First time trial of the year. Also the first time I’ve ridden my TT bike this year. Probably should’ve adjusted to this a bit more before racing, but oh well.
On the drive over to Carnation, I noticed a number of cars with snow on their windshields. Seemed sort of odd, since it was raining, and about 37 degrees. Once I got over the mountain to Carnation, however, there was enough snow on the ground to make me pretty nervous driving. The race, of course, wasn’t going off with good coat of slush on the ground, so it ended up being delayed by an hour. Unfortunately, this meant I got about an hour and a half of warmup, which is a bit much for me. I was also the second person to go off - which also sucks.
Eventually, the race did start, I got lined up, got a decent start, then noticed my powermeter wasn’t reading anything. Unfortunately, when I switch from training to race wheels, my Edge 705 doesn’t switch powermeters, so pedaled at what I thought was about 80% of LT while I ran through the menus for about 30 seconds to pick up the new powermeter. Once it came on, I noticed that I was at about 380W, which was a lot more than I wanted to be at in the first 3 minutes. Weirdly, I just couldn’t make myself back off the throttle, and ended up going waaaay too hard for the first 5 minutes or so (I’ve consistently had a problem with this, especially running). I did catch my 30 second guy at about 5-10 minutes out, which meant that I had nothing else to chase for the whole race, especially since there wasn’t a 30 second guy behind me (Adam Kaufman, also on Recycled, started a minute back).
After I calmed down, I started to settle in and chew up road (literally - I really hope that was mud and not cowpies). It took me a bit to figure out not to ride in the standing water channels on the road, but once I did, the cold wasn’t bad at all. Ended up catching the only guy in front of me, not getting caught by anyone, but having way worse power than I was hoping for (I was at about 326, and I was hoping for 350 - that’s a really big gap). Not sure what the deal was - I wasn’t breathing hard at all, I just couldn’t push my heart rate up and my legs felt dead.
I did notice that after the race I had some of the worst asthma I’ve ever had (maybe from the cold) - I was a little worried that I wouldn’t make it back to the car, and I was having a really hard time getting a half breath in. It’s possible that didn’t help the TT, and may explain why I wasn’t breathing very hard (couldn’t!) - then again, maybe not.
All in all, pretty disappointing - I was hoping to really burn this one up, and I ended up limping in instead.
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