Club TT

Last night was time trial night at the track. Even though I'm not in very good shape (the TT would be my longest hard effort of the year so far), I decided to go ahead and do it. My plan was to pace myself by only going as fast as nasal breathing would let me go.

Actually, the plan worked fine. One thing that I expected to happen did pan out, which was that I didn't go out too hard. I also turned very consistent laps, all within 1s or so of each other. I only had to open my mouth a few times, when I went a little too hard up the hill or into the wind. Really, the only problem I had was that I went too slow. Relative to a "normal" TT effort for me, I had too much energy left at the end; I probably could have ridden for quite some time at the pace I was going.

The only other club TT I've done was in May 2007. It's pretty hard to compare my time from 2007. By this time in 2007, I was reasonably fit and had already raced a few times. Still, the comparison was that my overall time yesterday was about 2min 20s slower than 2007, or about 12% slower, or almost 30s slower per lap! Probably I could have gone a bit faster if I'd been breathing through my mouth, but I don't know by how much. I doubt that I could have gotten down to my 2007 time.

Tuesday nights have turned into a nice benchmark for me on the nasal breathing thing. When I started with it two weeks ago, any time I had to pedal up a hill or into the wind (at maybe 13mph), I would struggle to breathe. Yesterday in the TT, I rode for 20+ minutes at nearly 20mph. Pretty big improvement in such a short time! I don't think my breathing has caught up to what the rest of my body can do yet. In Body, Mind, and Sport, Douillard said that the range for adaptation is 3-10 weeks, so I probably still have quite a bit of room for improvement.