Sunday, May 13, 2007

Ronde Van d'Appalachee

The GTC version of the Tour of Flanders is a fun, hard ride. It has sections of dirt road and steep climbs as well as 3 sprints along the way. For me, all of the sprints are hard. The first is a steep wall on a road called Harmony Grove. It is short and the tough part is that you turn left onto it from a gravel road and a stop sign so momentum is lost. I suck on this sprint because I can't climb. My average wattage up the climb yesterday was 386W and my max was 585W. It took about 50 seconds.
The second sprint occurs at the top of a ~1 km hill on Jack Pittman St. It used to be broken up tarmac but now is paved and easier than back then. It has two pitches that get pretty steep and I always peeter out near the top and end up losing places in the sprint. But, this time no one cared to sprint so I went up solo and got the mercy win. It took me 3 minutes to do and I averaged 376W and 647W maximum.
The last sprint is at the top of a really steep hill on Brooks Rd. It comes after a long paved downhill and a right turn where you lose your momentum. The hill starts out pretty easy and then gets very steep for about 20 seconds but then you still have 400m or so to the sprint. In the past, many guys have gone a bloc on the hill only to die at the top. I did not try for this one because i had just done a big pull to get someone else caught back up to a solo break. But for about 45 seconds or so i hit it hard and managed to do 411W average which is no big deal.

We did do a little attack on a long hill on Indian Shoals Rd and that was tough. The initial pop was 1047W on the hill and then sustained for about 23 seconds or so was 750W. After that I did a nice bridge to the solo leader (I mentioned before) at 300W foir about 5 minutes until we caught him.
I had been sick for about 12 days on and off so it was encouraging to see I could do little efforts with some power. I did manage to sit in 20% of the ride which was beneficial.

Next week is the GTC club championship and I will have a detailed breakdown for the race and where/how I got dropped.

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