San Dimas Stage Race

So after Friday I was relatively excited about my form...considering its still march, I am still light years ahead of where I was last season at this time. I spent a lot of time working on climbing over the winter and even though I still not at the level of pure climbers, I'm now competitive with other riders who consider themselves sprinters. In Fridays time trial I placed somewhere around a 100th place, which sounds terrible, but I was still less than two minutes behind the winner.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I received my new power meter the other day and considering I have very bad time trial skills I knew that I needed to use this device to pace myself so that I could ride within my means. Heres a photos of my current bike with my new Quarq power meter! its awesome! (www.quarq.us) I knew that I could hold a 350 watt pace for the 15 minute effort so during the event I basically starred at my power meter the entire time.

This technique was useful for ensuring that I did not blow up to early in the race, but sadly as I found out after yesterdays ride, I did not go as hard as I could on race day. During the race I ended up averaging 342 watts for the race, but yesterday I went to the TT course again and managed to average 356 watts and take almost 50 seconds off my time. Im an idiot! How did I manage to go harder in training than during the race! Enough with talking numbers, this blog isnt suppose to be a nerded out power numbers blog.

Here are some cool photos from on top of the climb that the TT was on. If you look way down the ridge you can see the small cut out of a road that snakes through the valley. That is where the time trial goes, at this point I'm about 2 miles past the time trials finish.

Needless to say, I got dropped on sunday at the road race. It was flippin hard. The course was like a 6 mile crit course. There was only 200 feet of climbing per lap but if you were not on the front you had to be very heavy on the breaks because the course was so crappy. It was definitely the most dangerous race that I have ever done. There were cars on the course, roads were to narrow to accommodate the 170 person field, and there were random concrete islands and dividers littered all over the course. Im not making excuses for getting dropped, I knew where I needed to be in order to race the race, I just was not strong enough.

Its now Monday and Im dealing with some intense allergy/sinus issues. I never have had allergies but Im just going to keep telling myself thats what it is, I dont need to be thinking that Im sick going into another huge stage race this Thursday.