This was my third time lining up to race at Pigeon Lake. I’ve raced here before in 2009 [link] and in 2010 [link]. Both were fun days and big successes. I guess today’s big success was that it was probably my most run race on the course, but my success in terms of performance was pretty lacking. Aaron pulled through for the team today in Cat3 and did snag a podium spot but it was pretty much in no part due to my contributions. The group riding today was really safe and I also found people to be very respectful in their behaviour, it was a great day to be out on the road. I didn’t have to consider the risks of drafting anyone at any time, everyone was predictable and very well mannered, if you rode today and somehow you’re reading this, Thank you. To jump back in a pack the first time after the criterium on Monday where a crash sent someone to the hospital in pretty rough shape it was really great to have a positive experience, a negative one would have really dampened the love of this game.

We were treated to great weather again and the Cat3 race was set for 111kms made up of four loops of the main piece of the course plus the ride out there from the staging area and then a ride back to the uphill finish. ERTC was represented by myself, Travis, Tim and Aaron. We rolled out and Calgary cycle kept the pace rolling over for the first little bit to get everyone warmed up. I took up patrol of the front of the pack on behalf of our team first and the others tucked themselves in at the back. Our strategy was to try and go with early attacks rather than simply cover them. The idea being that we wanted to try and encourage people to race rather than just shut things down. It worked alright and I threw in a few digs to try and create little gaps in the peloton when the opportunities arose however everyone was still fresh and nothing was really going to get away. After our first ascent of the big hill I was surprised to see myself still well towards the front of the pack and there were gaps everywhere. I leapt across to Tim who was in a break with two guys from Calgary Cycle and three more joined us including Stefan. There was a bit of a pause before people wanted to commit to the group. I think that pause is probably what kills tons and tons of the potentially exciting ways that a race can play out. The same thing likely doesn’t happen in Cat1/2 because there’s a slightly more aggressive all or nothing mentality there. But, because of the hill, the initial pause didn’t kill this one. Stefan started with the shouting of motivation and encouragement and pretty quick we had the pair of Calgary Cycle guys onboard as well as myself and Tim and Stefan. Five of seven were committed and I really demonstrated my commitment for doing a huge pull on the front on the downhill in my 53×11. 53×12 actually wasn’t a tall enough gear and I thought I was spun out for a moment before I decided I’d better check just in case to see if I had one more gear. Luckily I’ve gotten in the habit of buying cassettes with an 11 tooth and was actually happy it got put to good use today.

There were three more people who bridged up to us just as we were starting to get going as it was pretty clear that a group this strong and of this size had the potential to do some damage to the peloton. I don’t really know what happened, but some people either lost interest in the break or lost the ability to keep pushing, as pretty quickly I was taking every second or every third pull through to the front. Sadly that split never worked out, it was probably one of our best chances. We eased up through the uphill headwind section and everyone got to grab some food and drink from their pockets. Just past the feed zone after we’d turned the corner, I heard some guy chatting about his dog to someone else. I wasn’t very happy about that, we’re here to race bikes I thought and decided to launch a missile. I jumped from about 12th wheel back and by the time I had hit the front of the pack I was doing 60kph. I put in a solid 1 minute of effort hoping that someone was going to come with, I paused briefly about 100m up the road giving everyone an opportunity to come across the gap but no-one even tried. I was a bit frustrated and was about to sit up and drift back. I thought to myself a bit and then decided that if I want to have a bike race then it’s important to commit to it and mean it when I go off the front. I did, and put in a solid 5 minutes going full tilt to build up a gap, I was well out of sight pretty quickly but as soon as that happened I decided I needed to start to pace this as a TT to the finish rather than just trying to put time into the pack. If I explode I just have to limp in to the finish and if I get caught then I’ll also get dropped unless I’m riding sustainably. So, I backed it off at which point things started to come down a bit but then I started to hold my gap, and it was soon pretty clear that the pack was just leaving me out to roast as they quit gaining time. I checked at the top of the hill and decided I should try and be caught before we turned into the headwind and began the next gradual ascent. If I still had a gap there I’d be wasting a ton of extra energy. Indeed, I timed it to be caught just as we rounded the corner. The pace sagged to 20kph and I threw in another attack just to make a statement, I’d rather race than not race. That attack was pulled right back but things were still pretty much shut down and I drifted to the back to eat and drink while Travis took up patrol near the front.

The easy spin was great for getting some food down but it wasn’t much of a race for a while. Travis attacked into the headwind just before the corner and no-one went with him. Again. People eventually chased him back after the feed and Tim launched a great attack just as he was caught. That got people a bit nervous (I think, or excited, both are OK) and the pace started to climb and climb. I saw Travis going backwards and knew that he was going to hurt if the pace kept ramping up, there were two short power climbs just ahead. The pace was high and it was also pretty uneven, tons of gaps forming and being crossed, I was very quickly into a world of hurt and struggled hard to maintain at least a reasonable position within the pack in case big splits began to form. Every light on the dashboard was blinking orange, but I kept going, you`re not out until you`re out I said to myself. Masa launched an attack on one climb that really got me scared, it was in a great spot and was definitely selective as the guys who could go with were already at the front because of the prior hill. I was worried we were going to miss this opportunity as a team as it had the potential to be a good one, but luckily Tim was ahead even though I had lost track of him and he made the group. I think it was someone from Calgary Cycle who pulled that one back and I was lucky enough to get a draft. The pace stayed high but was a bit less jumpy for a stretch. Somewhere in here Travis got shelled out the back. I didn’t realize until about 10kms later that he was gone, it was taking about everything I had to maintain my own situation let alone think strategically or keep tabs on other people.

