Two Wheel Blogs

I made another attempt at the Missouri State Time Trial aka Race of Truth. True to it’s name, it provides insight into truth. I will share some truths I discovered today below.

1. 40K in this case is not truly 40 kilometers. Apparently, in this case it was a bit longer, or at least that is what the promoter said post race.

2. Whatever distance it was I truly could not have gone much further at the pace I held. I hurt to my core as I pressed as much performance as I could from my body.

3. Snot covering your face is not truly aero. OK, actually I do not know this to be true, but I was in a bad way today. Call it allergies, call it hard effort, call it what you want, I hurt so badly that I was not disgusted by it (I did not have the energy).

I came in second in my (master’s) category which is the same place I got when I did this race 3 or 4 years ago.

This year they encouraged all racers to pre-register so that they could set starting times prior to the day of the race. This is a really cool idea in that it reduces the inconsistency of weather conditions within a category by setting start times for all riders in a category close together. (i.e. all Category 1 racers started within one minute of another Category 1 racer). The down side of this is that a rider that pre-registered on the first day of registration (like Ewers truly) may have to start close to 11:00 instead of much earlier like I originally wanted.

Mother nature knows best once again. As luck would have it, my start time of 10:49 proved beneficial since the rain cell that came through at quarter after nine had passed. I did have to warm up in the rain, but at least I was not racing in it (though rain might not be as bad as wind?).

The weather changed about 5 times today. Racers in my category experienced dead calm as they started with short periods of tail wind on the outbound trip. Unfortunately, the return trip was gusting headwind. Certainly, the wind was not as harsh as it has been in some past years, but when you go out in a calm and turn into a headwind…it hurts!

I finished my race in some fairly intense pain. This, oddly enough, is a great thing because it demonstrated to me that I had in fact put forth a hard effort. Bringing home a silver medal for the boys to play with is just the icing on the cake.

Now I gotta figure out what is next...