Yankee Springs TT

I raced my first race for the year today, the Yankee Springs Time Trial. Things basically went OK this weekend. Since it's still early in the year for me, and since I hadn't ridden this trail before, I decided to just "train through" this race. So, on Saturday I rode two laps of the course, one by myself and one with Greg; it ended up being about two and a half hours of riding. My legs were pretty tired Saturday night, but riding two laps of a new trail helped a lot from the technical point of view.

When I woke up this morning, my legs were still a little dead. I drove up to Yankee Springs and got situated. They got a really good turnout for the race, I couldn't believe how many people showed up. It didn't hurt that the weather was beautiful this weekend. I did a little warm-up, but kept it shorter and easier than usual given the state of my legs. Then I went down to the start.

The race itself went pretty smoothly. I thought I paced myself well at the start. I pretty quickly caught up to the racer in front of me (maybe two spots in front of me), but I wasn't pushing overly hard. I ended up passing a few people, but a few more passed me. What was a little different this year was that most of the guys that caught me sat on my wheel for a long time, it seemed like usually over a mile. If I know someone is behind me in a TT, I always tell them to let me know when they want by, but today, most of the guys sat on for a while.

I had one little mechanical glitch, I dropped my chain on a bumpy downhill, but I don't think it cost me too much time. I will have to see if there's something I can do about that though. What cost me real time was that my legs blew up with about 1.5 miles left to go. I just couldn't get my legs to give any more.

Based on times from last year, I'd hoped to do the race in under an hour, but I ended up with a 1:02. It looked like our times this year were generally slower than last year, maybe conditions last year were a little better? Or maybe the racers that showed up last year were just faster?

Regardless, for an early-season race, I was pretty happy with how things went. My next race is in two weeks, the Fort Custer Stampede. This will be the first time I've gone the extra lap for a Sport race (the other Sport races I've done have been time trials, so we still do just one lap). Should be interesting to see how that goes.