Triple T

Back "in the day" one of the coolest handlebar stems was made by 3TTT, aka Techno Tubo Torino, and although I never had one of them, I always liked their style. For a long time, though they seemed to disappear and I kind of forgot about them as forks and headsets and stems evolved into their current forms. Then, early this year at the Rouge-Roubaix race one of the riders was showing me his new 3T handlebars and I realized that they must have made a bit of a comeback. Since I'd been unhappy with the bars I'd been riding for the past year, I eventually replaced them with one of the new 3T bars, and shortly thereafter with a new 3T stem.

The reason I got to thinking about the "triple T" stuff, as we used to call it, is that we had our annual Team Time Trial (TTT) championship this weekend over in Baton Rouge. It is always rather hard to assemble a good team for these 4-man time trials, especially if you're trying to get four riders who all qualify for the same category or age group. This year we somehow came up with four Master 45+ riders, and not only that, we did it more than 24 hours ahead of time. As usual, registration dragged on a bit, but nonetheless the first team took off only a little bit after the planned start time. With teams going off at 2-minute intervals, our team wasn't scheduled to go until almost 10:00, and by then it was getting kind of toasty out on the asphalt. I actually brought along a water bottle for this 32 mile race, which I usually don't do. Our team of Jorge, David P., Steve J. and myself started out fairly smoothly. We had planned on an easy start so that everyone would have a mile or so to get fully warmed up before we really got rolling. There was a moderate wind on the course, and since we were doing three laps that meant the wind direction kept changing. On the first downwind stretch we were pushing 29-30 mph, and that seemed to be about the best we were going to do if we wanted to keep everyone from blowing up completely. I felt that our first lap went very well and my only complaint was that we kept coming apart every time we'd go around a corner (there were two per lap). It definitely cost us a few seconds each time by the time we got reorganized into a paceline. By our second lap the strain was beginning to show and our speed was definitely starting to slip a bit. Soon after the start of the third lap we lost Steve, so we were down to three riders. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes. You get comfortable with having a certain amount of time for recovery after taking a pull, and then all of a sudden that time gets cut by 1/3 and you find yourself starting to struggle. Indeed, the third lap was a struggle for us, and when Dave started having trouble getting back on after his pulls we dropped the average speed down by at least 1 mph. That was also partially due to the wind, which seemed to be gradually increasing. Our final time of 1:11:25 (27 mph average speed) was respectable and good for 1st place in the 45+ age group, but it was only 8th overall and a good five minutes slower than the fastest of the day. Even so, I was pretty happy with our ride.