Week 10: Heat, Racing and more Heat!

https://youtu.be/udmcKl0Wp7o

At any moment you must be willing to sacrifice who you are for what you are going to become.

That's a strong message and if considered forces one to face the uncomfortable sacrifices required to make meaningful change.  Sometime during 2015, I started struggling with depression, unhealthy habits and was in a dark place.  I had become the person I gave up being some number of years before  And I'd tell myself...

Come on, Philip, you're better than this!

Racing is a tone-setter.  Racing a bike, for me, is a chance to do my very best at something.  There's an inherent value to giving your best effort, holding nothing back, with total commitment.  It's a pervasive state of being.  People that dismiss their roles in bad outcomes fail to be accountable for much of anything.  People that push themselves do so in increasingly many ways.  

I'm not that 300 pound person any more, and fear is a powerful motivator to steer me clear of

New Max Power

regression.  So when I say I gained 5 pounds in the past two weeks, and there's no guilt or shame, I know it's okay.  I'm leaner over the same time period and stronger, too.  In fact, this past week I had several PRs UP steep, difficult segments, a new all-time high max power output on the bike and a new 5 second best power output.  I feel strong on the bike.  The weight will take care of itself.

The weight can be frustrating, especially when Tour of the Gila is such a hilly race.  But, as long as my power is increasing and I'm not getting fatter, I guess it's okay.  After the season I'll focus on losing weight again.

Along with the weight comes an unhappy knee.  Last weekend, after my Saturday group ride, I went out with two teammates, Tim and Rich, and we hit some hills.  Rich took us up the road called Snyder Road...nicknamed, The Wall.  The hill has LOTS and LOTS of 20% - plus inclines, the average for the whole thing is 15%.  My average cadence was just 51 RPM, and at the end I spun up real quick to pass Rich.  My knees are very unhappy with me for the effort.

But, good news is that I've been spending consistent time on the TT bike, in the aero position, and getting more comfortable.

This past weekend was the Southern Arizona Omnium.  A stage race is scored by time on each stage and to compete in the stage race you must race in all of the stages. An omnium assigns points to each race and people that aren't competing in the omnium can still jump in any of the particular races.

Day one was an AWESOME criterium at Musselman Honda Circuit Track.  The course was fast but the turns were still a bit technical.  The race was at night, under the lights and I was absolutely pumped to jump in and race.  Here's a video of the S-turn:

I put myself in a few spots of trouble late, one by hitting a small grate I hadn't seen on the inside of one turn, and then being on the outside of someone I knew didn't take the last corner well (he apologized profusely later, he didn't know ... I did, my fault for being there), and ended up 7th.  Still, we had a big field and the only group that was faster on average were the Men 1/2 category.  Our final lap average speed was 29.4 mph!

Some horse bathing next to the warm up area for the TT.

The last time I raced, just a few weeks ago, I had hypothermia!  This weekend was the opposite.  It was HOT.  Even the nighttime race was hot.  The tarmac radiated heat like crazy and I downed a full 24 oz water bottle in a 30 minute crit!  I usually don't even take water on crits.

Day two was a 20K time trial.  Usually these start at the crack of dawn, but because the final races weren't over until 11 PM, we didn't start the TT until 11 AM.  My time was 11:41.  Regardless, there was a huge turn out for this early season TT.  It makes me think that the schedule needs to be changed.  Most of the TTs in Arizona come after the state championship.

Time trials are what I used to be best at.  So I'm a little frustrated that I am having so much trouble with them!  I decided that one of my problems was hubris.  I don't want to accept the fact that I'm making so little power on the TT bike, so I've gone out too hard and blown up.  The plan for the day was to NOT do that.  The details were to go out at 330 watts for the first 2 miles, then 340 until the turn around at 10k.  At the turn around, drink some water, take a breath, then 350 watts until 5k remain, bump it to 360 for 2 miles and then jump drop the hammer to finish the race.

Loosening up for the TT.

