Couldn’t find a road racing thread on the new site, so here is one.
First road race/crit of the year yesterday. Normal monthly industrial park crit yesterday. 98 starters in the p123.
SIDEBAR: I’m a little on the fence with letting the 3s in there, as they have 2 other races (3 if 30+) they can do at this particular event, but it fills the pack. You could definitely tell whom was a 3 by them constantly leaving gaps open, braking into and the immediately standing up/sprinting out of every corner, and being timid in close quarters. Oh well.
We avg’d 28.8mph for 90 mins, with a pretty good headwind up the small riser on the course, which was before the final turn. On turn 3, I guess there was a huge pothole, so they coned it off and it made for an interesting corner. You were forced to turn much later than you normally would and at speed it forced you to go pretty wide. I guess there was a crash in that corner in every race but ours? I made some moves, chased some things down, closed some gaps, and tried for a break after a prime. I caught the guy, we had 10 seconds on the field, and he sat up. The other guy who went with me wouldn’t pull through until the 3rd time I flicked my elbow, then proceeded to go way too hard. Like, we don’t need to be taking 700w pulls 1/3rd of the way into the race. Either way, we got absorbed after a lap. with 1 to go, I was in decent position, probably within the top 20, when we got surged on HARD. Up the final riser,m it was way too congested to try anything, so I rolled in at like 40th. No biggie as I didn’t have any teammates and I mostly wanted to see how my legs would respond.
My FTP is back up to 3.0 w/kg. Some of that is being a man of substance, and some of that is putting more time into strength training this year. This is the earliest I’ve hit that mark in the last 4 years, though.
I don’t need much power to go downhill fast, but it’ll come in handy on the long transfer stages. My CTL should be around 60 when I peak for the NAEC. My primary goal is to survive the day. My secondary goal is to not die on the one stage that is ~15 min long.
Been hitting the trainer/rollers since the new year. Trying for 3 days a week inside and then weekends outside. Last night was 3x10@Z3 (~300w avg for each interval), but felt I could have gone deeper at the end. I’m mostly doing everything on rollers, which makes things a little more interesting and I’m less likely to take “breaks” because I’ll just fall over.
I’m riding the Storck inside coz powwameter and outside rides are on the Scott. I’d like to get a powwameter on it, but I’m just putting that money towards wheels. Once daylight savings hits, I might change my tune, as I’ll wanna ride outside vs. inside.
I’m sitting at around 3.8w/kg, with a goal of getting back to around 4.3-4.5.
Everything in Oregon and Washington has been postponed until at least May/June. Looks like my first race is going to be out of state in the middle of June. What a way to shake off the dust.
This was linked off the local gravgrav list. I’ve been reworking my training plan to push my first peak out a month. I’m not sure I need to go all the way back to off season.
I should have prefaced to not mind those, that’s how the template is to delineate stitching. It will be black. This is really just the initial mockup. No use in doing them up with all sponsors id the initial design isn’t liked. Changes I’m making:
plaid on leg bands going away
“shrinking” plaid on collar and arm bands so you can see the whole pattern.
back pockets plaid.
removing green stripe in logo.
evenly spacing out each stripe of color on the jerz.
For bibs, this year we have green logos. Thinking that could work again w/our green helmets and the green on the jerz, but white would look pretty good as well.
Such a sad end after all these years… amazing to think there was such a push for an indoor velodrome at the height of the track racing resurgence but still nothing came of it.
Yeah, Steve put so much time and energy into trying to get the indoor velodrome built. I think it all came down to if the Blazers would approve it or not.
