At Thursday’s final HorseTooth time trial I noticed that I was self-selecting cadence a bit lower than was really ideal, especially on climbs. I found that every time I thought about it I was realizing I needed to shift, after noticing a few times I ended up really focussing on optimizing cadence through the closing stages of the TT. The result was fine, when focussed on the issue it wasn’t causing a problem. I even took the win.
Saturday I joined up with a number of others from along the front range for the ButterGold ride, a fun but at the same time relatively serious 80 mile, largely gravel group ride. I really felt like I was being pushed uncomfortably hard on the climbs just to keep up and for much of the final 25 miles, I opted to largely draft and sit in to make sure I wasn’t going to be dropped. When the hammers started swinging in the finale I had plenty of fitness left to play with though. Not exactly what I had anticipated, I was feeling stretched and barely able to keep up, when things got spicy, I found I had a much large than expected capacity to raise my game.
Sunday I was in a world of hurt, 80 miles the day prior took more out of me than I expected that it should have and so I decided to grab the power files and investigate. Did Thursday’s observation have much of anything to do with why I felt so lousy climbing on Saturday? Or am I just too heavy?
Generally energy supply is good, it has to be good as I was able to do threshold watts for 10 minutes after 4 hours riding and subsequently go highly anaerobic for 3 minutes. The
