Thursday morning came and after a night of thinking about Jeff Cup and my knee, I had a decision to make. Should I or should I not do the individual time trial this morning? I decided that I would go out, do a warm-up and then hit the line. My start time was 9:17, the course was 9.5 miles out, turn around and return. All of us headed over to the course and did some warm-up loops. I hopped on with Jim Weinstein and road for about thirty minutes. The knee felt okay, simply, just didn't hurt too bad. So I figured that I would give it a go, still trying to recover from the embarrassment of the day before.
I noticed that there was a head wind all the way out and then a killed tail wind for the return. After some LT testing a few weeks before, I knew my LT was around 280. So I figured with the head wind, I could head out at about 305 watts, turn around and ride the tailwind back at around 285.
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| TT Results |
I lined up and waited, 5-4-3-2-1, and I was off, well sort of, could not get the left foot clipped into the pedal and lost a few seconds, but got the bike up to speed with a 1200 watt kick. I settled in, got my cadence up and looked in at 305 watts and maintained that for the next 27 minutes. Little slower than I wanted but it was a strong head wind. I hit the mid-way point and headed back. instantly i could tell my power was dropping off, so I got it back to 285 and held it there. Figuring 50 minutes a little over threshold would work out. The knee was killing me, I kept repeating my mantra, and watched the miles go by. I crossed the finish line at 51:08, I cut nearly 4 minutes off of the second half. I am really happy about my performance. How did I compare to the others? Well 16th of 19. Wouldn't score a lot of points on Road Results but for me it was a good day.
After coming back from the ride, most of us kicked around for the day and got ready to head over to Plantation Palms Gold Club to have dinner with American Classic, one of our sponsors.
Other exciting news of the day, Lance Armstrong,
Jeremy Powers, Lazer Helmets, and Van Dessel Sports were tweeting about the US Military Cycling Team. VERY COOL!!!
Tomorrow should be a pretty packed day. Getting up in the morning, breakfast, kit up, and head out for a 40 miles ride. Then comeback, lunch, kit up again and head over to Macdill AFB. We are going to ride with some of the military members and their families tomorrow evening for another 40 miles. After that, we will have a few team meetings to talk about Saturday's race strategy.
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