Upcoming Races

I had a pretty good outing at the track last night. We worked on being comfortable in pacelines and groups, as usual. We had enough people to do a little riding in 4 lines; this was pretty interesting when you were on an "inside" line since you were completely boxed in. We did some "fartlek" style intervals for the last hour or so; my legs didn't really want to go for the first couple efforts, but after that I felt pretty strong.

I'm not doing any racing this weekend, but next weekend I'm going to square off against the roadies. I'm doing the "State Championship" 40km time trial out at Hines Park. I did a 20km TT out there last year, and it's a good location for a TT; the road is almost completely flat with some gentle curves and they close it to traffic for the race. Going 40km will be tough, but it's the same course for everyone. My goal is to complete it in 1:13 (about 20.4mph). I won't exactly be torching the competition with a time like that, but it would be a good time for me I think. Last year I averaged about 20.5mph for the 20km TT.

The following weekend is the Stony Creek Marathon XC race. I had intended to do this long 40-miler last year, but I got sick a few days beforehand so I didn't race. This should be an interesting race for a few reasons.

One is that, at least in past years, it's been a big mass start race. Instead of breaking the categories down by age groups, they started all the Expert/Elites together, all the Sports together, all the Beginners together. Especially for Sport, that's a lot of riders starting at once. So, I'll have to make some decisions about how hard I want to go from at the start; the course takes quite a few miles to get into the tight singletrack, so it may not be too critical to get to the front early.

Two is that it will be a pretty good indicator for how I might respond for the 6-hour race in July (although I expect this race will take just over 3 hours).

Three is the possibility that I might actually get a good result in the race. I hadn't really considered this until Brad mentioned it yesterday. The course is mostly open two-track with some reasonable climbing, so my weakness in the tighter stuff won't hurt me too much; I ride at Stony enough to know the trail pretty well anyway. I think it may also be to my advantage that the race is a little longer; you can see from the lap times last year that guys were cracking after the halfway point. Who knows though, maybe I'll be cracking by then too?