Against the Wind

I made the drive up to Baton Rouge early this morning for a little 21-mile time trial. On the way, of course, I stopped at the Starbuck's at Lakeside Shopping Center. I was almost awake by the time I got to the race an hour or so later. Although the chilly 50-degree temperature was surprising, the northwest wind was positively shocking. I waited as long as I could to start what passes for my warm-up, then returned to the car at the last minute to strip off the knee-warmers and extra jersey. By then it was a bit warmer but the wind was, if anything, increasing in strength. We were doing two laps of a loop that runs mostly along a big bend in the Mississippi River, so the apparent wind direction is constantly changing. Since the distance was only 21 miles, give or take, we were started at 30-second intervals, which makes your start time come up surprisingly quickly. To complicate things a bit, the start order was in order of registration across all categories, which means you end up passing some people who are much slower than yourself and likewise you get passed by faster people the whole time. The only real problem with that is that you don't always have a rider ahead of you to chase and provide that extra motivation.

So my turn comes up and I see that there isn't a holder, which is unusual for an individual TT, but anyway the starter counts me down from 5 and I'm off. There's a strong tailwind for the first quarter mile or so until the road curves to the right, so I accelerated quickly. The first time I looked down at my computer I was going 34 mph. Since that's an entirely unsustainable speed, even with a tailwind, for mere mortals like me, I immediately backed off a little bit and narrowly avoided going deeply into oxygen debt. That start line adrenalin can be dangerous sometimes, especially in time trials. Anyway, I settled down and was rolling along pretty quickly with a tail/cross wind and came up on the first right-hand turn right away. Suddenly I realized that the police officer who is controlling traffic at the intersection has his car parked on the inside of the turn and is standing beside his patrol car in the street. As a result, I overshot the turn pretty badly and nearly ran out of road on the outside causing me to tap the brakes and skip my rear wheel a bit. So rather than zipping through the turn into the headwind stretch with some good momentum, I ended up coming out of it going something like 22 mph and then had to accelerate again to get back up to speed. Anyway, for the next five or six miles I mostly fought against the wind, concentrating on keeping my form and pedaling smoothly. The direct headwind stretch wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared, and I felt satisfied with my speed. I guess the lowest gear I was in was the 53 x 14 or 15 on the first lap. I probably spent most of my time in the 13 today. Toward the end of the lap I was spinning the 13 at 29 mph or so for a little while. In the back of my head I knew there would be some guys going 34 mph along that stretch.

The second lap seemed a whole lot harder than the first, and everyone seemed to agree that the wind had picked up significantly. At one point I hit a short headwind stretch that brought me down to 20 mph for a while. It was hard to get into a rhythm because the road was constantly curving and the wind was being affected by the levee on one side and the trees, houses and fields on the other. I passed a whole bunch of people, and one person passed me like I was standing still, but by the end it felt like a worthy effort with an average speed of around 25.5. Considering the wind, I figured that my time of 49:34 was respectable but not particularly memorable. The fastest of the day was Frank Moak with a 45:02, and there were a bunch of times in the 48 and 49-minute range, and as usual the masters riders turned in most of the top fifteen or so. I ended up 17th overall, which was only good for 6th in the 45+ age group. Those old guys can time trial!! After the race there was lots of Raising Cane's chicken and a big bottle of wine, which made for a nice post-race lunch!

We had a couple of riders from the club who were kind of new to time trials and did it on their standard road bikes -- no aero bars, no TT helmet, etc. On a windy day like today, that must have made it a lot harder, but it was also probably a valuable learning experience! After the race my quads got really sore and tight, so I guess I over-did the big gears today.