Inevitably things slowed down again just in time for the headwind climb and everyone got to eat and drink again with about 30kms left to race. It was not really a good situation for ERTC at this point, no-one really had a great uphill sprint but were all pretty good on the fitness front. Almost everyone was still with the pack, even though it had been hard it hadn`t quite been hard enough to inflict damage to the numbers, just to the quality of the legs. It was in our best interest to try and keep making the race hard and so we did our best at it. There was a Bow-Cycle rider who had snuck off up the road twice now and was maintaining a pretty sizeable gap. I pitched in my efforts to tow him back by keeping the pace high, instead of trying to just do the locomotive thing I did my best to surge in response to any slowing of the peloton. I wasn’t able to open very many big gaps doing this but I always was able to create something which forced people to do a bit of work to close down. I think by this point most of the snap had disappeared out of the legs of the peloton and so those gaps weren’t really propagating through the pack and forcing everyone to work, they were being pretty evenly shut down. It meant that we were able to make some people work hard but certainly not everyone. As we climbed and then turned south again Tim and I threw in a few 1-2 punches and formed a few more gaps. I felt like here we were probably pretty successful in inflicting a bit of damage because the tailwind and the general uphill weren’t contributing as significantly to the drafting effect.

On the run-in to the final climb of the big hill I went in at about 3rd wheel but was last over the crest. I had pretty much spent everything by this point on creating a race and creating excitement. I didn’t have much for the finish but knew that we’d likely get a chance to rest up on our final visit to the headwind. I was right, but unfortunately a rest for me means a rest for everyone else.

I stuck in with the pack until we had crested the final incline about 4km out from the finish. I knew I didn’t really have anything left to sprint with, especially uphill, and so I tried to make my final bid for glory at this point, launched an attack, opened up a gap and drilled it as hard as I could. As hard as I could lasted for maybe 20 pedal strokes and I was done. Oh well, I though to myself, I gave this race everything today. I was pretty much resigned to only pulling up on my pedals by this point as my quads started to feel the onset of cramping. Cruising in from there to the finish was interesting, I moved through a few gaps, tried to watch as much as I could about navigating a sprint, trying to learn about what to do if I had been here with legs to do anything with, but really I didn’t have much of anything left to even use to pretend to attack the final rise into the finish and just stuck in with the pack to be given the same time as the leaders.

Successful day? Not really, but fun? yeah! I’m looking forward to doing some more in a few weeks. I’m noticing already that I’m getting more and more snap in my legs when I try and put in a surge than I’ve ever had before. Unfortunately that “best ever” snappy acceleration is still pretty sub-par when compared against the guys I’m racing with. I`m not mad at all about how it played out. If it were to have been easy all day and I tried to go with 10kms left then everyone else would have been fresh and probably could have pulled me back. If I had stayed fresh right until the finish I still would have lost on the sprint in to the finish. ERTC`s best strategy was to try and make the race difficult and fast, we did that, and we were rewarded by Aaron`s great performance up the hill at the end. No regrets – only lessons.

Photos thanks to Keegan Brooks
who also passed up bottles for us
the day after running 50kms.

I got in my final long run prior to the Oliver Half Ironman today. Just a bit over two hours with Travis. We were very good about keeping the pace down and I found us some good hills along the way, we mostly kept to dirt and gravel so the impact shouldn’t be too much to recover from. Actually I doubt I’ll even notice tomorrow. That’s a good sign I guess.

I parked myself in front of the computer and did some programming to extract a bit of information from my quarq files from the weekend in Saskatoon. Below are the two plots I constructed. The first is the power profile of the race and I also included the elevation profile of the route so that you can see I was putting in the surges late in the game while going up those little rises. I included three levels of smoothing which I think is quite instructive. You can notice early on in the ride that when the power goes up that all of the lines trend in the same direction. What that says to me is that I was really doling out the power with purpose early in the ride as it wasn’t fluctuating randomly. When the power is high it’s because I’m choosing to expend energy and when it dips I’m choosing to pull back a bit. Later on in the ride you see that the most sensitive power profile line gets a bit jittery. That’s indicative to me that when I was really starting to hurt I was having a hard time keeping the power consistent even though it was still pretty good, we’ll talk about the fade in a second. I think what’s happening is that because you’re accumulating such a high quantity of metabolism byproducts including the hydrogen ions from Lactic acid that your muscles are really trying to quit at every opportunity. It takes repeated reminders to pull yourself back from all sorts of tiny dips in power and get going again. Just 10 more pedal strokes later your body is trying to quit again and your power has dropped off. This is quite interesting. The consistent application of power is going to be the fastest and probably the least stressful on your body, but that’s not what the body naturally is going to do. It’s important therefore to really focus on smoothness and consistency when the wheels are starting to come off the wagon. This is something I’ll be thinking about during Tuesday Time Trials, it’s a skill that I think I can refine a bit more. Also worth noting is that I was hammering up the little rises late in the race and then suffering in between. Whether or not it’s the surges on the rise or the accumulation of the work over the whole race that causes it is something I’ll need to gather more data on before I can be sure. I believe it’s a combination, and I believe the power output on the hills is worthwhile, but I need to study the balance a bit better to learn what’s a worthwhile surge and what’s detrimental.

