Today was the second race of the George’s Spring Series, affectionately called the “Slammer” due to the proximity to the Idaho Correctional Facility. The weather was great and with our late start of around 12:30, it was warm enough to race in just shorts and a jersey. There was a wind, but not as bad as it can be out there in the open desert. But with only a couple small hills on the course, the wind is usually the biggest factor. Ted and I carpooled to the start area and got there early, so I had time to take a few pictures of other categories that were already in progress.
Starting for the Intermountain Orthopaedics elite were Ben, Hugo, Kelsey, Ken, Ted and myself. It was the biggest elite team contingent we’ve had in years. The race started fairly mellow with a couple guys eventually pushing the pace to “get a workout in”. Once we were on Cloverdale, the crosswind became a factor and the attacks started flying. Ted and I were trying to only respond to the GC contenders for the series, and not worrying about non-GC threats. A little while later TH and KA went off the front, but the GC race was still in the main field so we didn’t worry about it.
The next couple laps were somewhat of a blur, with attacks coming on Kuna-Mora and Cloverdale. At some point a Bob’s Bicycles rider went off and he was a GC threat. But at the time I was already red-lined and couldn’t do anything about it. Then later, another one of Bob’s GC riders went and then my team was left trying to salvage losses. I was frustrated with myself as I didn’t have the top-end power to go with or bridge to those attacks, especially after being in the gutter. But this is understandable as I haven’t done any L6 training and just started getting some decent L5 workouts under my belt. We continued to work to the finish, but the guys up the road were so strong that they still put five minutes on us! Ouch! I ended up 10th but the placing doesn’t matter as much as the elapsed time. Oh well, we still have three more races left and in bike racing, you never know what will happen!
One interesting aspect about the race is the similarity between Ted and my PowerTap data. We both know that we have similar fitness right now and since we weigh the same, we’re always comparing power data. But for our ride stats to be nearly identical, is uncanny! Before seeing his ride summary, I would have guessed that Ted did more work during the race. He seemed to respond to more of the big attacks than I did. But both our kJoules, TSS and Norm Power (NP) were the same. The difference between us does appear when we look at our power curves. Ted has better anaerobic work capacity (AWC) than I do and it is evident in his mean maximal power (MMP) curve for this race. Whereas, I usually have better power for durations 15 minutes or more. Unfortunately I never got a chance to push that side of the curve today.
Here are the results on Spondoro:
http://www.spondoro.com/results/slammer/2007/results.pdf