It is Friday morning and I feel like death warmed over.  Last night was the second POA Cycling Summer Series race held at the Municipal Stadium.  It was the same tough course as last time and I’m pretty wiped out.

Racing in the first event of the night put me with cat 4 and cat 5 racers for around 35 minutes of looping around this old stadium.  I ended up doing 31 laps of the half mile track.  Let me point out that it is a pretty tough course.

You can see where the start finish is.  However, what you can’t tell is that it is at the top of a climb.  You take a left after the finish on somewhat of a flat.  The problem is that it is a short distance before you dive down and then turn left again.  Of course, everyone accelerates out of the turn and by the time you hit the next turn you are going up again.  The next section is short again and before you know it you are making the turn onto the finish stretch.  By the time you reach that point, the climb is a humdinger.

Basically, there is never any chance to recover.  It is hammer out of the corner, hammer out of the corner, hang onto the field, hammer out of the corner, and then suffer up the climb.  Repeat about every minute until you are done.  It is recipe for pain.

How did my race go?  Well, I met one objective.  I started on the front.

I managed to stay there for about 15 minutes as well.  Peter Mathern was up there as was his teammate Tony Warmuth.  Peter was off the front much of that period.  The temptation was to go with him and attempt a breakaway.  Peter does things like that.

However, I knew I didn’t have the endurance at this point to make something like that stick.  The problem was I was still doing a lot of work as at multiple points I was the one leading the group chasing down Peter.  This would not last.

My heart rate was over 180 by this point.  As a matter for fact, I was red lining it for 33 minutes of the 33 minute 48 second race!  I made myself back off and drop into the field in an attempt to recover.  The problem is, this course does not allow you to do that.  You have to be near the front or you must work to get to the front or get spit out the back.

So, for the first half of the race I stayed in the top five.  My hope was that I could recover and then in the last 10 minutes of the race make a move with someone like Peter to gap from the field and get a good finish.  Unfortunately, when the five to go call came I was about 20th.

The pace picked up and it was even harder to work my way up to the front.  I made it into the top 15 riders but could tell things were stretching out slightly as we made the turns and accelerations.  About this time my body started sending me signals that it was unhappy.

The snap was gone.  If it came down to a sprint I was going to have to really call on my will to make anything happen.  Like a snap of the fingers I went from feeling like I could go in a break to feeling like I couldn’t hang on.

Still, I determined I was not going to quit.  With two laps to go I was still in contact with the riders in front of me.  Then coming out of lap three I had something happen that has never happened to me in a race.  I threw up.  Thankfully, only a bit ended up in my mouth and the only thing I knew to do was to swallow it back down and keep going.

The bad news is that it caused me to lift just enough to get gapped going through turn four.  I had to stand and give it all I had to make contact with the group ahead.  By the time we reached the start/finish for the final lap I was back on but dangling precariously.

As we went through turn two one rider blew up and went rocketing off the back.  That caused me to take a look behind me.  There was no one there but that one rider.  Forgive me, but I realized that I wouldn’t lose any more places, so I halfheartedly entered turn four and began the final climb to the start finish.  Who knows, maybe someone else (other than myself) would blow up.

I was close enough to say I finished with the main group.  Turns out I was 13th – which was better than I thought I did.  The large number of lapped riders made things very confusing.

Here are my numbers:  31 laps for 33:48 covering 13.6 miles, max power = 1094 with an average of 272 watts, heart rate = 189 max with an average of 185 bpm, and the average speed was over 24 mph.  My 20 minute peak maximal power was 285 watts.  That was very close to my highest ever 290 watts.

I will note that on my Garmin the average power read 336 watts.  When I saw that, I nearly freaked out!  That would have been awesome – though I was perplexed because with a number like that I should have been pulling the field around all by myself.  Getting the data into WKO+ cleaned it up and gave me a much more realistic number.  Hey, it was fun while it lasted.

My plan was to finish within the top 11 riders.  So, I didn’t make that goal.  However, I felt very good about making some progress with my fitness.  I did not feel nearly as bad as I did in the first POA race (I finished better in that one, but did not feel nearly as strong).  It helped to know that I was one of the last men standing with a group that completely busted the field apart.

The plan now is to start focusing some on drills that will help me be a better criterium racer.  What are those?  I’m assuming repeats.  The constant accelerations are what wear me down over time.  I need to learn how to build stamina in those situations.  I’ll crack the top ten yet!

 

Tags: Peter Mathern, POA Cycling, Summer Series, Tony Warmuth

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 6:12 am and is filed under Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.