Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Tuesday Time Trial.

Now is good time to turn off your TV, turn off the radio, stop that music that is playing on your i-pod, tell the kids to be quite, and just listen. if you listen close enough you may just be able to hear MY QUADS SCREAMING!!! This season I have not done allot of speed workout on the bike, and I thought that the baddlands annual Tuesday night twilight time trial would be the perfect place for a speed workout. If I had to describe it in one word it would probably be ouch! From the get go I was a bit nervous, because I don't know where I fall as a rider. I know I can run well, but as far as the other two sports go I am not sure where I land. For this reason I thought this time trail would be a good test to gauge my cycling ability. I signed up for the race and put myself on the A start list. Not sure why I did, but at the moment I thought it would be fun. As more and more people started showing up the more my nerves were growing, and I wondered why I put myself on the A list.

I went for a very short warm up, and got ready to wait for my start time. With my super fast mountain bike helmet, and no idea what I was doing I was ready to go in the A class. 5...4...3...2...1 And I was off. From the get go I went out very hard. I knew this course was very short, so I figured I had to be all out from the get go. By the time I got to the turn around on lap one, my lungs felt like they were going to blow up and my legs were screaming!! I thought crap I still have 2 and a half laps to go, and I am already dying. I just told my self to hang tough, and keep trucking. Now I was onto the second lap, and all I can say is that out section on the course was killing me, there is only a couple short climbs, but I felt like I was breaking down and fading fast!! I just told myself one more lap, you are doing ok. My biggest fear was getting caught and with almost two laps completed I still had not been caught. The fact that I had not been caught yet, started to give me a confidence boost. When I started lap 3 I started to feel better, my legs hurt, but my lungs had calmed down, and as I got to the turn around I noticed I was catching the rider that started before me. Sweet!! This is going ok. From that point on I gave it everything I had to catch him, but I just didn't have enough to real him in. I finished strong and was happy with my race.

I ended up in the middle of the A pack which is just fine with me. I also learned a ton from this experience, I don't race with allot of equipment, I don't have a power meter, a heart rate monitor, a cycling computer, or even a watch for that matter. I just go as hard as a can for as long as I can. But I learned that I need to start racing smarter. Pacing myself is a good thing, and equipment such as those will help me race smarter. I also learned that I need to warm up much more before a race like this. A short out and back with not do.

I must also give a big thanks to all the tri-fusion people that were there. They just kept telling me to have fun and not worry about anything. I have been around allot of teams and clubs, in my running career, but none of them are as nice or as supportive as tri-fusion. Everyone out there did an amazing job.

Hopefully soon I can get healthy and ready to race tri's again. I would like to hit up one more late season race this year, but we will see :)

2 comments:

Michael W. Bergquist said...

What? No times or distances?

Race smarter and harder. Pacing is extremely important and you don't have to have cool gadgets for that.

Good work!

jessithompson said...

Josh, You rocked it buddy. I added a bunch of pics to the gallery so you might add some of those. YOU ROCKED this race and had an extremely fast split. The course is way long for what they post it as, you'd have to ask Rog for the exact mileage. It was fun to be out there cheering for you...you always have a smile on your face. Except for this one pic I have of you where you look possessed by the devil - LOL - guess that's where all that speed comes from, eh? Way to go, buddy!