One Good Weekend

Sometimes one good weekend is all it takes to get things moving again.  Such was last weekend.  About the time of the last post (April Slump), I was down in a funk.  Since then, I had a fun time (but unremarkable on-bike performance) with the Ronde of West Portland - one of those uniquely Portland rides where silly people go ride up all of the insanely steep hills they can shove into 45 miles, and the Cherry Blossom Stage Race came and went the following weekend; also an unremarkable performance.

After Cherry Blossom, I took a full week off.  My motivation was at an all time low, and it was constantly threatening to rain and blah blah blah <insert excuse here>.

About half way through my nadir, I told myself that I would ride my sixty mile Hagg Lake loop on Saturday and then race the Estacada TT the next day.  About Friday I started questioning whether it was wise to ride sixty miles the day before a race, but I said "f- it" and told my rational mind to shut the hell up.

Saturday comes, and after getting off work at the restaurant, I head back home and gear up for the ride.  I've done the loop four or five times before, it is becoming one of my regular routes and is almost exactly 60 miles on the nose.  I decide that I won't push myself; I'll just get out there, get some miles, and get the mojo back running again and gear up for the summer push of the road racing season.  From past experience, it takes me about four hours at an endurance pace.  I take off at 3:30 and figure that 45 minutes before sundown is sufficient margin.

Milestone #1 reached: I got on my bike instead of finding an excuse to get out of it.  100 pedal strokes out the door and I am coasting for five minutes to get down into the valley.  One nice thing about living on top of a hill: after the initial 100 pedal strokes, no point in turning around and cutting the ride short.

I start the ride at a good clip.  I set a power target of about 250W just to keep things moving.  I'm experimenting with a new handlebar position.  I've moved the bars out and down to get myself more stretched out.  Turns out that I like it.  Should've done this a long time ago.

I get out to Hagg Lake and I'm starting to feel good.  I absolutely fly around Hagg Lake.  A later look at my powertap data shows I spent a full hour at 300W, which in the middle of a long ride, means I've got some good form.  At this point, all by my lonesome, I've averaged 22mph.  I'm just having one of Those Days.  If you've read Bob Roll's book (Bobke II); if I were as crazy as him, this would be the day I would've gotten myself lost in a snowstorm in the mountains.  Mr. Roll described it as when you push and push on the pedals and your body just keeps giving and giving without a complaint.  Perfect description.

I finish the ride in 3 hours and change, which considering that I have an 8 mile climb to finish the ride, is a pretty fast 60 miles.  On the way back I had some tailwind help, but still.  A Good Day.  Just what I needed.

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Going into the TT the next day, I was a bit sore, but told myself that it should go away later in the morning.  It did.  I was sore when I woke up, but by the time I got to the race venue, all the stiffness was gone.

I rode in with Ron, so all the talk was about time trial warmups and racing strategies.  The best advice being "go hard when it's hard"; of course, because you end up spending more time in the slower (thus harder) sections of the race and you minimize time by powering through these sections and recovering on the faster sections.

I hop on my bike to warm up about an hour before the race.  45 minutes of wiping sweat off my computer later, I'm at the start line.  This will be the first time the bike's been out in anger and I have no idea how my body will handle the aero position I have set up.  The warmup wasn't promising, but then again, warmups never are.

The countdown ends and I pull out of the holder's grasp and I'm off.  I get tucked, and wow, I feel good.  Soon enough I am flying downhill at 30 almost 40 mph.  Flying.  The bike's comfy, or as comfy as one can be at 350W and on the very tip of the saddle.

Interesting sidebar: the TT helmet I was borrowing from a teammate had a useful "feature".  Probably wasn't planned in the design, but every time I looked to the side or down, it'd whistle.  I kid you not.  You think about the damnedest things when you are flying down the road all by yourself at 30mph.  Good reminder to keep my head up and straight though.

I pass my minute man after five minutes.  My power numbers are good and I am flying.  I've never felt this good on a bike before.

After 20 minutes, I'm thinking that a 20 mile TT is a long time to be on the tip of a saddle.  I pass a couple more people.  I'm thinking the turnaround point must be around here somewhere.

I see an orange "bike race ahead" sign.  Ah.  That must be it.

After a turnaround that would make a monkey look smart, I'm off on the second leg.  I'm still flying, and nobody's passing me, so that must be good.

I pass the pockmarked section of road a teammate warned me about.  I experience the pleasant sensation of having both my wheels jump sideways half a foot.  In opposite directions.  In the aerobars.  Curiously, it turns out the bike is actually pretty stable.  Not bad for a $300 Performance Bike/Scattante/Made-In-China-Generic frame.

40 minutes in and my mouth is gaping like a fish out of water.  Mucus runs indiscriminately down my face as I don't even turn my head anymore.  Through my sweat stained glasses I can only barely make out the first two numbers on the powertap readout.  It's all I can do to make the first number read "3" instead of "2".  I'm falling apart.

An orange "bike race ahead" sign.  Hallelujah.

The 200m sign, conveniently placed 400m from the finish.  Almost there.

Pound up to the top of the hill; hit the top; back in the aerobars; click click click the gears.

Look confusedly at a row of orange cones near the finish line tent.

Decide I should probably pass between the cones and the tent even though it looks much too narrow and maybe I'll crash into someone but if I don't maybe I won't get scored and I can't see much of anything through these damned glasses so I'll push the pedals and pass by the orange cones and...

Finished.

It was a good day.  A good weekend.  I feel the season's back on track.

