What a week!... Last weekend I started to come down with some kind of bug in the form of a sore throat, which evolved into a broken voice, gunk filled lungs, and a nasty cough. Not exactly perfect conditions in the week prior to a race where I wanted to rock out a damn fast time.
Up until that point, my ducks and planets were lining up nicely for a fast ride. Despite feeling a little like death, I pressed on with training, and for the most part it felt like I was still on track.
Friday night consisted of a mad dash home from work, packing the Cervelo P3 into the Trico case, rushing to the airport, inhaling a quality mini pepperoni pizza, then boarding my flight to Kona.
The Kona trip started off with the fun of trying to fit the Trico case into a Toyota Corolla... No dice. If I tried hard enough, probably I could have made it work, but the Mazda 6 beside it was looking oh so nicer. 10mins later I was departing Hertz (yay for USA Cycling 10% discount!) in the Mazda 6, and on my way over to Penn Henderson's crib.
Race morning kicked off with my cel phone alarm waking me up at 345am (Way too early!). A cup of joe and a bowl of porridge later and I was driving north to Kawaihae.
Typically, I'm the first rider off on TT's on O'ahu, but for this race I was down as the last rider to toe the line. No big deal... Nice to have some rabbits to chase! Still not sure if I prefer to hunt or be hunted when it comes to TT'ing.
The ride out north towards Hawi was fairly miserable... The course was a bit of a rolling / stair-step affair, into a bit of a head / cross wind. That combined with a Sub9 disc and 1080 front meant I had to be super alert. Not much opportunity to take a hand off the bars to gulp down some much needed fluids! I got to the turnaround in about 30minutes, so was hoping for a fast ride back to the finish. Sure enough, the first part of the return leg delivered fast speeds... 4mins spent above 40mph, maxing out at 44.4mph, and the best part of 20mins spent north of 30mph. Only one real scary moment to note - Being passed by a Chevron tandem tanker truck, then thrown back into the wind and almost off the road at 40+mph. The final few miles were misery and my clogged up lungs just weren't delivering the watts that I was asking...
Final time ended up being 56min 45sec. Far from fast, but good enough for second fastest time of the day. Penn Henderson clocked 55min 54sec to take overall bragging rights, and the State TT title for Master Men 35-39, Tony Lang was 3rd overall with 57min 4sec to take Master Men 40-44. My time was good enough to take Elite Men 1/2/3 Cat. It would have been nice to win with the overall fastest time, but given how crap I'd felt leading up to, and during the race, I'll take that second overall and State Championship title for another year.
Post ride data viewing...
Coach Gyde has me taking this week completely off from the bike, so I'll be getting some much wanted rest. Almost perfectly timed to give my body the neccesary unloading of training stress to fight whatever virus has been wreaking havoc on my body.