The second thing to look at is the power curve for the race. In a completely flat TT with no wind you’d go the fastest with a small spike in power at the beginning to get you up to speed and then completely equal power distribution. This would result in a power curve that has a pretty significant shelf in it that has a severe drop off at whichever power you maintained on average for the race. It will drop off at the duration of the race, so in my case just a bit past the 10 minute line on the graph. How far the plateau remains flat without beginning to rise as you approach shorter durations is a measure of how well you were able to avoid power spikes during the race. In a bit of a lumpy TT such as the one in Saskatoon there is going to be a bit of a rise because pacing those hills efficiently does require a surge in power output. My power profile is below and I split it into a first half power curve (in black) and a second half power curve (in blue). The total duration power curve is also shown in red.

[Thick lines are AP, thin lines are NP]

The big thing that stands out is the difference in power curves from the first and second half of the race. You can see that the black line merges with the red line pretty much for the entire duration. What this means is that I set all of those power-bests in the first half of the race and then faded off in the second half. For reference the numbers for the different portions of the race are as follows:

First half: 431 Average power – 486 Normalized power

Second half: 376 Average power – 415 Normalized power

Entire race: 402 Average power – 452 Normalized power

This means that I faded HARD. I faded off by about 14 percent in the second half. Of course it’s way better to fade than to have a ton left in the tank as you cross the finish line, but to go out as hard as I did in the first half does make you pay the price. I can’t say for sure how much faster I could have gone if I’d paced it a bit better. A few quick calculations say that I perhaps had another 10 seconds of potential over the course with the same fitness, this is presuming that what limited my performance was 100% physiological, but we know that that’s not true. I maybe had another 10 seconds of physiology and another 10 seconds on top of that of mental game I could have played and asked a bit more of myself. So yeah, I’m saying 11 minutes flat if I just gather skills and no fitness. I am also not at my physiological apex, I can get better there too!

I think one of the contributors to the fade could be that I passed all of the people that I could see on the road at about halfway. My 2 minute man was well out of my sights and so I did loose a bit of perspective on whether or not I was really going faster than other people. This is a rookie mistake, and during the race I don’t remember ever thinking about whether or not I was gaining on the people ahead of me (i.e. I wasn’t being a rookie in case that was ambiguous) until I passed them… but I must have been doing it a bit. That means I really have no idea if loosing that sense of speed affected me or not. In future during TTs that are significantly longer (i.e. 30 or 40km) I think I need to reprogram my EDGE to show me a 500m average power and a previous 500m average power. That would give me an idea how my power is trending. In shorter stuff I think the best plan is to really just go about as hard as you can go and listen to whether or not your body is trying to shut itself down. This is something to practice. The numerical feedback is interesting and good for analysis but during such an intense effort I currently find that it’s tricky to take it in and use it in the decision making process. If I glance down and see a 3 second average power of 420 watts blink at me should I be backing off? Well, probably not, that’s only 5% out and something like hitting a pothole and shifting in the saddle or shifting a gear is going to make differences like that. The kind of think I need to ensure is that I’m not recording any big dips in power below about 330 watts (in this case, the numbers would vary based on duration) and really trying to avoid spikes beyond 450 unless I’m going to put in a sustained surge at higher powers. Really it’s important that your power application is uniform enough that you’re not having detrimental consequences on your speed, meaning dropoffs where you loose a kph or two, and on the opposite end, not loading up the legs beyond the sustainable level unless there is a significant time reward for doing so.

I need more practice watching power data during intense efforts and then analysing the results afterward if it’s going to speed me up. There are things to learn from here for sure.

I chose to give myself at least 24 hours before I posted a race report from the stage race on the long weekend. I spent a lot of the weekend being really frustrated by my situation, and while I know it’s inevitable that that sentiment is going to come across in my description of the weekend I’m starting to feel like it was a good learning experience. I’m not good at being frustrated, hopefully I can get better.

Saturday evening we had an 8.2km TT along the South Saskatchewan River. It was generally flat but had a few little dips and rises along the way that did require that you had to shift gears. Total gain of 27 meters but only a net gain of 7. It required a bit of strategy regarding how you were going to distribute your power but really it was a plain and simple drag race.

