A Long Morning

Five o'clock came way too early this morning, so I really was glad I'd gotten all of the race equipment together the night before. Even the bike was ready to go, which just meant that I'd bolted on the aero bars, but the race wheels on, and removed the water bottle cages (a purely psychological gesture, of course). The car was pretty well packed with traffic cones, 6-Gallon coolers full of water, flags, the race clock, computer, caution signs, etc. I was lucky I didn't forget to bring the bike.

So I arrived at the race site well before sunrise, where I put up the big finish line flag and the race clock using the car headlights in order to see what I was doing. Soon people began to filter in and by 7 am we were ready to start registration. I set up the computer in the back of the Volvo and started entering rider info so we could print out the start list. We had a lot of race-day entries, along with a few late arrivals, so the actual start time got pushed back by 15 minutes. Once the first 2-person team got started, I ran back to the car, pulled the bike down from the roof, and went out to get a couple of miles of warmup before it was time for Jorge and me to start. I told Jorge to take it easy on me for the first couple of miles so I could get warmed up.

We started out on the 40km course at a good controlled pace, thanks to Jorge, and within a mile or so I was feeling OK. The wind was nothing like I'd expected, and much of the outbound leg seemed to be slightly into the wind. I was pushing kind of a big gear, under the circumstances - probably one cog higher than Jorge. I think Jorge and I were pretty well matched. We were taking pulls of maybe 45-60 seconds, and our speed was ranging from 26-28 all the way out to the turnaround. The return trip seemed to have a few miles with a slight tailwind, but I never really felt anything resembling a super tailwind. Shortly before the turnaround I'd started getting a stitch in my side and so I spent most of the return trip nursing it to keep it from getting too bad. Although we had a few stretches of 27-29 mph, there were also some long sections where we were down in the 24-25 mph range. Jorge was riding really consistently, while I, on the other hand, felt like I was all over the place. I was definitely struggling in the last 5 km and had to take a few short pulls, but for the most part I thought we rode a pretty good time trial, finishing up with a 56:28. It turned out to have been the 5th fastest time for the day, although some of the credit for that goes to the fact that the Herring guys were over at the Fayetteville SR (where things don't seem to have gone so well for them).

After our race I jumped back into the back of the station wagon and started working on the results. We got everything posted shortly after the last of the meager Cat. 1/2s finished. The race itself went pretty well, I thought. The fastest time of the day was a 53:28, which seems pretty incredible considering the windy conditions.