Savannah Omnium

The first weekend of racing is always an interesting endeavor. As the saying goes, nothing gets your legs ready to race like racing. What that means is that you can do all sorts of training and intervals and the like but nothing ever quite simulates racing amongst a group of competitors. The Macon Tuesday Night Worlds rides can come close in experience (and even exceed racing in intensity) but those are still a month away.

For me, I usually go down to Albany for that first weekend of racing but with the elimination of the Albany Time Trial, I decided to head to Savannah for the first Georgia Cup Omnium of the year. I decided to race in the Masters 45+ category which didn't have an omnium classification for all three of the events which was a great decision.

Time Trial:

The first event on Saturday morning was the 13.62 mile TT near the Georgia Tech Savannah campus. We went off one at a time with a pretty strong tailwind and for the first four miles the wind pushed me to a great time and allowed me to settle into a good rhythm and heart rate. At four miles I reached the first turnaround and had to swing into a headwind and a slight climb for the next 6 miles. The key here was not to overcook the effort and blow up. While there was a bit of a rough patch in the middle of that section, I managed to keep everything together until the second turnaround which brought us back to the GT-Savannah campus and a strong finish. I managed to do the course in just under 30 minutes and took 2nd in my category and 7th overall which was an strong result.

Criterium:

This is the type of event that is my Achilles Heel. Being a good time trialist means that I'm not a very good sprinter and that's what this sort of event requires. We lined up as a combined field with the Masters 35+ riders which included a couple of former state champions. When the race started I had three goals: stay in the field, stay upright and get some of the surge type efforts required into my legs to begin to teach them to spin both fast and hard. For the first few laps, I struggled a bit to hone my cornering skills and leg speed but once I picked those up I found it fairly easy to stay in the front of the field. This allowed me to work on an advanced goal of attacking the field as a form of interval training and I did this three or four times with the hope of getting someone to go with me. Finally, with two laps to go and knowing that my chance of doing well in a sprint were basically nonexistent, I took a hard flyer as we crossed the start/finish line. I got a pretty big gap and decided to see if I could hold it for as long as possible. I managed to stay away until I was caught 150 meters from the finish. I didn't get much of a result but I raced hard and achieved all of my goals and then some.

Circuit Race:

On Sunday morning the event took us out to Hutchinson Island and the mini-Indy car course there for a 2 mile circuit to race on. This time I was just racing with the other 45 year olds (about 15-20 of us) for an hour and fifteen minutes. Due to the flat nature of the course, the group stayed together for most of the race with a few efforts popping off a few of the weaker riders. About 54 minutes into the race I had found what seemed like a good place to attack on a slight rise in the track while going through a 180 degree turn. I did a practice attack and found it fairly easy to get away from the group and so I allowed myself to be reabsorbed back into the pack to rest my legs a bit for a late race attack with the hope that I could get a couple of riders to go with me. The opportunity presented itself with a lap and a half to go and I went as hard as I could. I had one other rider jump with me and I decided to try and hold the gap. For a while it looked like we'd succeed and stay away but down the finishing straight, a strong rider from Jacksonville used the strength he'd built up over the last month of racing to pull a small group over the top of me with 100 m to go. I managed to hold onto sixth but it was another day of "almost."

In all, it was a great weekend of racing and while the results didn't show how hard I had raced and close I came to pulling off a win, I am really satisfied with my effort and the goals I achieved. As I told one person, "It is better to had raced and lost, than not to have raced at all."

Also, a shout outs to Trey Crisp who came down, raced hard and came away with a good result for the team in the Cat 4 race and Jeff "Stoney" Clayton who threw down in Greenville and walked up to the top step. Way to go fellas!

Next week is the last MIddle Georgia Time Trial series race and the weekend after that is Perry-Roubaix. Race season is fully underway and I'm in the thick of it.

Thanks for reading and keep the rubber side down.

Chad

Feel the Burn Notice-Episode #1

With apologies to the USA TV series "Burn Notice", I thought I'd write a series of essays that explain a little bit about what competitive cycling is like for fans of the team who might not be competitors. I'll try to capture the mind-set of what it's like to race a bicycle and what thought processes go into that using the narrative explanatory style of the main character from the series, "Michael Weston". I hope you enjoy the look into the world of amateur bike racing.

The Time Trial

Time trailing is both the easiest and hardest of the cycling disciplines. Since you race "by yourself" with few tactics and no drafting, this discipline is sometimes thought to be the purest in cycling and is often called, "The Race of Truth." It's also the most equipment intensive of the disciplines because each rider has to push their own way through the air. An aerodynamic bike, slippery clothing and smooth helmets make for a fast rider. They also make you look like a high tech space traveler.

