Races of Truth

I have never been very good at Time Trials. When I first started racing, back in the Nixon administration, we did a lot of them.  This was before the USCF, now USAC, went from Imperial measurements to Metric measurements.  The standard TT distance back then was 25 miles, just a tad longer than 40 km, and in fact the reason we now use 40 km as the standard. Unfortunately, some years ago USAC kind of abandoned 40 km as the national time trial standard, allowing Nationals promoters to use various presumably more convenient distances for championships.  I hated that.  Still do. Up until the mid-80s the national records and national champions were published in the back of the rulebook.  I miss that too, especially after local rider Brian Roberts set national records in 1982 on the LaPlace course for 75, 100,  and 125 miles the year that they decided, after the fact, to cease publishing (or really even recognizing) such records. For the record, his 100 mile TT time was 4:16:42, and yes, that was before aero bars, time trial helmets, carbon wheels, etc. -- basically Merckx-Style.  Speaking of which, at the LAMBRA TT Championship this coming Sunday we will be awarding special medals for the top three men and top three women overall who ride Merckx-Style, which for simplicity we are defining as collegiate mass-start legal, so although there won't be any solid disk wheels, there will be aero wheels, aero helmets, and perhaps some aero frames. Should be interesting.

Back when I started racing, and indeed for nearly a decade afterward, I was generally happy with a 25 mile TT time of anything under 1:10. We used to schedule six of these time trials in the spring, and, riding with a mechanical stopwatch clamped to my handlebars, I eventually got my time down to around 1:02 or so.  Then, around 1980 or 81 or so, things started to change. First, Glenn Gulotta did the first sub-hour time trial we'd ever had. It was a watershed moment. A number of other riders, finally realizing that it was indeed possible for normal humans to go sub-hour, followed suit the very same year. I vividly remember my first sub-hour time trial, which was a 59:59. It was a hot weekend and I'd been invited to a party at a farm up in mid-Mississippi with a bunch of grad students. On Friday I loaded the bike into my old Triumph GT-6, and with the engine heat filtering through the cracks in the firewall, drove up there for the weekend party. Then, early on Sunday morning, I snuck out, drove back down to Belle Chasse (the standard TT course went from the Scarsdale ferry landing across the river from Belle Chasse to a basically non-existent town of Carlisle and back) for the TT.  I gutted out that first sub-hour TT, then jumped back into the car that had been baking in the sun and drove back up to Mississippi for more partying. On the drive back home that night I started to run a little fever. A week later I was still running a fever and eventually went to the doctor. About a week later we finally figured out I had mononucleosis, but by then it was causing some hepatitis so they sent me straight to the hospital where I was stuck in enteric isolation for about a week until my liver enzymes went back down. That little bout with EBV kept me sick off-and-on for about a year afterward, and it was fully a year and a half before I felt truly recovered, which was around when I came down with pericarditis which had me lying around eating aspirin for another month or so, which cured the pericarditis and caused a stomach ulcer. Next thing I knew we had a baby. I somehow kept up an adequate amount of riding that once I was finally back to normal I could resume some semblance of training.

For a few years, before the really aero wheels and frames and helmets started to appear, I actually developed the ability to pull of some competitive stage race prologue time trials. Those are the three and four-mile ones that require you to start fast and then accelerate the rest of the way. I was amazed how much faster I could go with my old clip-on aero bars and a skinsuit. Eventually the expensive TT bike technology surpassed my ability to compete without it and my motivation, which was never very good for time trialing anyway, started to lag. Perhaps I'll try a Merckx-Style time trial one day and see how close I can come those times I did back in the 80s.

Or maybe I'll just keep volunteering to officiate them instead.