I've been absent lately. Not riding much and certainly not blogging much. Here's one of the reasons why: Jen and I found ourselves in a position a few weeks ago where we had found a house in the area that we really, really liked. It had everything that we decided the 'next' house should have. To make the story somewhat short, we knew that there were a lot of projects around our house that had been neglected for the past few years that we needed to quickly finish up in order to get our house ready to be put on the market. So for the past several weeks, I've been busy doing things like hanging and finishing drywall, painting, etc. instead of riding. Well, we put an offer on the new house, a fair offer I might add, but they didn't accept it....so, with that we decided we liked our house well enough that we wanted to hang out here for awhile longer (unless the Owner of the for sale property comes back to reality)and get back to living life.
Barely even seeing my bike the past few weeks, I decided it was time to dust it off if I wanted to salvage something from this season. Normally when I take a big chunk of time off the bike, I like to ramp back into my training but instead I thought it would be nice to do a test on where my current fitness is(or lack of fitness). I decided what better way to do a test than to jump into a race. Today's TOP race would be the perfect place. This race also fell on the same day as the State Road race so figuring all the heavy hitters would be down south battling it out, I figured that the pain level for today would be somewhat tolerable (somewhere between watching reruns of "The Simple Life" and "The View". Summit Freewheelers do a great job of putting on these local races. If you have the opportunity to fit these into your schedule I highly recommend it. First off, they only cost $5 which is a bargain in today's world and secondly because they only cost $5, the field is usually a little more relaxed and willing to play and try tactics which makes the races that much more enjoyable.
This morning's race in Franklin Twp. is part of one of my training routes, the Portage County White Trash Ride (PCWTR) so I knew the route extremely well. The course is deceptively difficult because there are so many rollers out there. Nothing too big that they can't be powered over, but considering the race would be a minimum of 6 laps, it would take careful planning, conservation and strategy to maintain some power for the end of the race should it end in a bunch kick. My only ambition for the day would be to just ride wheels and hang onto the group. If I finished with the field, than I would consider that a victory for me. The only heavy hitter to join us that I was familiar with was Ed Delgros from Summit. I've heard a lot about him from reading Thor's race entries so I knew he would be tough and would make it much more than a normal training ride for us. My hope was that he would decide early on that he wanted some TT practice and take a solo flier off the front and leave the rest of us for a casual ride back to the finish line. Well, Ed did try several times but there were always interested people in the group willing to bring him back, bringing my pain level closer towards the "simple life" on my scale.
Half way into the race, I lost touch with the group and found myself dangling a few meters off the back. Slowly I saw the selective group leaving me behind. I tried and tried to catch back on but could never find the extra little oomph to do it. Funny thing is I can remember thinking that ok, at least I hung on this long and I was happy to ride the remainder of the race solo. After half a lap of riding solo, I noticed that they were coming back to me. Great! They slowed up just enough and I had maintained my tempo enough that they were well within a distance that I could bridge back up to them. So, pushing my tempo that much more, I finally managed to bridge back up to the group. Down to the last lap and a half, I decided to suck wheel, recover and see what can happen. As we were coming into the finishing stretch, I started to move myself up the right hand side of the group to make a move. I was sitting third wheel and was just about to go for it off the front when another rider beat me to it. The group chased hard and I was left with me legs telling me....see what would have happened if you tried to do that? Yep, my legs were done but I'm glad that I finished the race exactly how I had hoped to, with the group, sort of.
Here's the data for the day:
brian
Road Race:
Duration: 1:37:30
Work: 1365 kJ
TSS: 146 (intensity factor 0.948)
Norm Power: 275
VI: 1.18
Distance: 37.321 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 898 233 watts
Heart rate: 102 184 166 bpm
Cadence: 29 141 91 rpm
Speed: 8.6 37.4 23.0 mph
Pace 1:36 6:57 2:37 min/mi
Hub Torque: 0 343 71 lb-in
Crank Torque: 0 1231 216 lb-in
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