Another Forty Kilometers

I was loading up the car at 5 am and seriously wondering if I really should be considering doing another 40k time trial.  I certainly had ample excuses - a bad night's sleep, a likely headwind, and of course the fact that I was also supposed to be officiating.  There were also the undeniable facts that I'm not very good at it, and I was basically riding a regular road bike with clip-on aero bars. I suppose if I'd been racing every weekend for a couple of months I might well have decided to sit this one out. As it turned out, however, the NBO guys had pulled together plenty enough volunteers, Mark was there to help officiate, and Robin was there to handle course setup.  So I figured, "What the hell?"

After wrapping up registration we got everyone together and started the stopwatches and race clock at precisely 7:50 am and the start line crew headed off to get things going right on time at 8 am.  My start time wasn't for about an hour, so I had lots of time to get my act together.

I still wasn't really up for a full-on time trial effort, and was looking at this one more as a good hard training ride, so when they said go, I took off at maybe an 80% effort level.  By the time I got settled in, I knew this would be a hard one.  The course headed almost straight into a significant north wind for 20 km, and within the first of those I already knew I wouldn't be doing a very good time.  The whole way out I kept fluctuating between going hard and backing off, all the while fearing that I might overdo it and blow up before the end.  My lagging motivation wasn't helping the situation either, and I ended up spending way too much time in the low 20s.  I'd started out at a nice pace, around 26-27 mph, but over the first few miles I saw that speed drop considerably and was soon struggling to hold 24 mph.  Even that didn't last too long.  I'm sure I saw my speed drop down to 20 mph a couple of times.

After the turnaround it quickly became obvious why I'd felt so lousy on the way out.  With the wind at my back I was able to spend a fair amount of time in the 27-28 mph range.  Still, I already knew I wasn't going to go sub-hour that day.  In the end, I posed a time of 1:00:17, finishing just behind Jorge who had started two minutes after me.  After a quick cool-down, I got started on the results.  I was pretty impressed with the winning time of  53:50, considering the wind.  By 11:45 I was back home working on posting the results.

So last night, or should I say this morning, I was awakened by a loud crash right outside my bedroom window. Looking through the blinds I could see that a police car had run into my own parked car.  It was around 4:30 am.  Sheesh.  I pulled on some clothes and went downstairs as three other police cars appeared. I guess it must have been s slow night.  Anyway, I guess I'll be finding out how good the police department's insurance company is.