bike jocks road and track 2014/15 thread

After not riding for about a week and a half, and a nasty bout of food poisoning Thursday night/Friday day, I tried out the Harlem Skyscraper crit today. Didn’t feel great but I already paid for it and DGAF. It was a humid 85 degrees, still probably dehydrated, and I felt really nervous after a guy crashed hard in the first lap of the 5 race. Lotta blood on the course.

Anyway, fully gassed after 8/20 laps, pulled out after 9. First DNF. Feeling like selling the road bike for a MTB and chilling out.

did another 6hr mtb race yesterday. wasn’t really planning on it, but i had a few committed teammates who were happy to have the company (and for me to bring the team tent on a sunny 90* day). this time around i was feeling way more prepared, both for the heat and for the long day.

it ended up being waaay more enjoyable than the last, mainly because the course consisted of a nice 1hr loop of twisty flow trails on gently rolling terrain. it made it super easy to keep the power output moderate and smooth, without feeling like the overall pace was too slow for excitement (i am also a flow junkie and love railing fast corners). two exceptionally fast guys went off the front really quickly and i happily rode my pace in 3rd for the entirety of the race. i even ended up with a big negative split on my last lap when the same dude from the last race started chasing me again! apparently this time he was registered in a different age category so my final effort was for naught but to get me to pizza faster.

shotgunned a beer to start the last lap which maybe helped with the negative split/second fastest lap of the day

shotgunning a beer helps pretty much anything.

I’m three weeks out from my biggest race. I have most of my training/racing planned out leading up to it, but struggling with the last week.

The race is on Saturday, should I race crits Monday+Tuesday, take Wednesday off, easy spin on Thursday, some sort of hour ride Friday with a few efforts?

depends on what your volume looks like going in. if that makes sense for your taper, sure. but if mon/tues PIR are fairly high in TSS points for you, maybe opt for something else.

definitely do easy riding all the way through the week and openers on friday.

The PIR races are generally around 170 tss, my CTL should be around 55 or so going into that week… Maybe higher if everything works out.

Is it Cascade?

Also, hello from Baker City.

Good luck over there! I’ll be driving through later today on my way to Boise.

I’m targeting the Boise Twilight crit… then I’ll just keep racing PIR/Tabor until cross season.

I’ve been doing better at the tuesday night world champs. Less suffering, less getting dropped.

Maybe I’ll try a real weekend race again one of these days.

Power quads! I bet you have a big sprint

Coach is having me do lots of late attacks (1-5 minutes before the finish) to teach me to be more decisive and to commit 100% when I go (I have a problem with being too passive and waiting too long and then not doing anything at all at the end of a race). He says if I can read the race from that far out then sprints will become a piece of cake. I like cake.

Didn’t work at the technical crit last weekend. I attacked with 4 laps to go, joined up with the guy that was already off the front, but we got caught with 1 corner to go.

Been doing some damage on the Tuesday lunch worlds crit, but no official wins yet. Lots of 5ths & 6ths, and a 2nd, but these guys are pretty strong and good racers so I’m happy with that. Tried to go about 3 minutes out yesterday, caught up with a break of 3 and was thinking they’d be fading by now, but they hopped on my wheel and cat and moused it a bit, I took the sprint bait from one of two guys on the same team up there, but I didn’t really have much left after towing them around anyway. Not sure what I should have done, since if I sat up the field would have caught anyway. Maybe I should have launched later, like 1 or 2 minutes out, and harder, but Morgan Stanley team was blocking pretty well til then, so not sure if we’d have gained on them at all.

You would think so but I did some athletic testing when I was a swimmer and I have basically 0 fast twitch fibers.

I think if I can get serious about training then TT/track endurance stuff would suit me.

[quote=rauce]I’ve been doing better at the tuesday night world champs. Less suffering, less getting dropped.

Maybe I’ll try a real weekend race again one of these days.[/quote]

i’d wreck bc staring at your bike

if that’s the case, i wouldn’t risk spiking up your ATL. you should be ramping up your CTL till the weekend before, then keeping it easy. still riding, but probably would want your TSB between 0-15 by race day. should be easy to get your CTL up like 5+ pts in the next couple weeks.

@rauce I don’t think i naturally have fast twitch either, though i have no ‘athletic testing’ to back it up. the thing i do know is that if i do not work on my sprint, it completely goes away. some people just always have that and have to build endurance… i have to train my anaerobic side and practicing sprinting, otherwise i don’t have shit. the plus side, however, is that since you’re a tall dude, you weigh more, therefore you put out more watts, so your max power is going to be pretty good - just have to train your muscles to react quickly so you can harness it.
i’m kinda sucking at sprints this year, but i generally do OK in road sprints/crits/etc just based on shear power alone -w hich i dont get by having any sort of impressive w/kg in sprint (at my best I poke into the “cat 2” category on the coggan scale), since i’m heavier than the average female racer due to my height.

track is pretty much the best thing for gettin’ that sprint too. endurance races - points races, tempo, etc - just sprint after sprint.

[quote=aerobear]
if that’s the case, i wouldn’t risk spiking up your ATL. you should be ramping up your CTL till the weekend before, then keeping it easy. still riding, but probably would want your TSB between 0-15 by race day. should be easy to get your CTL up like 5+ pts in the next couple weeks. [/quote]

Perfect. Molly is coaching me now too… we did a great ride today with a mix of climbing and speed work on rolling hills… I set a new 8 minute power record @ 325w. We’re going to go do sprints on Friday… it hadn’t occurred to me in the past few months that I needed to do them, was too preoccupied with ftp and vo2 intervals.

