Author

Peter Allen on Aug 17, 2008

Race name: ABR Masters National TT Race date: Sunday, Aug 17, 2008

ABR Masters National 30K TT

August 16, 2008 – Garden Prairie, IL

Masters 30+ – 5th – 47:09.01

270 watts – 25.4 MPH

I’m back! Well, sort of. The ABR Masters National Time Trial championship last Saturday represented my first race since having collarbone surgery back in June. I didn’t get a stars and stripes jersey, but I didn’t crash!

I actually ended up surprising myself, despite only finishing fifth. My goal was simply to ride hard the first half and see how things went from there. If I averaged over 24 MPH, I figured I was in pretty good shape considering everything that has happened to me in the past few months.

The day began with a somber note as I departed for the race in Garden Prairie without the Blue Pod, which was in the body shop thanks to some high schools kids who hung an illegal U-turn in front of me a couple of weeks ago. At least I had a car to get to the race, and was eager to race my new set of other wheels—the Isaac Aerotic.

The ABR Masters TT didn’t utilize the normal 40K course, rather it followed a shorten 30K version. Thus, times were guaranteed to be fast with the shorter distance and near perfect weather. The weather was sunny and in the low 70s with slight 5 MPH wind out of the SW. I decided to register race day, so I had one of the last start times. I knew I would at least have riders in front of me to chase.

The first several miles felt a bit like riding a bike again for the first time. I hadn’t the opportunity to ride my new TT bike outdoors more than twice, and I hadn’t really ridden outside much in the past 2 months. Plus, I was nervous about crashing. I was OK on the straights, but would slow down and crawl around the corners. Considering I had crashed in a TT on a corner, this was to be expected. I had a slight tailwind the first half of the race, but still put the hammer down. I wasn’t paying much attention to my speed or power, I just knew I was hurting after 6 miles. Oh, was this going to be ugly. Or so, I thought.

A four year old without training wheels would have looked more confident than me at the turnaround. I started slowing down about 200 yards before the cone and inched my way around with one foot unclipped. Yikes. It wasn’t pretty. I at least powered up again fairly quickly and was looking forward (in a sadistic way) to the head wind on the return trip. That’s when I really started to hurt.

There was a slight headwind on the way back, which made things a little harder. I could feel my lack of fitness and was getting pretty dehydrated. Ironically, I actually started to feel better the last 5 miles and got into more of a groove. I ended up finishing fairly strong, looked down, and was amazed at my average speed. Somehow I had gone as fast I had been back in April and May. Despite a the wind on the return trip, my power readings were nearly the same between the first and second half of the race. I was about 2 minutes slower on the return trip, which wasn’t that surprising.

I ended up finishing 5th in Masters 30+ and was happy with my time despite my tentativeness on the corners. It was just nice to get out and race again!