Mixed bag of five days on the bike

Nice stretch of five days on the bike for me.

Wednesday was track class when we had 15 or so newbies come out for a go on the fixies. Everyone seemed to have a good time and we ended the evening with some mock racing which gave me a chance to stretch the legs ahead of the racing to come.

Of course, I let the newbies win......;).

Thursday night was pursuit night. 2K for juniors and old farts, and 3K for everone else. The 3K pursuit represented 11 laps of the velodrome from a standing start. Though two started at the same time on opposite sides of the track, this race is really run as a TT against the clock with the fastest time within each category winning.

The sun was out, but so was the wind which manifest as a blistering face-squisher down the front straight. Consequently, times were a bit on the slow side overall.

With a couple of weeks of PIR racing in my legs I elected to run a 90 inch gear (50/15 for those who care) and try and spin the crap out of it for as long as possible. It felt pretty comfortable and I made most of my splits and finished in 4m 26s, almost identical to last years time for the same day.

Tom ran an excellent and well-paced 3m 13s for the 2K pursuit (7 laps).

Not very aero 3K TT position  (courtesy of Charlie Warner)

Friday was the first Fast Twitch Friday for the year. It was flying 200m night. This is when everyone runs one flying 200s to set times for seeding the match sprint pairing. On subsequent Fridays, 4 riders are grouped together based on their seeding time set on this night for paired match sprinting for the rest of the season.

For the flying 200, you have three laps to get up to speed and get high on the banking in preparation for a 'flying' maximum-speed dive to the 200m line. Only the final 200m is timed. The goal is to get a blistering pace going for that 200m mark when the clock starts, and hold it as long as humanly possible.

Like a nasty blender accident, it is violent churning of assault with legs and vision ablur.

A cacophany of sanctioned violence, if you like.

Feeling strong-ish, I ran the 94 in gear (49/14) and clocked an initial effort at 13.44s which represented an average cadence of 118 in that gear. Later in the season I should be able to spin that gear about 10-20% faster if all goes well. I then backed it up with a second effort that experimented with line and timing of the jump at 13.45s. These times were faster than this time last year and about half a second off all time best at this track.

This means that I am pretty much on target with training despite the three month break. Sweet!

Saturday brought a track workout in the sunshine with the Sizzle Pie crew and, on Sunday, a 2h recovery ride with Tom on the SS. We looped out to Tile Flat Road in Wash Co.

Recovery ride 13-year-old style

A stop at DQ highlighted the 'recovery' nature of the ride.

Nice mix of easy, intense, super intense and easy road and track riding in the Oregon sun.