Well, I did my first road time trial. I figured since I am still in my "race phase", I might as well race, even if it's on the road. I signed up as a Cat 5, not really knowing what to expect. It turned out that this was a good call. Most of the guys there were pretty fast. Almost all had nicer equipment than I did (my 8 year old road bike isn't exactly state of the art); I was surprised by the number of aero bars and aero helmets I saw in Cat 5.
Anyway, it was a 20km TT. The course was basically flat and in an out-and-back setup. This is not the sort of effort I'm used to from mountain biking! Anyway, I figured if I could do the TT at 20mph (36 minutes), I would be happy for a first attempt. I ended up finishing almost right at 35 minutes, so about 20.5mph.
The full results aren't posted yet, but I got beat by a lot of guys; I beat quite a few too, so I guess that's OK. I only passed one guy on course, and got passed by two. So I felt reasonably competitive.
Photos of me in the race can be found here. (I'm the one in the middle set!) Note the relative age advantage I seemed to have compared to the guys on either side of me. I was happy that the guy behind me (in orange) didn't get close to me at all, but I never did catch the guy ahead of me (in blue). I don't think he finished that far ahead, since I saw him immediately afterward, but I don't think I made up any time on him either.
For all the crap roadies take in mountain biking circles, I found everybody to be pretty friendly today. In fact, I chatted with more people at this race than I do at a typical mountain bike race. Of course, maybe things change as you get to the higher levels.
EDIT: The link above doesn't seem to be working. Here are some links directly to the pictures, hopefully they'll work better.
Photo1
Photo2
Photo3
3 comments:
I was one of the guys that didn't have nicer equipment than you. I was the guy on the hybrid, thought there would be more non-road bikes since they encouraged beginners. It was my first time trial too and it was an interesting experience to say the least.
I think you were the only person that I passed; on my way to 51st place(!). It looked like you were doing OK; having the wide tires would have definitely hurt you on that course. It's also very hard to know how much you can push yourself at your first race.
The whole deal about "beginner" racing is tough. Most beginner racers are not beginner riders (not saying that you are). For mountain bike racing in our area, it's a little looser because you generally don't have to worry about licensing. In road racing, as I understand it, people that don't race that much may still be Cat5's, even though they may not really belong there. I don't know how closely you looked through the results, but the guy that won Cat5 would have also won Cat4 and would have nearly won Cat3!
If you're interested in continuing to race, I'd suggest that you set a target time before the race and use that as your goal. As you saw in my post, this is still what I do, especially for TT's (road or mountain). Don't worry too much about where you place, there are way too many factors that are out of your control that contribute to that.
I had set a target pace of 17 mph, and I attained 17.5 so I was happy. I figure with a decent road bike, I can probably get another 2 mph plus I wasn't really pushing it because I knew I had no chance at winning anything and didn't want to run out of steam. Interesting about the Cat 5 guy doing really well. I didn't realize it.
Post a Comment