noticed that he had been telling Charlie, who was directly behind him in the rotation, not to surge, which meant he was probably having trouble getting back onto the back after his pulls. It seemed to me that he was slowing down a bit when he would pull, and then dropping back kind of fast, and I think Charlie was trying to get us back up to speed when he would come to the front. We were still going pretty well on the second lap, but definitely not so well that we could afford to ease up. I was surging myself a bit, always feeling like we weren't going quite fast enough. It had to be done, though, and everyone on the team was handling it well. The team felt really smooth and stable, although I did trade a little rubber with Jaro at one point when the pace suddenly slacked off and I found myself overlapping his wheel. Good thing we both know how to ride our bikes. Anyway, by the end of the second of three laps, the strain was starting to show. Lap two had definitely been slower than lap one.

The last lap was both harder and slower. Kind of typical for a Team TT like this. Steve was starting to hurt big-time, but was doing a pretty good job of holding the pace when he would come to the front. Unfortunately, we had to ease up a few times during the last two laps when someone would miss catching the draft at the back, and that cost us a lot of time. As usual, I was probably suffering the least because every time I would pull off, no matter how hard I had just gone, I would have lots of draft and could recover pretty well before my next pull came up. A few miles from the finish, Steve finally threw in the towel, letting us know he was dropping off so that the pace wouldn't be disrupted. After that, it felt much harder to me. Charlie really seemed to ease up when Steve dropped off, and it took us a long time to get rolling again into the headwind, and I was really missing that extra wheel's worth of draft.

We ended up with a respectible time, I think, that was apparently good enough for second place in the master 35+, but I couldn't wait around for the results. As soon as I cooled down, it was back in the car for the return trip to Pensacola. I think I stopped sweating somewhere in Mississippi. You're probably thinking that I must be crazy to drive all the way from Pensacola for a 32 mile TTT and then turn right around and drive back, only to make the return trip to New Orleans the next day. Yeah, you're probably right. Anyway, I haven't seen the results yet, but from what I heard, the Herring guys set a new course record that was something like eight minutes faster than our time. We averaged about 26.7 mph or so according to my computer. I had said before the race that in order to be competitive we needed to be looking at 27 mph. I have a feeling that the "competitive" speed today was probably more like 27.5. Anyway, we might have been able to shave another 30-45 seconds off of our time if all cylinders had been firing and if we hadn't lost time on the turns and when we had to slow down to regroup after a car pulled out in front of us. I don't think we had quite the horsepower to take a minute off of what we did, however, even under ideal conditions. At any rate, it was still better than hanging around on a beach in the sun at that time of year when the "girls gone wild" crew is on vacation.

Definitely need to get some sleep tonight . . .