2012 OBRA State ITT Championships

Today was the 2012 OBRA State Championship ITT race...I've been looking forward to this race for a while now having my new bike to race on and having spent a lot of time over the last 6 weeks doing training rides up Pumpkin Ridge. 

I had a good taper heading into the race and my legs felt pretty good, though I hadn't done much riding in the last two days. Warming up went well, but due to the length of the race 40K I cut my warm up a little short. It was already mid 70's by the time I started my warm up and delays in the start time resulted in starts moving back 28 minutes...so we had to delay our warm-ups more than anticipated. 

In addition to that they did a number switch up on us by moving them to the right side instead of the left...and since I glue my numbers on I couldn't change them. Thankfully I had a second number on my lower back and the officials were OK with that.

There was also an anticipated start ramp for the race as well, but it never showed up, but we did have a holder, so starts were still good as we were able to be clipped in from the get go.

Race conditions were not as good as they were last year where we had a 3mph headwind on the way out and a tailwind on the way back. That lead to fast times last year. This year we had a 7+ mph tailwind on the way back and a 7+ mph headwind on the way back...You could see flags in peoples yards sticking straight out, so the wind was pretty hefty.

Coming out of the turnaround I got settled in and started picking up to speed...Once I was around 25-26 mph a gust came out of know where and knocked me a good 4 feet to the right and about off my bike. Freaked me out and kept me on guard for the final part of the race.

Splits were not too bad for me...24:45 on the way out and 29:37 on the way back, given the tailwind out and the headwind back I paced myself fairly well. I don't know what my power output was since I don't have power on my TT bike, but Strava put me at 385 watts, so I was probably closer to 350-360 which is right at where I figure my FTP is.

I did have a drop off in HR at around 35 minutes going from an average of 162 BPM down to 157 BPM, that happened within about a minute and wasn't gradual so I'm guessing I either hit a fatigue limit there or that was when I started getting dehydrated since I don't carry water and it was warm (86 degrees during my race).

Overall, not a bad day on the bike with a 2nd place in my class with a time of 54:22, which is about 14 seconds slower than last year (4 seconds from the official time) under much harder conditions. I'm still waiting to see what the combined times are and where I fit in there, last year I was 10th overall...so I'm interested to see where I fall in those.

My race season for 2012 is over and for the most part went well. Next year, I'm going to concentrate more on TT's (especially after crashing and having a couple close calls in road races this year) and pick up the finishing touches to buying speed with a new set of wheels (hopefully). I want to pick up a set of HED 9 front wheel and JET Disc for the rear (maybe with a Powertap). Both will be clinchers as I like those more than tubular's and for me they are just as fast and every bit as comfortable.

Next week is our team century which I'll probably ride...though I'm considering doing the hill climb championships just for the fun of it. I'll make a decision on that later this week depending on how fat I feel at the time.