Despite battling a cold, I was pretty much able to pick up where I left off a year ago in Vision Quest Coaching’s CompuTrainer Time Trial held Saturday at Vision Quest’s lovely Highland Park facility. This year, instead of hosting an entire indoor time trial series, the Vision Quest team held a one-day event that is now a part of the American Bicycle Racing’s Mid-American Time Trial Series (MATTS). The course was the challenging Cholet Time Trial course from stage 4 of the 2008 Tour de France. Even with some of the more extreme grades and abrupt changes in grade smoothed out a bit, it is still a tough course, and the format which ranks riders based on the amount of distance they can cover in 30 minutes means that instead of being rewarded for a strong performance by finishing more quickly, everyone is forced to push as hard as they can for the full 30 minutes.
Cholet CompuTrainer Course Profile Used in VQ TT
My first ride was in the Masters 40+ class, and I managed to cover 12.35 miles, good enough for the best ride of that heat, and, it turns out, good enough for the most distance covered all day. I was riding next to Mike Jones of PACT, doing his second ride of the day, who managed to step it up to 11.91 miles to capture the Open 1, 2 and 3 class and the fourth best ride of the day. My second ride was in the Masters 30+ class, and I managed to cover 12.12 miles, which was good enough to win the class and third best distance of the day.
The story of the heat was the battle I had with Dan Verner of PACT who put on a stellar performance racing in the Masters 40+ class. Dan and I were pretty much neck-and-neck throughout the first 20 minutes with him finally taking the lead for good on that climb up out of the hole at the 15K mark. To be fair, I had the advantage of knowing that I had the distance to beat for the 40+ class from my earlier ride, so I didn’t want to push Dan so hard that he ended up eclipsing my distance to win the class. He ended up with the second best ride of the day, covering 12.23 miles in 30 minutes.
It was nice to be able to place well in my first races as a member of my new team, Lamb Little Racing. Directeur Sportif Reed Oliff along with Jayson Torres and Doug Peterson all put in good performances. As usual, Doug also has an excellent write-up of the event on his blog.
For the record, during my first ride, I managed to average 378 watts, giving me 4.27 watts/kg. Now, the humbling thing is that Bob Weeks of Vision Quest had a printout showing power numbers for pro cyclist David Millar of Garmin Slipstream when he rode the actual Cholet TT to a third-place finish in 2008. Millar averaged 397 watts for an average speed of 30.5 miles per hour over the full 29.3K course. Here’s the thing: Millar only weighed 168 lbs., so his watts/kg worked out to 5.2. So, I would say I’ve still got plenty of room to improve both on the numerator and the denominator of the watts/kilogram equation.
Full results are available on the American Bicycle Racing website.
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