Time trialing is about pacing. For every distance and time there is an optimal effort the cyclist wants to put out. Go too hard and you'll run out of gas before the end of the race. Don't go hard enough and some other rider will finish the course faster than you. Finding that balance is where the art of the effort is and it's how time trials are won and lost.

Every rider has a maximum effort they can put out for an hour. The effort is different for every rider and can depend on the rider's genetics, training, fitness and a host of other factors. You can go harder than that but you can't do it for as long. If you try, you're body will rebel and shut down. Again, the harder you go, the sooner that happens.

The first thing you need to know to be a good time trialist is to know what that effort feels like. Once you know that, you can pace your effort according to the race. If you're doing a fairly short time trial you can go harder-a lot harder. This seems like a simple principle but it's harder than it sounds. This is complicated by a couple of misconceptions riders will often have.

The first big mistake a lot of riders make is that they start a time trial way too hard. Whether it's adrenaline, cycling "macho" or a lack of understanding of what constitutes "hard" over a long period of time, riders often come out of the start pushing a pace that they can only sustain for about 3-5 minutes. At first, this feels good but once the first mile or two goes by, the rider finds that not only can't they hold the pace they've set but that they've burned up their legs for the rest of the time trial. There are guys who are experts at the short effort-prologue specialists-but there are very few time trials of that length.

The second big mistake that's made is to race your opponents-the other riders. This may sound like what you want to do but in a time trial you have to remember that you're racing the clock, not any one else. Get into a drag race with a faster rider that's in front of you or behind you and you'll pop before the race is over. Get too satisfied with passing other riders or too discouraged when you are passed and you'll let up and slow down. You race the clock based on what your body is going to give you on that day.

The final big mistake is a lack of attention to detail. Time trailing is a detail oriented endeavor. There's no pack to hide in, no technical skill to fall back on and no friends to help you out. Almost everything in a time trial happens before you step up to the start line-how you trained the week leading up to the race, how you eat the morning of the race, how much tire pressure you're running, how aerodynamic you and your ride are, how you have warmed up. It's a lot of little details that might only make a couple of seconds difference but when taken together can make or break your race.

Finally, when you go off, you have to learn to block out as many of the external distractions as you can. You can't be thinking bills or about mowing the lawn or what you're kids are doing. Your goal is to focus on the task at hand and to get into a rhythm that includes your breathing, you legs and your train of thought. You focus on pushing yourself to the edge of what you can do for that race and that distance and then you spend the rest of the race forcing yourself to remain at that edge.

Do this well and you get good and fast. It's not a discipline for everyone but it is the "Race of Truth."

Thoughts on the "Pre-Season"

This past weekend, I participated in the Tundra Time Trial, a race I've done every year since its inception in 2003. The race used to be something of a "fitness check" that happened about a month before any of the serious racing started in Georgia (usually at the old Brooks Omnium). As the Georgia road race calendar has expanded and cyclocross has become a well attended cycling activity, Tundra now represents the first "real" event of the road racing season here in Georgia.

This year's event had over 350 participants and we were all treated to a marvelous day of weather. While not quite the "Tropical" Time Trial, there was no tundra to be seen. The team had five members racing and I went off at a fairly early 9:04 am. It was a good effort and I ended up beating my time from last year by around a minute and 25 seconds, winning the Masters 45+ category and finishing in the top 10 overall. The only downside is that there were good racers of my age (who were racing in different categories) who beat me by over a minute, a deficit I'll have to be able to erase by the June 23rd state time trial championship.

The results of the race for me validate that it's been a good off-season and pre-season. Shifting my training schedule last year has brought me to this point with more fitness and better form and technique than I usually show. A big part of that has been the preseason racing that I've done; what have been called training races. I've done three of the four Middle Georgia Winter Time Trial Series down in Warner Robins with wins in the men's open class in all three and I raced the first Georgia Cup Winter TT race up in Adairsville coming in second overall.

The most important aspect of these winter races was to get some sense of what kind of power I was able to produce on the time trial bike for both shorter (~10 minute) efforts and longer, more sustained (~45 minute) efforts. To do this I had to run with less aerodynamic wheels but I got a much better sense of what kind of effort I could sustain in a real race situation. That knowledge really showed in my effort at Tundra where I was riding on perceived exertion alone. I knew exactly how to gauge my output and was able to sustain a 26 mph pace for the entire race and had a negative split (which means I came back along the course in the second half of the ride faster than I went out on the first half).

With any luck, I'll be able to go down to Warner Robins for the fourth and final Mid-GA TT Series race and wrap up the series title and the sweep on March 6th. Between now and then is a weekend of racing in Savannah with another time trial and some flat, circuit style racing. It's not something I'm very good at but there's almost nothing like racing to teach your legs how to race and I'd rather enjoy the beauty of Georgia's first city than the cold of Greenville.

Thanks for reading and keep the rubber side down.

Chad