This weekend simultaneously marked the end of my road season while kicking-off my cyclocross season. It is a bitter sweet end to the road season as my legs have finally come around with my CTL settling into a nice all time high point while maintaining a fresh positive TSB.
The field was stacked with a full squad from Hincapie Development including Ty Magner, Oscar Clark, Joe Lewis, and Joey Rosskopf. In total, they had over 8 riders who each can impact or win a race. Then, you add in several other large squads such as Stans No Tubes, Global Bike, and a lot of solid Pro riders mixed into the fray as individuals or pairs of teammates. The course consisted of a 4 mile out and 4 mile back with 8 x 8 mile laps with about 1,000 feet of climbing per lap. The pace on lap 1 was very fast. I have to admit that I have been spending a bit of time getting acquainted with my new Litespeed CX bike, so I haven’t ridden any hills since River Gorge last month. I felt good enough to go harder on lap 1 and attempt to get in the early break, but I was concerned that type of move would put me in the red and potentially result in getting caught or blowing up. I was very glad that I didn’t hung back in the chase group as we quickly caught riders who tried to make the break and were shed at some point. That would have been me, and it would have left me very fatigued with no benefit to my overall race position. As we were racing, I assumed the Hincapie team would create the break by force and anyone in the pack would get put into race of attrition mode. After the first 2 laps, we settled into a decent tempo with the occasional full speed 5 min efforts where the field was lined out, but for the most part, it was lap after lap, shedding riders slowly off the back every time we hit the midway up the KOM climb. On the last lap, the pack was still pretty large with about 40 of the original 75 riders still in the main field. It was clear that it was likely going to break apart into several large groups for a field sprint of several groups separated by very few seconds. I crested the KOM around 10th wheel and desceded the hill pretty quick with the other riders. It got scary as attacks and counter attacks went up the road and riders swarmed the narrow road from the back while trying to ride up the yellow line and far right side pavement shoulder / gravel combination. With about 2 miles to go, riders finally attacked hard enough to line out the pack which allowed several open lines to move up. After we hit 1k to go, there was a slight lull in the field, but the road wasn’t open until around 200m, so nobody could move at all. There was no 500m sign that I could see, but we could see the finish line barriers. In hindsight, I’m not sure what would have been a better move since there were few holes behind the first row of four riders. I was sitting about 5th wheel and noticed Oleg take a flier, so I jumped his wheel. He started to slow, so I went left around him at around 100m and threw my wheel just past Winston David for 4th in the field sprint and 14th overall. 2 riders snuck off the front somewhere, so we were sprinting for 9th or 10th place, I think. It wasn’t a great result, but when you figure I had no chance to make the break of 9 guys given my inability to ride hills that fast, it was probably as good as can be expected for a heavier rider doing 6,500 ft elevation in 70 miles of racing. The numbers were not that impressive for the day since it was all up and down with some rolling areas. NP was decent, but it wasn’t anywhere near a peak. The hardest part of the race was the first part of lap 1 when I recorded 416 watts for peak 5 minutes. My personal best 5 minutes is 445 watts, so this was hard, but I wasn’t killing myself either. It’s important to remember that peaks are peaks for a reason, and they are hard to achieve without a few minutes of rest afterwards. If you are planning to go hard enough to get a peak 5 min or peak 20 min and then continue racing for the next 3 hours afterwards while doing another 6k ft of climbing, it may not be a good idea to go after the breakaway if it means hitting your peak. That was my scenario as I probably had enough power to reach or stick the break, but not enough to stay in the break, so I chose to dial it back and do lap 1 well within my ability which meant I had plenty of sprint left after 70 miles and 6k ft of climbing. Since I only had a few seconds coming off Oleg’s wheel in the wind, my sprint was limited to 3 seconds, but it was around 1,312 watts, so mission accomplished on conserving my efforts. With the road season over, I’ll write a subsequent blog post on lessons learned and observations from this season. Off the top of my head, I can easily see a few things bubbling to the top that are obvious. First, my weight was too high all season. I raced Sunday at 173lbs which was 11lbs above my low last season. I planned to race at 160lbs this year, but I didn’t have the dedication to do it. My results were just good enough most of the season that I never forced myself to diet really strictly and cut calories below 2k which is required to drop weight. I’m not sure if I’ll have that drive next year, but if I want to drop the weight, I now realize it has to be in the spring before the hard racing. When I’m racing long races, I can’t diet and recover. Another learning is that I now have enough FTP to race well, and I need more repeatability and high end race fitness earlier in the year. It was interesting how I got stronger when I added a few punchy group rides into my Thursday night training and chased a few Strava segments for fun. Doing several 100% efforts for 30 seconds chasing a Strava KOM was actually helpful to my fitness. In a perfect world, I’d do hard intervals, but I hate them so much. If there are a few segments on a group ride that require 100% effort to get going, so be it. I also realize that I need to work in Tucker Saturdays with 86 mile to/from efforts earlier into my spring. I need 4 straight weeks of these Saturdays to built CTL. Then, I need to add in one multi-day stage race to bump CTL way up. I normally race in the low 90’s, but this season, I hit a CTL of 110 after the 6th race in 5 days at the Georgia Cycling Gran Prix. I didn’t maintain that level, but it is so easy to maintain a high CTL in the high 90’s after you get bumped above 100 for a few days. If it looked like I was stronger end of season, it was because I was starting races with a positive TSB and a CTL at 100 versus post injury races in March / April with a slightly negative TSB and a CTL of mid 80’s. I’m not a math expert, but a 25% increase in CTL coupled with a move from negative to positive TSB will make any rider much better. If I can stay injury free in the spring next year, then I’ll hopefully get to the 90’s before late summer and stay there all season with long Tucker Saturdays.
Now, I turn my attention to cyclocross where none of my road fitness seems to help me at all. I need to quickly build muscles that I have been ignoring all season. I need to develop off road skills that I don’t possess. I need to go hard for 1 hour instead of pacing myself for 4 hours. Let the fun begin….first race this Saturday in Chattanooga.
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