I wasn’t running my absolute fastest TT setup, as I used a cosmic carbone front wheel with my disc instead of taking a tri-spoke. We were loaded to the brim in Aaron Falkenberg’s Jeep so that saved some space. Other than that it was good to finally be decked out for a TT in proper TT apparel. I’ve done 2 years of racing and never had a club skinsuit until this spring (not for my lack of interest!) and it really makes a difference. When you’re at speed it really really feels smooth, which is how it should feel when you’re going fast, it shouldn’t feel super fast with all sorts of stuff flapping in the breeze. I had TT’d my fastest 5km TT at this past week’s Tuesday workout with 392 watts and figured that a goal of sustaining 400 watts would be appropriate once I was in a good headspace and focused on really bringing out my best effort. Indeed I was able to get 400 Watts and am pretty happy with that. I did 1022 watts off the start and needed to take about 10 seconds after the first 40 seconds at about 300 watts to recover from the start. Probably a bit eager, but it did get me up to speed, and the average speed didn’t drop while gathering that recovery so it probably didn’t cost me. I caught and passed my 30 second man at about halfway and subsequently passed my 1 minute man and my 90 second man within only a short span of time. Aaron was my 2 minute man and he was well out of sight. I did have a couple power dips in the second half where I was really starting to hurt and things dropped down a bit. All in all, I paced alright with a bit of a fade but could still do in excess of 650 watts on the final rise to the finish. Afterwards I watched the clock tick by for a while as more people came though and it looked to me like they were arriving ahead of the 30 second intervals that they would need to be behind me if I were to have won. Once the result got posted my highly inaccurate estimation of time gaps was proven incorrect and I won by 13 seconds, that’s almost a full 2%, which in this game is a pretty nice margin, I didn’t expect it.

Sunday was a RoadRace that amounted to about 100kms once you tack on the neutral rollout. It was quite a ways out of Saskatoon so that we could have some hills to do battle on. Unfortunately if you go an hour of Saskatoon you’re in the absolute middle of nowhere and so we were racing laps on a dead-straight out and back, not the most enthralling scenery, and the lack of corners meant that the general flow of riders was identical for the entire race, no corners to string things out. The pavement was pretty good and the sun was out, so it was OK. I was riding my new cosmic carbones and something wasn’t correct with the free-hub or the cassette. I think I can fix it by simply adding a second spacer behind the cassette (Mavic seems to be spaced ever so slightly differently than the other stuff I have. I had a similar search for a required thicker thin spacer on my cosmic elite wheelset two years ago. It’s frustrating that I didn’t get this sorted out before the race. I had test driven those wheels quite a bit. I’d put more than 3 hours on them myself and Dave rode them for a couple hours plus the spring thaw. Now on race-day there’s a problem that arises.

The start to the roadrace was pretty mellow, big tailwind, we had a little surge a ways out from a hill and I figured I should turn the screws on people for a while and so ramped things up and rode hard all the way onto the bottom slope of the hill. As I had hoped a few skinny guys would then think this was a good opportunity to attack on the big hill and they did. It meant that the guys at the back of the pack really had to hammer to latch on again at the top and I got to climb the hill just steady as I had started first wheel. It all came back together as I think everyone knew it would but some people needed to strike a match to make it happen. I chalked that one up as a point for me.

Returning with the headwind we had some people going off the front and a couple groups did get a ways up the road but I think they knew it was still a long ways to go and weren’t really trying, there were enough people who didn’t want to see them succeed that once they got beyond the maybe 200m mark we’d have a short bout of co-operation and the breakaway would come back. It was inevitably the case that the same people always did the work to bring them back but it was distributed so manageable. We had a pair of the Manitoba espoir kids pull a dangerous stunt when they had a team-mate up the road and we were beginning to get some co-operation happening. They squirted up the shoulder and pulled out in front of everyone and then laid on the brakes. The idea was that if they could slow down the pack their buddy could gain some more advantage up the road. It was pretty much the stupidest tactic in the book, and it caused people to start crashing into eachother. A mass-pileup was only reverted by the quick reflexes of some good riders, and there was some serious yelling going on. As one of the guys who had this ‘bright idea’ was dropping back through the pack I smacked him on the hip to get his attention and gave him an earful about proper behaviour. As we continued to race I was thanked by a bunch of the other guys for saying what needed to be said. The thanks wasn’t universal as apparently there was a complaint about the incident. I was assessed an arbitrary 20 second penalty as a result of it, how they came up with 20 seconds? who knows, it was intentionally enough to get me out of sitting first place. I’ve discussed it with a bunch of other riders since then, would I do the same thing again? Well I’d definitely do the yelling. I’d actually probably even make the yelling more extensive, get across the whole message, and add some footnotes to my speech as well. I’d probably yell at the offender and then I’d make my way around the peloton and make it clear to all of their team-mates that the behaviour of their team was putting the rest of the group’s safety in jeaopardy. Retrospectively I might not make contact, although how one form of contact is different than another is pretty arbitrary, people are always pushing one another around on the hip to make their presence known in the peloton. It makes it a safer place to ride.

No-one can win a bike-race until they’re at the finishline. Until you’re at the line there needs to be a huge measure of respect for the other riders in the pack. My wellbeing and ability to get home safely the next day relies not only on my ability to handle the bike but the trust that needs to exist between me and the other riders who are on the road in front of me. After that incident all of the mutual trust in the peloton went out the window and the rest of the race wasn’t really, in my opinion, a safe place to ride. I moved up closer to the front, figured it was worth a bit more effort, and stayed out of danger.

