Race Report

Just a quick post today. No pictures.

I had a race today. One month after I gingerly first turned a crank on the trainer and nearly 16 months since my accident.

I drove on down to the local crit racing circuit at Heffron Park. No idea what grade to ride, I decided to start in E and if that was too easy then I'd pull out and wait for the D Grade to start. Well it turned out there was no E grade so I lined up for D grade. On the line I was seeing if I could do a track stand while we were waiting to start. I could. Geez - it's just like riding a bike.

Chatted with plenty of the guys beforehand and had to laugh at Jason Roberts who, when he saw me lining up and checking out the leg, called me "f***ing hard core man". I suppose that's one version of HTFU! Jason is one of those guys that could audition for the Hulk stand in job.

Before that I did some laps of the circuit to remind myself of those familiar bumps and turns. I also surprised myself by being able to do some pedal revs while out of the saddle. It's not pretty and I'll need a fair bit of work on the technique but it's a start.

As for the race, well not all that much to report really. I lasted 5km before being dropped, simply not enough horsepower to manage the (relatively light) surges of the D grade bunch but I'm not that far off D grade standard, so I have a reasonable benchmark to work from. After that I just circulated solo for a good 45-min training effort.

I had a little trouble as the new chain I have on is showing up the state of the chainring and under load it would skip most annoyingly and when I was attempting to pedal out of the saddle over the small rises, the chain would jump - it was hard enough controlling things as it was and it took a bit of care as I was putting my spokes into one guy's dereilleur at one stage. Will need to attend to that. To be fair, I think I'm due for a new race bike, there were that many creaks and groans coming out of this one...

Here are the stats for the day:

Crit Heffron D Grade:
Duration: 47:00 (1:06:06)
Work: 552 kJ
TSS: 96.5 (intensity factor 1.11)
Norm Power: 205
VI: 1.05
Distance: 24.462 km
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 748 196 watts
Speed: 3.7 44.9 31.2 kph


Entire workout (173 watts):
Duration: 1:15:55 (2:25:26)
Work: 786 kJ
TSS: 138 (intensity factor 1.047)
Norm Power: 194
VI: 1.12
Distance: 35.626 km
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 748 173 watts
Speed: 3.6 44.9 28.3 kph


We shall see what happens next week!