It depends. I wouldn't do it if it's super-hard the whole time and you're going to be drained at the end, i.e. if it's a race-effort ride. If it's a moderate pace with a few short climbs, that's probably okay. But the safest thing is to do your own solo ride to get the work in. Keep in mind that any training you do now isn't going to make you faster on Sunday! It may not slow you down, if you do it right, so it's a good idea to get some work in to keep training for the next race, but it's not going to help you three days from now.

This is how things tend to go for me, as well. Many of my best results have come after a truly terrible ride the day before.

Yawning during the ride despite having a good nights sleep, being about 20 watts under your expectations for me are sure signs of overtraining. HR is too hard to tell.

A+ event (Tulsa) starts in 9 days. Past 8 days, 940 TSS in 18 hours. I kind of feel like I'm cramming for a test.

Good luck.

One thing I've noticed in the past few days is that my HR has been at around 171 that seemed to be around threshold and 174 when I was working on climbs, whereas for a long time it seemed that 160ish was my threshold area and 165 would be my VO2max area of perceived exertion. Not sure if I just have an elevated HR after racing this past weekend or if it's indicative of any type of physiological change.

Yeowch

hubcyclist, honestly you are so new to racing that it as likely to be development in your ability to use RPE as anything else. Your body may be realizing that it can go harder than it thought it could. HR is variable to begin with, and your assessment of when you are at threshold vs. VO2 Max is frankly probably not all that reliable right now.

Yeah, definitely won't help me that quickly, more of an area of need that I probably should been working on prior to now lol

Purgatory is a hard race. It's also the state championships, which makes it harder still. I'd err on the side of control (ride alone) and rest.

I always struggle with 1/2/3 races after the racing a three race, and find 1/2/3 races much more fun, so for crits is been only doing the big boy race. I'd do 3's afterwards though, is still be able to sit in and sprint and get a top five or something like that.

There are a handful of events out here that have the P12s right around noon (Davis 4th of July Crit and Lodi Cyclefest in particular) . That seems to link up well with the "fans" and it is probably a nice change for the P12 guys not having to race at the end of day on Sunday.

i did a hill workout today, not that i'm the gold standard for how to train. but yeah, backing up when cdr said, usually 3 days out (especially for one day races) is fine.

whatever you do will not change your fitness that much, but total effort duration in the 10-15 min range won't hurt. Purgatory is the race course as the MIT road race, which, iirc, has a 5-min long hill. Two to three efforts at what you think the race pace would be (probably VO2max in nature) should suffice. If you want to make it harder, stay above Z2 during recovery between the on portions. personally i would stay away from club rides as you accumulate too much fatigue from junk miles.

As @carpediemracing said, take off Friday, openers saturday, and go race on Sunday. Good luck!

if it takes 5 minutes to get up the hill at purgatory you're so far off the back it won't matter.

I would agree with this. It's better to be too fresh than under rested.

I did a group ride with GC and his team yesterday and mein fuher let me turn the volume knob up to ~8 out of 11, so I got to ride like a buffoon for a bit which was fun since I don't get to do that sort of stuff too often. ~155tss.

Today is recovery, tomorrow is easy, Sat is openers, yadda yadda.

I wouldn't race. But hey go for it and let us know how it goes.

When you took off after the gravelly hairpin Newman said "gosh I sure miss riding with TKP." :)

Seriously though, fun riding with you, thanks for coming out. It's not really a team ride, that's more the Saturday AM vibe. The Wednesday night crowd is more of a friendly see-the-sights thing, mixed bag, some racers, some fitness-riders, some barely-hanging-on-ers. I didn't even know everybody who was there. Cool that you know RW, that kid somehow manages to always be strong despite hardly ever riding (unlike our sprinter dude who has ridden about 4 times this year and blew himself up completely last night).

Yea thanks for putting up with me there. I'll try to get out to it more, but it doesn't mesh with the training schedule as often as I'd like. I miss doing it every week, that and the tuesday night TTs on springtown were my training staples in college.

TKP - not on Strava? How do you prove to the internet that you actually went for a ride?

I don't even have an instagram, I basically don't exist.

Went with the morning group ride. Felt good, pretty fast pace, PRd a couple segments, worked in rotation, closed the gap and led out the sprint when the field let a couple guys escape with a minute to go. Flatted on the 5' KOM climb, but felt good/hanging on near the front. Looks like I'll be racing this weekend!

Oh god, I'm going to zwift.

I did an hour earlier... press your down arrow key and you can reverse direction.. kinda cool.. Hill repeats :)

yay