iron eyes for the normal guy

back to bike racing

well a little change of pace today. did a bike race in and around warren ma. when i signed up a bikereg.com there was a course profile that seemed pretty hilly. i thought i had done this race before and but the profile seemed different so i thought they changed up the course or something. well, i was wrong, it was the same course. so, on the agenda today was 3 loops of 21 miles per lap with about 1100ft of climbing per lap. so for you non-math majors that's 63 miles and 3300ft of climbing. since i knew the course and knew what to expect, i thought no problem because in the past, this course was always good to me. but, i guess the problem is, bike racing is way different than ironman training. so, i was chilling near the front to begin with when a group rolled off and i was just following wheels and then i was in a breakaway with 7 other guys. i'm thinking, this is not good. my hr rate is in the the 160's which for me is pretty high and i knew i couldn't sustain this for the whole race. i was just rotating through, not doing anymore work than i needed to. thankfully, we got caught after 5-6 miles than hopefully i could get some recovery in the pack. i could tell i wasn't having the best of days so after that my mission was to just chill and see if the legs would come back to me. felt fine for the rest of the first lap. the 2nd lap i had to dig a little deeper on the tough sections to stay up. then on the final lap, i knew this especially tough climb was coming up again, but there was a lot of attacking before it and the pack was virtually single file coming into this section. the writing was on the wall and i got popped along with a bunch of other dudes. i ended up riding with a group of 6 guys the rest of the way. once my hr settled down, i actually felt better than the rest of the people i was with. so, i worked with them pulling a lot of the time. actually one of the guys i was with is doing ironman lake placid. his first ironman too. i guess he was in the same boat as i was. being able to maintain a sustained, but not faring too well in responding to repeated attacks. overall, it was good interval training for this part of the season and a little break from the usual routine.

later,
d

posted by supersonique @ 7:51 PM