Sunday, January 14, 2007

Dan's Macabre Ride

Today we had the pleasure of riding in 70 degree weather in January. It was cloudy and no wind which made for a nice, fast ride. I had not been on a ride this long, going this fast, in a long time. After 1 hour we were at 21 mph and ended up at 20.5 mph for the whole 2:46 hours. A lot of guys pulled for most of the ride like Dan, Jeff (F1), Theron and Marshall. I was concerned with finishing and only did one pull the entire ride which I am not proud of.

We had a really nice group today of experienced riders/racers who are aspiring to lead the GTC racing team to a lot of great placings this spring. Most of the ride was a nice, packed group, doing the work needed to go fast and have fun.

The main highlights for me are the Lawerence Road mile long stretch of dirt which is full of pot holes and nasty ruts, turns and climbs. On the way out it is a lung buster and on the way back it is the perfect, sick lead up to the county line sprint on pavement about 500 meters past the end of the dirt. Nasty. The other highlights are the short, steep paved climb of Hickory Grove Church and of course the long broken climb of Jack Pittman.

Going up Jack Pittman we rode easy and no one attacked to the top so we averaged 306w for the climb and hit 582w max in some steep section. For the dirt road sprint, Jeff (F1) and I went for it and averaged 620w for the 15 seconds and 888w for the sprint at the end. For the county line sprint that no one went for but me (I get the dork award), I averaged 864w for the 15 seconds and 1133w for the sprint max. Any of the folks who did not sprint would have smoked me if they had gone for it so I am not too proud of those numbers, although for me they are not too bad.

My legs were really dead by the end and I ended up doing about everything but ride easy. I spent 20% of the ride between 0 and 20watts and I averaged 218w for the entire ride. In terms of training zones, I spent 70 minutes in recovery (<156w), 22 inutes Easy ( 157-212w), 17 minutes Light (tempo-213-254w), 17 minutes Middle (sub-threshold-255-296w), 14 minutes High (297-338w), and a whopping 24 minutes in Sub-max (<339)!.

This is way too hard for me in January but sometimes you have to see where you fall and how you will respond to a hard, fast ride. I am tired but feel that I kept up and happy I did not get dropped.

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