Even though I’m not fully recovered from the Tour de Park City, I wanted to do some LT work today. The Mount Harrison Hill Climb is on Saturday so if I did a solid workout today, I’d still have enough recovery time to bring my CTL back into positive territory.
The half-Bogus Tuesday Nighters have been going on, so I planned my ride so I could do a modified 2×20; I’d do an LT interval before the race group ride started, then descend down and meet up with the group for the Tuesday Nighter. I started my first interval at the bottom and kept it mostly high-tempo, low-LT. My legs didn’t feel bad but the air was humid and felt thick so breathing was hard. It wasn’t super hot but it was nice to feel the cooler temperatures as I gained altitude. But I still felt a little dehydrated from the weekend.
I managed to make it up to the Forest Service Sign on my first interval in about 38 minutes with a normalized power of 278 watts. Then I quickly turned around and descended so I could get to the gas station and re-fill my bottles before the Tuesday Nighter.
After filling my bottles I rode back up to the starting intersection and there were quite a few people in attendance. I only had to wait a couple minutes and then the we headed up. I estimate there were about about 50 riders and I settled into the middle of the pack for the first part of Corrals. As the group increased speed, I dropped back as I was experimenting with using my power meter for pacing a hill climb like this. There has been discussion on the Wattage Group on whether the pacing benefit outweighs the weight disadvantage of using a pwer meter on a hill climb.
I was targeting about 300 watts and let it go only 30–50 watts above that. This quickly put me off the back within the first few hundred meters! But I didn’t let that discourage me and even by the top of Corrals, only a kilometer later, I was passing people who were getting dropped. I kept the pressure on during the descent and took the next little uphill fairly easy. When I got to the bottom of the switchbacks I just pegged my wattage at around 300 and kept it there.
I tried to keep steady and didn’t adjust my speed when passing other riders, at least not intentionally. Sometimes it just happened; as I passed riders, I’d look down at my PowerTap and see that I was over target and have to ease up. And by this point I was passing quite a few people. I was happy about how well the steady pacing strategy was working! With 10 minutes to go I slowly increased my wattage. Then I really ramped it up over the last five minutes. I ended up just barely passing someone with 400 meters to go and wanted to make sure I didn’t get re-passed so the last minute I was giving it everything.
I made it to the sign in about 34 minutes with a normalized power of 312 watts (303 average). Not bad! Especially since I didn’t feel fully recovered from the weekend. Though you can’t tell from the Power graph my pacing was a slightly increasing the entire interval. Those descents and the variability in instantaneous power make it hard to see but after slicing the interval into thirds, I ended up with average power (not norm) of 283, 300, 325. Consistent negative splits! Not sure of my placing but I think I did get into the top ten.
I was hoping to have a crank-based power meter by now but decided to wait and see what the power meter market has to offer next year, when I’ll most likely be buying a new race bike. So for now, I’m going to install the PowerTap harness on my Trek race bike and use the same pacing strategy for Mt Harrison this weekend. We’ll see how it goes!