April Slump

It's happened enough that it's time to give it a name.  The April Slump.  The last three seasons now, my fitness and motivation have fallen off a cliff in April.  It's a combination of things really.  A long off-season spent doing hours upon hours on the trainer or rollers in the garage.  A fairly race-heavy March with the Banana Belt series and the rest of the early spring classics; big events taking up nearly every weekend from the middle of February to the end of March.  And finally weather that is as fickle as a bride on her wedding day.

I've come to terms with it.  Think of it this way: I've been training since November.  By April, that's five months of almost pure training under my belt, most of it indoors or slogging through the rain.  So by April, month six of training, my body is saying "fuck it" and my training hours fall to essentially zero.  I think the only way around this slump is to start training in February; the downside being that my form will suck in the spring classics, and those are really fun races I love and have loved doing since I started racing.

To get through it, I have to remind myself the facts of the matter.  Summer, when the racing fun is in full swing and I can race practically every single day of the week if I so desire, is still months away.  I have time to take a little break and recover my form.  Truly, as the Training Bible (and just about every other training source) says, fitness is always changing.  It's either going up or going down; keeping a high level of fitness for a significant amount of time is impossible.  It takes too much energy and puts too much stress on your body.  Eventually you need to recover.

So, recovery it is.  I figure that I'll lay off a little; ride when I feel like it and kick the trainer and rollers back into a dark corner of the garage and make them not appear again until next November; and in a couple weeks, after the Cherry Blossom Stage Race, really get back in the swing of things.  The timing will be right about right.  Don't fight the slump.  Understand it.  Let it happen.  Let my body tell me when it's ready to get lean and mean against for summer.

PS: Definitely a trend.  Check out the post I made right about this time last year: April Doldrums.  Forgot about that.

Spring Classics

March is the season of the spring classics here in Oregon, primarily populated by one, three week race series called the Banana Belts.  Don't ask; I have no idea why the name.  There are bananas on the registration table when you sign in, but the course does not resemble anything like a banana.  Racing is every Sunday for three consecutive weeks.

The Cat 3 field does races of 44, 55, and 66 miles respectively.  The first and third feature a sprint finish, while the second is run the opposite direction and features an uphill finish.

Race 1: I had high hopes for myself.  I was feeling good in the first two races of the season, and this one would resolve in a sprint finish after a fairly short race.  Hopes dashed - a third place prime, and nada on the finish.  It was a fun race, but man are there a lot of good sprinters in the field.  I finished nipping at the heels of them all, beating not a one.

Race 2: Didn't know what to expect in this one.  I've raced the Banana Belt series for the past two years, but this was the first time the road was in good enough shape to run the opposite direction.  Found out the hard way I still suck at uphill sprint finishes.  And that the course running five laps in the counter-clockwise direction is a lot harder than four laps in the clockwise direction.

Race 3: Sat in the field while Mitch the Man went out and crushed all from a breakaway starting at mile 2 to win the race.  Good times; hard race because of the climbs and the distance.  Lined up for the sprint.  Suck again.  No legs for the sprint.  No finishing speed.  No kick.  Nothing.

A weekend off of racing and then it's the infamous Piece of Cake road race.  This race would be a parade if there were no wind; basically completely flat.  But there was wind, and rain.  Belgium classic-like conditions: crosswinds complete with spitting, windblown rain, gray skies, and farm fields.  In the first lap, I tried to get off the front a couple times.  I had a hunch that the win would come from the breakaway given the crosswind conditions.  The whole race was one of suffering, looking for wheels to follow and for shelter.  A group eventually got off with a member of a big team and they just shut the thing down.  The pack was crawling; no team willing to bring people up to the front to bring back the break.  A few others got off the front, making a total of 10 people, fragmented in several chase groups.

Finally the sprint comes for 11th and I have nothing.  Again.  This lack of form at the end of the race is getting just a bit irksome.  Just a little.  I even had a good leadout this time... couldn't capitalize.  I should've picked a strategy and stayed with it.  By expending energy early hunting for breaks, I doomed my sprint finish.  Now I know what all fuss is about swinging for the fences.  These short, punchy fliers do nothing but wear down the legs.  I'm not off the front and too fried for a fast finish.  Either stay with the pack and sprint, leave it to chance whether I am sprinting for 1st or 15th, or try, try again for a breakaway.
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I'm being owned at the finish because I am expending too much energy during the race.  Maybe it's as simple as that.  Maybe I'm not as good a sprinter as I think I should be.  Maybe I just generally suck at racing.  I don't know anymore.  All I know is that Cat 3 is for real.  For the first time, all these tactics, strategies, everything that everyone tells you about racing; it all starts in Cat 3.  In Cat 4 and below, you can get away with surfing through races. The guys with natural abilities come out on top more often than not.  In Cat 3, you start specializing.  You don't see the sprinters out in breakaways anymore.  You don't see the climbers in the bunch sprint.  Whereas it might be you and three other guys contesting the sprint at the end of a road race in the 4's, in the 3's, there's 15 guys just like you who are fighting for position right up till the end.  You don't see them during the race at all.  They are like ghosts drifting around and through the pack.  But the 1k sign appears and all of the sudden the front is swarming with them.  The last five minutes of the race are a constant battle for position.  Squeezing into gaps just wider than your bars to get to the front of the field (but not too far to the front!).  You get within sight of the finish and it's a game of chicken to see who jumps first.  Fourth wheel turns into 15th in the span of about two seconds when you're the chicken.

I feel like these March races have been my first real exposure to road racing.  Everyone is good.  Some are really good.  Mistakes in strategy or execution are punished.  Teamwork is alive and real; if you don't have it, you are at a distinct disadvantage to those teams that are organized.  Cat 2 is a dream that, for this year at least, is slipping away.  I have too much to learn still about racing.