Double header race weekend!
South Australian State Masters Time Trial Championship 2017
On Saturday we had the South Australian State Masters Time Trial Championship, returning to Langhorne Creek. The course is a generally flat, out and back course, with the occasional slight rise to put a bit pain into the quads. Once again I had a bit of trouble with the scrutineers and my bike, but once they worked out they were using their jig wrong my bike passed.
My PB was set on a road bike with TT extensions two years ago, so I was interested to see if my performance had improved, and/or whether riding on a proper TT bike would help me at all. Also adding to the mix was the use of my new power meter. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I really had enough data leading up the event to really use that effectively. I basically had a rough idea of a target power, but whether that was reasonable target was a bit of an unknown.
Anyway, I was out of the blocks and on my way. Out leg was fairly quick, I suspect due to a bit of a tailwind. My time check at 5km showed i was on target for a PB. At the turn around point after 10 km I seemed to still be on target. Sweet!
The return leg was a bit of a struggle, probably owing to it being ever so slightly uphill, plus a bit of a headwind. That said, I tried to maintain power within the range I had targeted. This seemed to work as good motivation!
In the end, I managed to do my fastest ever time trail, at an average of 36.7 km/h, beating my State Masters PB by about a minute (previous PB was also on a slightly shorter course too!
) Really happy with that. Not fast enough to get a medal, but really happy with how I went. I also got a heap of good power balance data from the Vectors. I might be on the lookout for a second disc wheel and maybe a cheap TT helmet in the near future.. I'm slowly getting to like this whole time trial thing..
https://www.strava.com/activities/1018424297
18920711_10154794267753823_529644437804155113_n_0800.jpg
Fox Creek Duathlon
This was a trail running/MTB event that Miss V had done the last couple of years and really enjoyed. So when a mate asked if I wanted to do the bike leg for him, I couldn't help but want to give it a go. We signed up for the Short course event under the team name "No Hope". Even so, we went in feeling fairly confident of a good result though, knowing (partially) what the form of the other teams was likely to be. That said, it seemed like it hinged on me getting in a decent bike leg. No pressure! I set myself a target of about 40 minutes for the approximately 10 km course.
My teammate Rob came in from his first run leg pretty much on time. At this point we were in 3rd place, behind the Short Course Teams leader by nearly 3 minutes. We did our transponder swap and I headed out on my lap. Almost immediately I hit traffic! argh!
At this point, I should point out that I'm not particularly aggressive when it comes to passing on the trails, so i spent probably longer than I ought to following people around the course. After passing the initial bunch of riders I had a reasonably clear run for the rest of the lap. With only a single lap to do I was able to smash myself pretty hard, passing more people than passed me. Hurrah!
I rolled back into transition just over 40 minutes later. Pretty pleased with that result, especially after finding out that I did the lap nearly 13 minutes faster than our competition
. Teammate Rob headed out for his run with a nice comfortable buffer. His lap was marginally slower than his first, though he certainly gave it everything out there.
Final result.... Team No Hope apparently was misnamed, as we won by 7:42 ! Woot!
https://www.strava.com/activities/1020048301