After about 30kms it felt like perhaps the cassette was getting loose as a result of the missing spacer. It was making more of a rattling sound and I had a couple of mis-shifts. I didn’t want to risk damaging the new wheels, or the derailleur, or the bike-frame, or myself if I crashed out as a result of something going bad so I decided to stop at the next turn-around because I knew the wheelcar would be readily available in that situation and make the swap. I made the swap really quickly and was back on my bike in perhaps 25 seconds, but then the chain had dropped and it took a bit of jimmying to get it back on. Once back rolling I saw that Aaron had dropped off the peloton to help me get back on. I think it would have been good to work together if it had only been those 25 seconds but because of the dropped chain it took longer than it should have and I timed my first gap up to the peloton to be 57 seconds. That’s a lot. I sort-of wished that Aaron had stayed in with the pack, because now there was no guarantee that we’d be able to get back on at all. I caught Aaron and took a draft behind him but when I pulled around he must have really been going hard, because he popped off the back. A split second decision – I had to keep going – unfortunately I could go faster alone. Aaron knew this was the right decision, if I couldn’t get back on we’d end up riding together into the finish anyways, but at least this way I was going to give it a shot.

I averaged 44.08 kph on a generally net uphill length of the course with a bit of a tailwind and caught the peloton just as they were turning into the headwind. It was about everything I had. I got back on and was greeted by Mark, said he was glad I was back. I got some gel in me and drank up most of my gatorade. It took maybe 5 minutes of riding last wheel in the peloton to get recovered but after that I was alright. The attacks kept going off the front instigated by Manitoba/Wookcock who made up a little less than half of the peloton. No-one really wanted to, or could, or knew how to, (or some combination of all three) co-operate in the peloton. I think they were all scared that someone would pull another stupid stunt on the front and this time someone would actually hit the pavement. I worked relatively hard on the last long stretch into the headwind covering little attacks but no-one really tried hard enough to make something stick.

We turned with a tailwind for the last half-lap of the course and a couple guys went up the road, a cycledelia dude and Bill from Roadworks. It wasn’t really going to last and we all knew it so I was riding on the front. There was another fake attack to try and get some people to make an acceleration but it ended quickly and things stacked up again quickly. I had my hand out again to prevent the rider in front of my from coming across my line and then felt a wheel in-between my foot and the chainstay of my bike. No-wheel belongs there and things turned out poorly. A couple guys hit the deck, one of whom hopped up and got back on, the other got some road-rash and a DNF but as I understand it was alright.

We finished up in a bunch-sprint, just like we all knew was pretty inevitable. I took fifth, although at the time I figured I was probably 7th or 8th. The guy who won the 15 second bonus for first place also had crossed the center line so he got a 1 minute penalty as a result and was knocked well down the GC. I was now ranked second 7 seconds back.

Monday we awoke to wet patches on the road, very cool temperatures and drizzle. I was alright with cooler temperatures but I hoped that the road would be dried up in time for our race. Aaron and I went and rode a half-hour warm up and got to the start line ready to go… only to find that the race was running well behind schedule because they had needed to tow a few parked cars off the course before they could start the first race. So, we parked ourselves in Subway and tried to keep warm which was relatively successful. The wind was blowing, it was misting rather than raining, and the temperature was about 5 or 6 degrees C. The ladies finished up and our race start finally came, off the start one of the guys from the big team went hard. I expected it, but I didn’t expect everyone else to soft-pedal the first 100m. I arrived at the first corner in second place, first of the chasers and figured I could throw in a few laps of the chase to get going, it would at least let me do the corners at race pace without someone ahead of me for the first while. After the first lap Mark went by on the back straight obviously intending to try and bridge and crashed out in the third corner. It was just an indication of things to come. The first corner was wide and although being a bit dusty it wasn’t slick with rain because of a huge tree. The second corner had fair pavement but was a wide-road to narrow-road corner. The same thing following a stretch of good pavement with a tailwind at corner three (wide to narrow) but this one had a big lump in the pavement right on the race-line. Corner four was pretty wide but it was riddled with potholes and patched pavement. Bad news especially when wet.

