Today I woke up 4am to make my trip to the Makaha Time Trial on the west end of O'ahu. For once, I managed to force myself to go to sleep at a reasonable hour (9pm) the night before an early race morning and it worked out well. My eyes cracked open at 3am but I went back to sleep for an extra hour of kip.

Seems like today turned into a day of firsts... I got to the race with bags of time to get in a decent warm-up on my shiny new Cervelo P3C. Until Saturday I was rolling around on a Quintana Roo Caliente, but IT+B finally got a Cervelo P3C in my size (51cm) and in typical Zagorski fashion, I decided to do a complete bike change the day before my first race of the season! I took a lot of measurements from the Roo and got my position transferred over to the P3C pretty damn close.

I got in a good warm-up on the trainer, sipped a can Red Bull and watched some heinous looking clouds roll in 10mins before my start time! Sure enough, those clouds decided to dump out all water for the next hour. My first reaction was f**k... WHY does it have to rain today of all days??? But then I thought "F**k it, I'm from Scotland, this is MY weather!... Go out there and get it done!" That was probably a bit of a WWJMD (what would Jason Macintyre do?) moment. Probably the answer to that would be GO HARDER.

10 seconds... 5.. 4..3.. 2.. 1.. struggle with 53 x 14.... GO! I forgot that I had an 11-21 corn-on-the-cob on my Zipp disc after warming up on 12-25 and started off a bit over-geared. The rain was so bad that I couldn't see for shit... I couldn't see my SRM display (power, speed, distance, time etc), could vaguely make out the road, and probably couldn't have pinned a tail on my ass if I tried.

There was a bit of a tailwind so I spent most of the time going to the turn well over 30mph, topping out at 41.3mph! I caught my 30sec man who had a car stuck behind him pretty fast so had to snake around on the shoulder lane and hope I made it out the other end alive. I'm very impatient, and if there's one thing I hate, it's being held up by something when I want to go faster.

Later on I started to experience some blustery crosswinds and had to fight with the aerobars to keep the bike pointed straight. The guy in front of my managed to overshoot the turnaround thanks to some confusion over its location! I took it a little wide, but didn't lose large chunks of time. Tony Lang who is always the danger man in TT's started 1min behind me, so I could gauge how I was going judging the time split between us after the turnaround. I think he was a little ahead of me at that point... A bit of an "oh f**k, we're close!" moment, so I shifted down a couple more cogs and have it some stick. The ride to the finish was into a headwind and was quite miserable. My goal for today (had it been dry conditions) was to average 30mph and I had stuck a note to my base bar with speed-splits for the out and back portions of the course. For example, if I was going 27mph into a headwind, I'd have to ride back with a tailwind at 33.75mph. Had I known it was going to be so windy I'd probably have stuck the 54t chainring on for the initial tailwind.

I ended up crossing the line with a 21:52... Probably 21:50 if I'd stopped my SRM right on the line. The timing for the event turned into a bit of a cluster... They had me down as being over 1min slower, they had 2nd placed Tony Lang down as about a minute slower than the 22:30-something that he timed himself at, and various missed / incorrect times. Quite frustrating really...

SRM File

It's disappointing for riders that put a lot of time and effort into preparing for a race like this only to not even know where they finished. Was nice enough of the organizer to offer an entry fee refund to riders who didn't get their time recorded, but that still doesn't quite compensate for the time spent going out there, doing the race, and traveling back.

A couple hours after the race my front Vittoria tubular went pop thanks to a shard of Budweiser bottle. Probably another bottle ejected from the window of a moving truck. Notes to culprits... 1) Don't drink and drive. 2) Keep yer shite in the vehicle at all times!

Anyway, nice to bag a win at the first race of the season. Here's hoping for a faster run at next Sunday's Castle-Hanauma TT!