Category 3/4
Luray, VA
Starters: 74
This was supposed to be three event stage race. Due to the storm on Friday night, the road race was cancelled. So instead we headed out for a few hours of hill climbing.
Day two was the time trial and the Criterium. The TT report is below; I did not do the Criterium. It was very technical; the temperature was peaking at the high 90s and decided that this was not the crit for me to really get back into the swing of things with.
Luray Caverns Time Trial
The course was smooth, started on a fairly steep descent then entered a good set of rollers. This was an out and back 9 mile TT. The first half the elevation loss was greater than the gain so overall it averaged more of descent. There were several turns that made it easier to break it down into quarters since there was not marking other than the actual course.
Weather was pretty warm; temperature at the start was 79 degrees. There was no wind to speak of during the race.
The plan was to use my LT from prior to the wreck, around 300 watts. I set my Garmin for time, power zones, distance and cadence; learning from the last TT. The plan was to shot for less than 24 minutes. So I wanted to stay in Zone 4 and hit each of the quarter segments at about 5 min and 40 seconds each. I did not pre-ride the course but drove it several times. Did a good warm-up for about 45 minutes but had to wait a little while for my start time.
I had a good start and a good descent. Scott Giles voice continued to ring in my head, don’t rest until you have the bike back up to speed on the climbs. So that is what I did across each roller. I averaged about 25.13 mph on the outbound and hit each of my segments on time. The return was more of a gradual uphill but was able to stay in zone (for the most part) and hit my times. I ended up at 23:57 just barely under 24 minutes. I had seriously miscalculated my goal; I should have been aiming more towards 20 minutes. 23:57 got me 41st out of 74, at 4 minutes down on the GC.
Stats:
Normalized power: first half, 305w (average 264w); second half, 283 w (average 265w)
Average Heart Rate: first half, 171 bpm; second half, 180 bpm
Average Cadence: 80, really tried to pay attention to the cadence but very little of the race was flat; so this is actually more of a climbing cadence. The area that was “flat” the cadence was closer to 88, still lower than my 90-95 goal.
VI: 1.11
Criterium
I did not have a good feeling about the crit, there were several pretty good descents and 9 turns. I decided to bail on the crit.
NEXT EVENTS:
2012 Hagerstown Challenge Criterium (July 7)
No comments:
Post a Comment