I was making time back on the solo-break by just riding tempo and no-one seemed to want to come around me. When they did, they did a contribution of one or two corners and then indicated that someone else should take over. I was safer on the front and so went back up there and figured if I pulled in the break solo without using much energy then I could really go hard once he was caught and try to solo away for the win. My plan had been to go off the front in the first third of the race, now it looked like I was resigning to the last third. With someone up the road who I could see wasn’t doing the corners as fast as I could, I didn’t really want to bridge up. I’d rather just catch first, and then go solo, or have either Daniel from Lifesport or Mark MacDonald come with me. Both of them seemed to be riding well. A couple laps after Mark went down and had got back on I was again leading the chase through corner three and there was a huge crash behind me. I was cutting across right next to the bad pothole but if you were a little sloppy with your line it would have been easy to hit. Bill from Roadworks had gone down along with 4 other people according to reports. Aaron was one of them as well. That was the lap that I caught the break, and I was alone, I knew other people were getting on so I let up a bit and the gap formed again slightly. The next lap there were about 6 guys who all got back on after taking a freebie. I don’t know if they all hit the deck of if they just claimed to take the free lap because they were ‘involved’, either way, we had lapped out a huge portion of the field or they had crashed and pulled out, it was down to something like 8 people remaining. I believe there was also a crash on corner 4 at some point but I don’t really know when it happened, or who it happened to. As we rode it became apparent that the big pileup in corner 3 had involved a pretty serious injury for Bill because he was being attended to by the medics but they weren’t going to remove him from the road. They did take him to the hospital on a spine-board as a precautionary measure but the reports later that afternoon were that he is OK, I haven’t had an update since. I was leading the big group and began to indicate as we approached that corner that we needed to slow down. The race kind-of fizzled out from there. We did some racing on the other three corners but it wasn’t really possible to agree on the same amount of “neutral” when we went around corner three. The remaining riders all agreed to stop and tell the commissaire that we couldn’t keep racing until the course was clear. So we pulled up and the proposal given was to vote on whether or not to cancel the rest of the stage. Of the remaining six, five voted to call it quits, I eventually added my vote to make it unanimous. Frustrating. I had ridden 20 minutes of tempo and didn’t get the opportunity to go for the win.

So, I take away some experience from racing the crit, it was a good exercise in reassessing a strategy on the fly. I also got in a good workout at the road-race because of my huge effort to get back on. I also learned why it’s important to have team-mates, especially when you’re leading the general classification, it takes a ton of work to shut down tiny little attacks. I probably would have tried to solo away from the pack in the second half of the race instead of sticking in the group if I hadn’t needed to catch back on after the wheel change. That cost me energy, but not unimportantly it cost me all of my drinks. I also learned that we’ve got it really really good in the Alberta racing scene. I know that sometimes we say that the commissaires are too picky. Well, in spite of the fact that I got an arguable penalty they could stand to be a bit pickier out in Saskatoon. Stuff like racing with random jerseys & not representing which club you’re a part of, and showing up without your race numbers to the start of the race. That stuff doesn’t fly in Alberta and I think we can be grateful for it. We also have volunteers who drive the wheel cars out here who can help you draft back onto the peloton after a mechanical, driving a car to safely draft is a skill and I’m glad that we have people with that skill in our cycling community! We also have the massive benefit of having pretty big fields to race against. The lack of group riding skills in the peloton this weekend is partly to blame on the individuals and their coaches for not having learned or taught them… but it’s partly not their fault. Unless you race regularly in a pack of 30, 40 or even 50 or 60 riders (like we’ll have this weekend at Pigeon) it’s basically impossible to learn good etiquette and safe behaviour in the peloton. If your experience in racing is small groups you really lack the understanding of how a pack that is way larger moves down the road. It’s a lot different.

I’d raced the Spring Thaw Triathlon at the University of Alberta 4 times before and been the Race Director once. I’ve improved every single time I took on the course, and 2011 was my best effort here both in terms of physical preparation as well as strategic and mental preparation. I did few things wrong on race-day and made a bunch of good decisions that helped with my result. I’m really really happy with my execution of the race, and even though it wasn’t perfect, it was about as close as I think I could get to doing so. So, the fact that I won is great, but it took everything I had to do it. I may be showing a chink in my armour by writing about it now and publishing it on the internet for all my competition to read (because I have no doubt that Dave will be reading this each night before he goes to bed to take me down next time we go head to head!)… but so be it. I was very close to perfect execution at the Great White North Triathlon in 2010 as well, that day panned out also very well and I thought a lot about that day while detailing my plans for this race.

The Spring Thaw is a 750m pool swim in a 25m pool, heats go with 4 or 5 people per lane, this is followed by a 20km very challenging bike course with some sections of poor pavement, 4 ascents of Emily Murphy Hill which tops out at 9.7% grade (and takes about 1 minute to climb full gas), and has you navigate more corners during those 20kms than the average sprint triathlon, the run that follows is pretty straightforward and includes no hills but has a few sections of false flat. It’s an out and back where you should be able to see your competition once at halfway. This was altered on race morning due to a breakdown in communication and an underslept race-director adding an additional small out and back section meaning you’d see all your competition once and your closest competition three times.

My good decisions began when I decided to call up Campus recreation and revise my projected swim time. I had quoted 12:30 when I registered which was an accurate projection of how fast I should have swum to pace the race correctly. I then heard via the grapevine that there were some ex-varsity swimmers registering for the race which would mean that the final heat in the pool would be filling up. I wanted to race head to head against the competition and not start in an earlier and slower seeded heat, so I revised my projected swim time to be inside 12 minutes, and quoted 11:50. I theoretically could swim 11:50 and so it wasn’t technically a lie, on the other hand I shouldn’t swim 11:50 if I had hope of riding and running well. That decision mattered, because when the heats were published it was only people who had projected to swim less than 12 minutes who got into the last heat. Everyone at 12min and more was in an earlier heat and therefore wouldn’t be racing head to head, it’s not that they couldn’t win, but it would be impossible to ‘race’ other heats.

