This morning Heather and I drove up to Waitsburg, Washington where we are staying for the Tour of Walla Walla. The race name is really a carryover from the initial years of the race. Slowly the stages have migrated to Waitsburg, about 25 minutes north of Walla Walla. This year three out of the four stages start and finish in Waitsburg. Hugo and Ted also drove up and we are all staying in the wonderful host home of Laverne and her two dogs, Molly and Obie.
I haven’t been feeling great all week, but I was hoping that would change by this weekend. But yesterday’s pre-race ride didn’t bode well. Both my perceived exertion and my wattage during my efforts, weren’t that great. I had a feeling before I even started today’s stage that this weekend was going to turn into a “training” race for me!
Today was the Kellogg Hollow road race, which for the Pro/1/2 men was 2 loops of an undulating course for a total of 62 miles and almost 5,000 feet of climbing. We started out neutral for a mile to get out of town, then the race started for real. The pace was fast from the get-go and anytime we’d hit a steady climb it would get pretty hard…at least for me. I was really struggling on the climbs. I was having visions of getting dropped early on and I tried my best to stay with the pack. On one of the flatter sections, I moved to the front and tried to bridge to a small break that was developing. I gave it my all and then totally blew. It was awful! I could barely hold onto the pack when they came flying by. At that point I knew it was going to be a long weekend!
Later on, a motorcycle official came up to me and started yelling at me about the yellow line rule. He said this was my first “warning” and that the next time I would be disqualified! He stayed with me continuing to tell me to move over. I looked down and I was to the right of the yllow line, so at first I didn’t “get it”. But he stayed with me and persisted then I realized he wanted me to move to the right-side of the lane, not just to the right of the yellow line! At first I was totally pissed as there’s no rule or that says an official can relegate you to a portion of the course. But I moved over and he finally went away. But after that I just raced the race as I normally would, staying to the right of the yellow-line at all times. If you konw anything about the amorphous nature of the pack, there’s no way you can limit your position like that in a mass-start road race. I just made special care to be far away from the yellow-line when I heard the motorcycle come by.
After the race, I learned that Ted was also “warned” about the yellow-lin when he was riding in between the the dotted and the solid lines. We then figured out that the official must have thought I was the same rider as Ted’s incident (we have the same uniform, and Ted’s number was 41, mine was 40). That explained why he was so pissed at me. Anyway, there was no warning on communique after the stage so I didn’t need to protest.
Back to the race…
Once we hit the KOM hill, the pace really surged and I popped off. I wasn’t the only one; there were a few people who popped like I did. We started rotating together and eventually caught back on. From that point on I was in survival mode, trying to stay protected as much as I could. The next worst part of the race was a really tight left-hand turn. It seemed that the front would sprint out of the turn to really force the pace. I almost popped off there as well! Eventually the pace eased up and I could recover, but something was definitely off with my riding.
The course was also very confusing to me. Even though we did 2-laps of the course, I swear we went up certain hills more than twice! It didn’t help that I was pegged and cross-eyed on those hills. Maybe I was delusional…or maybe it was the fact that the hills and scenery were so similar that I thought it was the same hill, when in fact it wasn’t!?
Finally a break got off and the pace of the pack settled down. From that point I just sat at the back, conserving as much as possible. Ted tried to go with some random attacks and even attack on his own, but he never could get away. But it at least kept the break from getting too much time on the field. We lost Hugo early on after he chased down almost everything that moved in the first 20 minutes. So Ted and I finished together in the main field about 2:40 down from the breakaway. Hugo lost much more time and came in with a “fun” group where it sounded like they had a grand old time riding to make the time cut!
Looking at my power, it does confirm that it was an awfully hard race. I broke some YTD best powers and the hardest hour had a normalized power of 313 watts, when my current threshold is set to 305. But I did feel that something was ‘off” and I did later learn that the axle on my new hub is actually bent. I don’t think it would add significant drag, but if it did, it would explain how thought my power was really good, yet I couldn’t go fast enough (since it is downstream from the power meter).