Team Time Trial and Tribulation

As usual, I didn't have a Team Time Trial team together until a couple of days before the race. We had one Cat. 4 team that was already put together, and then there were the rest of us - Cat. 4, Cat. 5, 40+, 55+. For a while I thought we might be able to cobble together both a 55+ and another Cat. 4 team, but as we got closer to race day it was not looking good. In the end, there were four of us, and we were going to have to race as a Cat. 1/2 team since two of us weren't old enough to race masters. In a way, that was good because the two masters teams ended up putting in the fastest times of the day - way, way faster than ours. So on Friday night I bolted on the old Aerobars, dug out the skinsuit and TT helmet, and assembled a bunch of LAMBRA and NOBC equipment that we'd likely need for the race - table, clock, tent, generator, computer, printer, etc. The bikes were going to have to ride on the roof.

I got up a bit after 5 am on Saturday, loaded up the car, drove over to Starbucks just after they opened at 5:30, and then headed over to mid-city to pick up Elliott. It's about an hour drive to Vacherie, where the TTT was being held, and looking at the big dark clouds I knew we were going to get wet. We arrived around 7 am as planned and I went about setting up the tent and everything in the rain. We put the tent in the corner of the Jubilee Truck Stop parking lot because there was something there to which we could secure the tent to keep it from blowing away if and when a bug thunderstorm came through. Unfortunately, but the time we got it up it was raining hard enough that we were standing in a couple of inches of water. I eventually fired up the generator, being careful to keep the cable more or less out of the standing water, and they started registering teams. Naturally the weather had scared away a few teams. We were the only Cat. 1/2 team, but there were three for the Cat. 4s and two for the Masters. On the down side, that meant we'd be the first team to start. I was fully expecting that we'd be passed by at least a couple of other teams.

Trying the Mio Link HRM

After a fifteen minute rain delay we started out in a light drizzle. Steve led us out, with me, Elliott and Phil following. Steve and I are reasonably close in size, but Elliott is much taller than I, and Phil is probably a bit taller still. Basically, Steve and I were going to be getting a nice draft, Elliott and Phil - not so much. Elliott had a TT bike, as did Steve, but Phil was on his regular road bike without even aerobars. I knew he was in for a hard ride.

Easy to see who was getting the better draft!

On the way out we had a bit of a tailwind. With the light rain and foggy face shield on my TT helmet it was very difficult to read my computer. Everyone else was having the same problem. I was using my new Mio Link optical heart rate monitor, which was working fine, apparently. I never looked at my heart rate during the ride. From the start, Phil was taking rather long pulls, and we were rolling along pretty smoothly. Given our lack of warmup and mix of abilities, I was happy with our 26.5 mph average speed for the outbound leg. We definitely could have gone a bit faster, but I'm pretty sure that would have resulted in at least one rider blowing up completely on the return trip.

Cat. 4 podium

At the turnaround we somehow got pretty badly separated and Steve and I had to wait up a bit for everybody to come back together. There was an increasing headwind all the way back, but at least the rain had pretty much stopped by then. By the time we were halfway back Phil was starting to show the strain of being the biggest guy in the paceline, and together with our accumulating fatigue and the headwind that kept our speed for the return trip down to around 24 mph, so by the finish I was showing a 25.0 mph average. I knew we'd be minutes slower than some of the other teams, but I hadn't been expecting we could do anything better than 26, so I wasn't too disappointed. Our Cat. 4 team did a really good ride and won the Cat. 4 category, posting the 3rd fastest time overall, so that was great.

I think everyone who raced had a good day. The rain wasn't really much of a problem and fortunately we didn't have any issues with lightning. By the time we did the awards the sun was out and the street was almost dry.