Two Wheel Blogs

Can a 20 minute long race be considered epic? It may not by the strictest sense of the word; but for me the 4th Wednesday Night Timetrial falls into my epic category. And I don't think I'm alone. More accomplished racers than I used the same term tonight.

I think we sat and chatted for an hour before a third competitor showed up. Joe runs the races. I help him put them on. If a third hadn't shown up we wouldn't have ridden.

As it turned out three others braved the chilly wind and rain tonight. Four men and one woman in total would compete. Add two additional volunteers and a USCF official and we had a race.

The wind switched itself around for tonight's event. a tailwind pushed us to the turnaround, putting a premium on power management.

I rode like I didn't care. I was cold and wet and I couldn't see my powermeter display for all the rain. Because we'd sat and talked so long thinking nobody would show up to race I only had about 15 minutes of warm up. Not that it mattered, my legs have been out to lunch all week.

I caught my minute man a couple of kilometers from the turn; and then my 2 minute person at exactly 200m from the turn. As I coasted past I muttered something about taking the turn easy and did my best not to interfere with the other's turn.

And take the turn easy I did. I guess I was pretty nervous about turning in the rain. According to my SRM, my turnaround lasted a full 32 seconds, during which my average power was 127 Watts. The good news is, I didn't fall down.

In all, a good night's racing. My time was right on top of last week's time - very encouraging, considering my wattage was a bit low and winds, though from the opposite direction, were about the same as last week.

As for wattage, once again I managed a slight negative split. Outbound power was a fairly ordinary 291W. Power coming home averaged a scant 4 Watts higher.

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