Having stayed at the in laws last night I got up and had some toast and a coffee before heading of the village hall in Broadbridge Heath to sign on and get a number. Done that now time for a dump, who needs smelling salts when you can stroll into an event toilet for the same effect? A quick warm up on the turbo before heading of to the start.
The ride waas pretty uneventful, I seemed to be mashing the gears a lot more then I would normally. The PT is limitied to how much info it can show you and once you've made your choices you are stuck with them unlike some other computers I've seen. I settled on current power, Cadenece and HR as my measurements of choice. I think I need to adjust this though as I never really had any idea of how I was doing in realtion to the course. Speed or average speed would have been much more useful to me. Power is a great thing but I was struggling to keep the numbers that the fitness test in the week had predicted for this length of effort. In an attempt to make the power numbers I ended up really mashing the gears which I'm not really comfortable with. In the future I'll concentrate on keeping my cadence and HR up and let the power take care of itself, it didn't seem to help me to try and grind my way around the course. The thing with that is that I seem to struggle to get high power numbers with a higher cadence, it's something that I need to work on in the lab.
Anyway, I finished in 1:03.44 average speed 23.66mph. It's a reasonable time but I've gone faster in the past and I think I'm stronger then I was when I last did this course. The weather wasn't as good as it was back then but I had gone DRAGO by purchasing a wheel cover to give the effect of a disc wheel and I'd managed to acquire an aero fairing helmet type thing yesterday for the local bike shop (LBS). Perhaps I'm not as strong as I thought or perhaps the "disc" wheel and aero helmet didn't make the differences I'd hoped for...
I'm signed up to do this course again in about two months, in the mean time I better either do some training or start writing that second chapter of "DRAGO Excuses for lazy MFs"
One last thing, during the ride I could feel that my adductor muscles were getting a bit sore, well, when I went past the finish line and stopped pedaling they stopped working, I was in agony. I went back to the car and put the helmet in the boot before heading of in an attempt to loosen them up a bit. Before I forget, the helmet was crap or at least the permanently attached visor is. Within about 30 seconds of sweating it was like riding blind, I won't use that as an excuse for going slower 'cause it didn't have that much of an impact, it was just a pain in the arse. I'll have to do some DRAGO mods to that before it gets another outing. Back to the add's, I got back form the warm down and they felt worse then they did before, I can't believe how much they hurt. I could barely move. It was awful, I couldn't move without shooting pains through my general groin area, at one point I thought I was going to have to borrow a zimmer frame from the village hall hobble to a pay phone and order a stannah stair lift to get me into the car to be able to leave. Luckily enough a dial a ride van turned up and a couple of care workers got me into the motor so I was able to get away...
No comments:
Post a Comment