Well, I was hoping for a much better day on the bike today....but fell well short of my goal of 31 minutes at the Jack Frost TT. There are several likely contributing factors, but most of the problem was I'm still fat and need to lose weight.
The morning started well enough. I woke up early, got ready, had the car warmed up (a bit of frost on the car this morning) and made it to the parking area about half an hour earlier than originally planned.
When I got there, I went to sync my watch with the start time, but they had yet to start the clock. So I searched out the race officials and asked which one of their watches was the clock going to be started by....one guy spoke up and said it was his, so I asked him what time he had and I was about a minute faster than his.....So that's what I went by when planning my warm up.
Bike hooked up in the trainer, everything on and ready to warm up. I wanted to get in a good 30 minute warm up today, just enough to get a good sweat going and get in some good threshold efforts before heading to the start line. 10 minutes before my start time, I jump off, put my trainer up, hand the keys to my wife and head to the start line. I pull up and it's about 10:23 (my start time was 10:30) so all was good.....then I look at the start clock and it says 00:06....which means they have 10:06???? What the???? Their clock was a good 15+ minutes slow.
So much for my warm up. I tried to keep things going by taking trips up and down the road to stay warm, which is a bit hard when it's 45 degrees out and you planned to be going full bore just a few minutes after getting off your trainer which warms you up quickly. So I slowly got colder and colder.
Finally, it was time to get started and overall my legs felt pretty good. There was a head/cross wind all the way out....not a big wind (3-6 mph), but just enough to let you know it was there. Having an early start time (I had to ask for an early time since I was heading to a memorial service just after the race) didn't give me many carrots to chase. I caught most of who was in front of me in the first couple of miles and had nobody in front of me after the turnaround until about 3/4 of a mile from the finish.
Overall....I finished with an unofficial time of around 32:45 (+/- a few seconds) which is well short of what I wanted. I don't know where this will place me since the results haven't been posted yet, but I'm guessing it's not great.
Basically, I still need to lose 20 more pounds and keep working on my threshold workouts. Starting in April I'll be doing more 2x20's for the TTT in May which will give me a bit more endurance, but I think I need to work a bit on my speed before then, maybe a few more 5 minute VO2 max intervals between now and then.
Overall.....not a bad day considering the weather was beautiful, but I failed to meet my own expectations knowing I can go much faster than I did.
Oh well....Two more weeks until the next TT which will be a bit shorter, but will have a bit more elevation change than Jack Frost did.
Edit: The results have finally been posted and it appears my effort was only a "Moderate" fail. I took 3rd out of 63 racers in the 40-49 catagory and 25th overall on the day (which my overall was better than last year by a few places).
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