Race Sim Powercurve

My next set of good decisions began with a focused race week. After a very disappointing finale to my marathon buildup this spring [I wrote about that here] I decided that I needed a redemption performance ASAP. If I had raced well at the marathon this triathlon was going to be fun, I’d race my best but I wasn’t going to go out of my way to sharpen up for it. Instead of training through it, I felt like I needed to show myself that I was capable of good execution and strong mental racing skills. So race-week workouts were done with this in mind, meaning I didn’t go and ride 500kms, I didn’t skip all the swims to be outside in the first nice weather of the year, and I didn’t try to push my run volume back up above 30 miles per week in preparation for the Oliver Half Ironman. I swam long the previous Saturday, swam Monday and ran short, ran and swam Tuesday, did a race-effort 15min (powercurves at right) with some transition practice on the bike to ingrain the pacing strategy for the big hill in my mind and muscles, and then ran and swam Thursday with a rest-up on Friday. While nothing impressive, that’s more swim frequency than I’ve done since before Ironman, I was committed to getting the feeling of being a swimmer back in my arms. I was successful with that.

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Ready to Rock

Race morning I had one goal in mind which was to stay calm. This was all I focused on at GWN2010 on race morning and it really helped. I arrived early to get a good spot in Transition, kept the headphones on to keep distractions at bay (which was more a sign to other people that I didn’t want their distraction than for the music) and once things were set up I tried to stay away from big groups of stressed out triathletes. I parked myself in the stands at the pool and tried to be calm. When I heard that the run-course had been changed on a whim on race-morning I was pretty frustrated, as I had personally invested about 3 hours in accurately measuring a run course for the race to be exactly 5.00kms and there was no reason for it to be changed on race-day. Instead of trying to fix it I just watched the giro broadcast online with Travis. I was pretty sure I could run 5.8kms at the same pace as I could run 5.0kms so it didn’t really matter.

No warm-up swim. This might not always be the best idea but for now, I think this is my best strategy. Getting into the pool and swimming around to get warmed up just gets me thinking too much about doing this and doing that. If I just start swimming and focus on getting the pace to match the kind of breathing rate I want I find that I can manage better than if I am thinking about stroke mechanics. A warm-up swim is just going to get me thinking about stroke mechanics, so I sat on deck while 100% of the other athletes in the final heat (who had all quoted swim times faster than me!) were doing their warmup swims. I visualized T1 instead and did some shoulder circles and kept my HR down. Exactly like GWN, I just waited on the sidelines until I had to go and get ready, when I did jump in the pool I was calm and ready.

The swim is my weak-leg in Triathlon and so I really wanted to cut my losses. I needed to swim my best in this race if I wanted to be in with a shot at running near the front of the race on the run. I had swum with 2 of the 3 other guys in my lane frequently this past winter and I knew they were strong, I also knew they were going to go HARD off the start. So, if I wanted to catch their drafts I also needed to go hard off the start. I did. It took Travis a full 100m to catch Rob’s draft after the 5 second staggered start. It took me another lap to catch on to Travis which was like bridging about 8 seconds up to Rob considering I was still 2 bodies back. By the time we were at 200m Rob had really detonated and let Travis and I past and he tacked on to the draft train at the back. Brian, who was leading our lane went even harder out of the start and we missed catching his feet for the swim. I followed Travis for 150 more meters and recovered as best as I could from our crazy fast start at which point Travis was starting to fade and I gave his feet a tap and he moved over. I made sure that he and Rob were going to catch on to my feet for the draft for the rest of the swim and went hard for the final 400m to finish it up. They’d helped with the fast start and so I felt like I should contribute back by making sure they’d have a draft to finish off well. I maintained breathing every stroke for the final 400 which means I’m going hard. I maintained the gap to Brian up at the front of the lane until 650m and then even pulled it in a bit on the last 100 such that in the end I actually outsplit him as well. It was about as fast a 750m as I think I’m capable of and I hopped out for a 12:01 time. That’s equivalent to 1:28 per 100yds, which I’d be hard pressed to pull off in a set of 100s in the pool during practice! There were 25 people in the last swim heat and I swam the 22nd fastest swim of the day with one person from the second fastest heat swimming faster than me, that meant I was the 5th last person out of the pool… so my significant planned underestimate of my time to try and get me into the final heat of the day was not a strategy that I employed all by myself, there were other people out of their league as well!

T1 was fast. Helmet, racebelt, go!

I saw Dave in T1 and was on the bike ahead of him. I caught a couple people right away, I caught a group of the varsity swimmers pretty quickly and I caught Mike Downey on my ascent of Emily Murphy hill the first time. Retrospectively I think he was in the lead of the race at that point. I’m not sure if he realized that. After that I had a few people to pass here and there but for the most part I didn’t have to lap much of the field while on the bike so traffic was never crazy.