Well, looks like my season is about over.

Baker City was rough. I got dropped early on on the first stage, when we were rounding a corner, and some cat 4 (all women’s cats race together) yelled “gravel,” causing a bunch of people to grab their brakes. This caused a big gap in the field, and then the front of the group attacked out of the corner. I worked really hard to try and get back, but the pack was too fast. Things really strung out over the first little climb, about 2 miles after the corner. I ended up reeling in a few ladies and working with them before dropping them on the longer climb. I struggled a lot in the long, windy back section of the course by myself and DFLed for my cat. Despite the result, I actually rode pretty well and hit new record 1, 10, 20, 30, and 60 minute power.

Stage 2 was a 1-mile hill climb. Since it was short, I didn’t think I’d have a great chance to do super well but thought I’d probably come in mid pack. Again, I rode well, putting out an average of 225 watts over 6 minutes (4.4 w/kg), but I got second to last in the cat 3s.

Stage 3 was a TT. I don’t have a TT rig, so I just did it full Eddy style. I also rode pretty well, averaging my threshold power for the 30 minutes it took me. It was really windy; my power averaged 30 watts above what I put out the last time I did the course, but my time was 30 seconds slower. I started to have some hip and leg pain, but chalked it up to fatigue and the crappy pavement out there.

Stage 4 was a crit. In a 1/2/3 field, I have no shot, so I figured I’d hang as long as I could and then just ride around to save energy for the next day. Started to have bad hip and knee pain about 15 minutes in, and it got worse and worse. Right leg felt fucked, and I wasn’t pedaling straight at all. I finished up, got off the bike, and was so stiff I limped back to the car. Texted with my PT, and decided not to start stage 5. Super bummer, but probably the smart thing to do.

So, I’m back to seeing my PT this afternoon, but it looks like I’ll need more work before I do any serious hard efforts. I might get out to PIR, and MAYYYYYBE will do the uphill TT in mid July, but I don’t know. At this point, I’d mostly just like to find motivation to keep riding through the summer and try and hold onto a bit of fitness for cross. Getting older is the shits.

Serious hugs. It’s definitely a weird experience to set a whole slew of new power numbers on the way to getting trounced, but at the end of the day you were unfortunate to get caught on the wrong side of a gap in the field and demonstrated an ability to have hung if not for that. As for the TT, were top times faster/slower than last time? Sounds like weather conditions were different and you had a stronger TT.

Unfortunately I know that feeling of being fit yet having your body pull the rug out from under you.

Yeah. I’m stronger than I’ve been in the past, but the fields here are so strong right now that I’m still getting my ass soundly kicked. Looking at the TT segment on Strava, 2014, the last year I did it, was obviously a much less windy day, yet the QOM for the course was set this year, along with 4 other top 10s. I don’t necessarily mind bad results, but it’s frustrating to be racing with cat 1/2s that seem to be getting stronger all the time, so I’m never actually in the race. A lot of cat 3s feel the same way, so we lose over half of the women who are upgraded after their first year racing cat 3. I feel like if I were to race with my own category alone, I’d probably have a lot more fun, but there aren’t really any cat 3 fields. I may end up going and doing more out-of-state stage races next year to try and find those fields.

I don’t know. This year has been interesting. I’ve learned a few things about myself that I think will be useful, but I think it will be good to work with a coach again next year. I also clearly need more strength training going into next year, as that’s a component of my hip/knee/leg issues.

I can absolutely see how that would be tough. I did a few 1/2/3 crits in CA early into my 3s and I quickly realized that, while I wasn’t going to get dropped from the pack on anything that wasn’t crazy technical, I would also never have a chance at getting better than top 15. If all my races had been those combined fields then it would’ve been super tough to stay encouraged.

How many cat 3 women typically show up to the 1/2/3 races?

Jordan, are you riding on a Stages now? If you’re having right leg/hip issues, might be tough riding a left only meter, since it isn’t going to be able to measure the loses you’re getting from your right leg issues.

In Colorado, they actually have a good amount of Cat 3 Womens fields. I think this is really helpful. It does depend on having the #s though, as races with less than 10 people can suck. It seems like the Cat 3 women fields here are the same or bigger than the 1/2 field. The women’s peloton isn’t substantially bigger here, but not sure on numbers how it compares. Seem to be a similar balance to oregon - only a handful of cat 1’s, so 1/2/3 field is about 50% cat 3 (or more in some cases).

They put in a big effort to have cat 3 women’s fields in Oregon in 2010, but I was still getting my butt kicked (tons of those cat 3 races were won by a now pro racer who was teammates with another also now pro racer). Cherry Pie had 28 cat 3 women. They also had a cat 3 only women’s field at the stages race Cherry Blossom that year - field was huge, 38 women. That was a big year, but somehow that momentum seemed to have faded in years that followed.

Yeah, I’m on a Stages. Actually, I talked with that very issue with my PT today. We’re going to try and work around it. She’s done a pedalstroke analysis on me, and she’s going to keep an eye on the imbalance using those also.

Roundabout, the women’s fields are really variable. The first race of the year, the 1/2/3 field was 12 people, with 7 of them cat 3s. The stage race, there were 10 cat 1/2s and 10 cat 3s. Of the cat 3s, 5 of them finished with the same time as the winner of the 1/2 field. There was one race with 10 cat 1/2s and 19 cat 3s.