Expecting the Worst

The temperature was in the low 40s, the wind was in the mid-20s, I was still shivering uncontrollably from being out in it for two and a half hours and I'd left my knee-warmers at home. With two layers stuffed under my skinsuit and no warmup, I rolled to the start line looking for Jorge who was my teammate for the NOBC 2-Person Time Trial. He was still fussing with wheels (deep dish rims were looking kind of risky with the wind) and clothes but made it to the line with ten seconds to spare. I was expecting the worst.

My day had started around 5 am when I pulled on my base layer and new NOBC skinsuit, and covered it all up with a pair of jeans, a long-sleeve rugby jersey and a coat to go outside and load up the car. It was really dark and really windy and the temperature was somewhere around 42 in the city. Great weather for a time trial, eh? I arrived at the course in LaPlace around 6:30 and set up the popup shelter (which doesn't exactly "pop up" with only one person on hand), securing the two windward poles to my car so it wouldn't blow away. Soon the other club volunteers started to arrive and we got registration going a few minutes early. By then I was starting to shiver, and by the time we closed registration at 8:30 I was shivering so much it was getting difficult to hit the right keys on the computer. By 8:50 we'd started the stopwatches and dispatched our crew to the start line and turnaround(s), so I finally got the bike down from the roof of the car and then jumped inside to strip off my civilian clothes, revealing the hidden Action Figure skinsuit underneath. I stuffed another jersey under the skinsuit before zipping it up, and then started looking for my knee-warmers which, as it turned out, were sitting on my dresser at home. It was my first experience with wearing a skinsuit in cold weather like this - with arm-warmers, skullcap, full-finger gloves, and shoe-covers. I was still freezing, but it was time to roll.

So since neither Jorge nor I had gotten warmups, we started out fairly slowly. I was expecting the wind to be brutal, but once we got rolling and started to warm up, I realized it wasn't quite so bad. The course runs north and south, but the wind was coming mainly from the west. Most of the route has nice tall trees along the west side and they were pretty effective at blocking much of the crosswind. It felt like there was a bit of a tailwind component on the way out and we were going pretty good, mostly in the 25-27 mph range with a few brief surges up to 29 or so. I suppose we could have pushed it up another mph, but I was nervous about putting too much into it and then maybe falling apart on the way back. As expected, of course, the return trip was slower. We spent a lot of time in the 24-25 mph range, and the crosswind demanded one's constant attention, even when drafting. When we hit the long unprotected stretch along the Ruddock boat launch our speed dropped all the way down to 22 for a while, and it seemed like forever before we got back up to 25. Even so, I was a bit surprised that it wasn't as bad as I'd expected, and we crossed the finish line after the 40 kilometers with a time of 59 minutes flat. Under the circumstances, I was pretty happy with that. It turned out to be good for 2nd place in the 40+ and 8th overall, but not even remotely close to Tim and Woody's winning time of 55:32. So other than the fact that we probably lost six or seven hundred dollars on the event, which we did without an event sponsor and with low entry fees, it was still fun and things went pretty smoothly.

So this morning I figured I'd better get the legs moving for an hour or so, although by the time I finally got out the door after removing the clip-ons, changing wheels, putting on lights, etc., it was already too late to meet anyone who might have been similarly foolish enough to ride. The wind was still blowing and it still felt like winter, and I turned around early since I was only going 15-16 mph on the way out. I never saw any other riders this morning, but I was glad I'd ridden. The legs had been sore yesterday evening, but felt a lot better this morning.