The Truth

The Time Trial is often referred to as The Race of Truth. That may be close to the truth, but the real race of truth is the Team Time Trial. You see, in an individual TT, there's always ample opportunity for self-delusion, rationalization, and generally convincing oneself that one doesn't really suck as badly as the stopwatch might indicate. In a Team TT, on the other hand, there's no hiding from the reality of one's own suckage, even when you're the smallest guy in the paceline.


So Saturday morning I was in the car at 6 am on my way up to Baton Rouge for the annual Team Time Trial. We'd pulled together a 40+ team consisting of Jorge, Rob, Keith and me. I knew Jorge would be up for a fast pace. Keith had been riding strongly of late, and although I hadn't ridden much with Rob, I figured he'd be up to the task as well. I wasn't so sure about myself. The TTT registration process was kind of confusing, at least from the official's side of the table, but I got all of the teams and riders entered into the computer and then had twenty minutes or so to change and get in a little warmup. We got our countdown and headed out on our 51.6 km torture test. The start went smoothly, and with a little tailwind we were soon up to 28 mph despite the plan to avoid going out too fast. I was feeling OK until the road started to turn into the wind. Jorge was taking long fast pulls, Rob seemed to be having a little difficulty with the pace, and Keith and I were holding our own. Every time I'd come to the front my legs would really start to load up after about 40 revolutions. This was not a good sign since we were less than ten miles into the time trial. It was around that time that we unexpectedly lost Keith. By the time we were halfway through the second of three laps it was going like this: Jorge would pull for about a mile, usually at about 27-28 mph. He would finally pull off, at which point Rob would come through and immediately pull over. Then I'd come through and the pace would kind of grind down one or two mph until I'd pull off and Jorge would come through again. Then I'd have to really put my head down to catch onto the tail of our 3-man paceline as the pace went up again. The last lap was just plain painful. In retrospect, I guess I was probably a bit dehydrated, but I think the real problem may have been that I'd never taken enough recovery time the prior week. Anyway, we did a respectable time thanks to Jorge who pulled a good 80% of the distance. Took me a while to recover from that one! I packed the station wagon back up with the LAMBRA equipment and headed home to post the results on the website.

Sunday morning I was back on the bike at 6 am, riding out to meet the Giro Ride. There was a little breeze already, but I knew the real issue would be the heat. With a few of the regular riders still up in Louisville for Masters Nationals, the group was a little smaller than usual, and I was surprised to see Jered and Ashley who had arrived back in town at something like 4 am after a very long drive from Denver. As soon as we hit Hayne Blvd., a small group rode off the front of the still-disorganized group. After some shuffling around, we finally got a good rotation going at the front and basically chased Rob K. and his breakaway companions until they eased up around Chef Highway. That didn't last long, though and another group took off on Hayne, so we were once again chasing, finally closing in on them a mile or two before the turnaround. The effort took a pretty big toll on the pack, though, and at least half of them turned around early to meet the front group on the way back. I think everyone was getting pretty toasty by then because the whole group was rolling down Chef Highway at about twelve mph for a long time. I eventually rode up to a small group that was down the road and soon found myself doing a 2-man time trial with Steven N. as I waited for the rest of the group to awaken and come storming by. We got reabsorbed toward the end of Hayne, but after the sprint the group came apart again so a small group of us rolled off the front for the last time. We kept the pressure on until the end of the service road, but after that things eased up. We were toast -- at least I was. A couple of miles from home I sucked the last drops of water from my big insulated bottle and promised myself a real recovery day on Monday.