revchuck 

Well, the year has started. The first race of the season was a 20km TT and a crit in Monroe, done the same day. This is an edited version of what I sent my coach:

"Murphy came along this weekend. My planned 12-1 departure time ended up being 4. No time for a course recon. Got to the motel about 8, in bed about 9. Awakened about 3:30 by the couple in the next room going at it with great enthusiasm. Got back to sleep about 4, alarm went off at five and I did NOT want to get out of bed.

Got to the venue, got my number and warmed up. Got in the start line, decided I had time to spin a bit more, came back to the line to hear the guy two spots behind me start...so I started with 2:30 already on the clock. Lesson learned.

The first few minutes went okay. Then the pavement got bad, then worse, and I had a hard time maintaining power, partly because I was busy looking for a slightly better path and partly because I was getting bounced off the seat. I ended up with a death grip on the extensions just to keep my position. I let off on the pedals too soon at the turnaround and wasn't able to up my power as planned. There's a gap in power towards the end of the ride; that's where I hit the 1 km marker and shifted up only to have my chain drop from the big ring to the small. Apparently I had nudged the left shift lever a bit or it had vibrated down due to the bumps, just had to bring the lever up again.

Speaking with some of the other 55+ guys, heard at least one of them say they had the same issue with maintaining power over the rough pavement. Another said it was the worst pavement for a TT he'd done, and he'd done a lot of them. And to add to the matter, when I got home I found the front tire on the TT bike was flat. Of course it's a tubular. I'll look at it today and see what the cause was. (Turned out it was rock shard that I had hit just right. That Effeto Mariposa Espresso stuff fixed it.)

I warmed up for the crit and felt okay. This was my first "big boy" crit, M40+/M55+ combined. I think there was one other guy my age or so, the rest were 40+, total of seven. It had been raining a good bit, but had stopped, so the road was wet. At the start, the younger guys floored it - I supposedly got up to 26.5 mph and my guess is that they were over 30, and that was going into a wet first turn. The other 55+ guy and I settled in together for the first four laps or so, then he pulled away, and I ended up solo for the rest of the crit. I ended up practicing cornering in the wet, which actually wasn't as slippery as I'd feared. I got lapped by the younger guys about 1/2 - 2/3 of the way through. My legs just weren't responding. When I looked at the speed and the average power, it seems like it was more power than it should've taken."

The official results didn't get posted on line until yesterday, and I saw that the younger guys in the crit were 2s and 3s doing their second crit of the day. I have 12 years on the oldest of them, 21 on the youngest. That knowledge took some of the edge off the drubbing I got. It was also my first race in the wet, and I was surprised that a clean wet road didn't give up that much in traction...either that or I'm cornering too slowly. As for the TT, I got creamed by the four other 55+ guys - the guy in fourth place was almost four minutes faster than my time with the 2:30 screw-up taken out. (That fourth place guy was also the only other 55+ racer in the crit.) I obviously have a lot to learn there.

So, the first race is done. Two more this month!

ETA: I would've had better results racing as a Cat 4.