Race Powercurve

That description of the bike leg is purely from the outside. On the inside I was hurting. If I were to have swum that hard for a 750m TT in swim practice I would have crawled out of the pool and lay on my back on the deck for at least 10 minutes. I might have eventually recruited the energy to flop back into the pool and do a couple laps to cool down to prevent my body from seizing up into one big cramp but I wouldn’t have been able to do any more of a workout. Instead of laying on the pool deck I transitioned into the bike leg. Needless to say I was a bit lacking on power. The power curve way up above is from the little pre-race workout I did on Wednesday on the course. I had an Average power of 358Watts & a Normalized power of 445Watts for 16 minutes or so. It felt controlled and reasonable for race-day. Instead my race-day performance was 311Watts Average power and 399Watts Normalized power. About a 10-13% slump from where it should have been depending on how you look at it. It was partly that I couldn’t bike as hard as I thought I should have, but partly I made a decision that I needed to be able to run. It was a wise decision and I’m proud of myself for deciding not to bury the hatchet before T2. I rode strong, strategically used my effort where I needed to, and did my best to arrive into T2 in less debt than I had arrived in T1. I still netted the fastest T1+Bike+T2 split of the day. It was also a course record, it was strategically suboptimal and I was OK with that. Exactly like Great White North, strategically slower than my best, and arriving at T2 ready for a footrace.

I wanted to be able to run with the freedom to choose my pace based on what felt right and so elected to go without a watch, I didn’t want feedback I wanted to run fast.

Leaving T2 I felt good for 400m and felt rough for about 800. The first out and back came at this point and I saw Dave behind me, I had no watch and didn’t bother to try and figure out any split. I knew that if he was going to catch me it couldn’t be until the second half of the run. I lost a fair amount of time through that rocky section but focused on my footstrike and my breathing for another kilometer and my legs started to improve. I then turned into the headwind and I really picked up my focus. I am good at running into a headwind. Whether or not anyone can quantify that… hmm… I don’t know. I always mentally decide that it’s advantageous to be running with a headwind when you’re a heavy guy as it can’t blow me around as much. In any case, I felt good for a fast kilometer into the wind. Then the turnaroud. I got to see Dave again, he had gained on me but not by much, if he was going to catch me it would be less than a kilometer from the finish. I was now running with the tailwind and felt good. I think I’m also a good tailwind runner, I’m like a sail. I guess I should always race on windy days, I’m mentally strong in those conditions. Things ticked by and I realized I was within 10 minutes of the finish. I can do anything for 10 minutes I told myself. Just like GWN I had paced the run so that I felt amazing with about 1/3 of the run leg remaining and then really let loose. Then with a kilometer to go I told myself it was only a kilometer. I can do anything for a kilometer, I hadn’t checked over my shoulder all race and if Dave suddenly appeared he wouldn’t have had a chance to pass me. I was ready to go for the finish at a moments notice, I had my running legs now. I refused to check back and see where he was, if he saw me look he’d have hope and I wasn’t going to give it to him. The final little out and back and I could finally have a look. He wasn’t nearly as close as I thought. Just run I told myself and so I did. There were a few cheers as I came around the side of the building and I was feeling awesome. The lap on the track at the end was really great and it felt totally fantastic to wrap it up like that. Every race should end with a lap on a track, it’s a great feeling. Lets take some notes from Paris-Roubaix and the Olympic Marathon.

Mens Sprint Podium – a UofA Triathlon Club clean sweep!

Swim:	22nd Overall 12:01 1:36/100m
T1 + Bike + T2:	1st Overall 32:16 37.2kph
Run:	9th Overall 23:43 4:05/km
1:08:00

Race weight is what the scale shows me on race day.

-Vince Matteo

April 10, 2011
The first indication that I
should have been focusing
harder on recovery:
A failed long-run a few
days after I started to
be strict instead of smart
with diet choices

Trying to cut weight in the final three weeks before a marathon may help on paper but it doesn’t help in real life unless you can do so without getting sick on the run leading up to the race. I wanted to get light and fast, every pound lighter you are for race day is a pound you don’t have to carry along the course for three hours. Every pound you loose should amount to 2 seconds per mile or there-about. If you loose 4 pounds you could speed up by almost four minutes over a marathon. I had put in some hard work and wanted to get everything out of it. I was greedy and I wanted those extra minutes of free speed and I did what it said it took on paper to get them. Realistically I had shattered my own personal records for maximal training loads and I needed to recover 10% harder than I had ever recovered before, which meant I needed 101% of my regular food intake. Trying to eat 99% of my regular food intake was too hard on my body, it collapsed and failed under the training stress I had subjected it to. A PR 10 miler the weekend after a 17 mile detonation run (stats pictured) puts your body in the hurt box. I needed to give it everything it wanted if I wanted it to give me a fast race on May 1. Instead I kept asking for a little bit more every day, I asked it to cut fat while it was trying to recover. I wasn’t asking a lot, I cut three pounds in two weeks and then got sick. Three pounds is all? Yeah, I think those three pounds cost me the race. I went from lean to skinny over the course of about 18 days, you probably didn’t see me with my shirt off, but I did, 3 pounds out of 195 is a dramatic change. I watched it happen, I thought I was getting fast, instead I was punching my immune system in the face. Losing those three pounds of fat was roughly 20% of my fat reserves. That’s a dramatic change, even more dramatic than stringing together a PR 107km run week from a previous PR of 91km, that was only 17.5% larger and I knew that was risky.