A post shared by Philip Brown (@gruveb) on Mar 11, 2017 at 9:55am PST

So I ended up riding a fantastic negative-split 12K time trial.  Of course, the race was 20K and I suffered mightly over the last 20K.  After the race, talking with my buddy Kyle, he stated the obvious (as he, too, is disappointed with how his TTs are going), which is that we've not been doing those long efforts required to do well on a TT.

Even with the poor execution, I ended up at 28:22 unofficially, but the race officials added 30 seconds to my time, I think because my 30 second man didn't show up.  There was all sorts of scoring errors and right now the officials are manually going through to recheck and calculate the times.  Even if I'm wrong, and they're right, I won by 2 minutes over my omnium competitors.  This was a mixed bag because it only gave me a handful of extra points over the competitors but definitely caught everybody's attention.  I was a marked man on the road race.

We had 49 riders in our race!

Going into Sunday's road race I was a little nervous.  Saturday afternoon I suffered some pretty bad cramps and wasn't feeling too hot, from the heat, you know.  (See what I did there, eh???)  But my plan was to make the race hard, and try to get away in lap 3 (of 5).  The road race was 5 laps around Pistol Hill, in Vail, Arizona.

I was in 2nd place, or maybe 3rd, the results weren't posted and I calculated on my own, and I wanted to win the omnium.  So, I was going for broke.  I didn't want to ride to hold onto 2nd place, but the real issue was that if I won the road race and the guy in first, Caden, came in second, he'd still win the omnium, by just 2 points.  Caden proved too smart and strong and no matter how I tried, I was given ZERO leash.  No matter what I did, someone was willing to bury themselves to bring me in.  A few other attacks were successful and two breakaways actually stuck until the last part of the last lap, which is unusual for Cat4 racing.  But, it was clear, I was going no where.

Salt leached through the bib number!

In the end, I popped, finishing 12th on the day as I cramped coming up the hill.  I felt horrible, totally spent, but also happy that I at least had a chance to play my cards.  This omnium, after all, is training. Had the race been scored on time, I'd have ridden easy all day and not gotten the training benefit.

In the end, I came out 3rd in the omnium and made some new friends and had a great time doing it.  That's bike racing for you.

Next weekend is the Tucson Bicycle Classic.  I'm racing Cat4 again, and again, it's a very large field.  This is a big event for me, one where I want to show well!  I'm far from where I want to be, both in general cycling ability and weight.  But, this year is all about learning and developing and suffering and smiling while doing it all!  So long as I keep those priorities, the results are positive.

So I'll leave you with some pictures from the week.  Thanks for reading and following along.

Brought Chuggies to the Crit... he was a bad dog though.

At least I wasn't in trouble!

Tim and I warming up before the crit!

A pic I took on a training ride this week.

A pic from the road race Sunday.

I was trying to punish people in the back of the pack coming out of this corner!

The No-Podium Podium

Historic University of Arizona Criterium: Race Report

It was a bit nipply, as Clark Griswold would say!  Twenty one degrees at my house when I left for the race this morning, and in the low 30's at race time.  Still, the sun was out, the course was pretty interesting, and, well, it's race day!

I always want to win, and am working on developing some instincts for racing criteriums that may help me win, but that's just it ... right now I'm trying different things.  Today my #1 goal was, do not crash.  In the first race on the day there were 7 separate crashes on the one tricky corner.  In my race, just one.  As the day went on and the road warmed up, the paint on that corner got less slippery, so that helped.

The second goal was to try some different break aways using features of the course and see if one sticks.  I felt good and believe that if I could've gotten away I had a good chance of staying away.

Thank you John Hays for the great pics!

 Spoiler, I didn't get away.  In fact, nobody did.  There were just a few guys shutting everything down.

The course:  0.8 miles long and starts slightly down hill headed east with a very fast pair of turns (numbers 1 and 2) that send you slightly back up the hill then a bend to the right and a very pinched and technical 150 degree turn.  This is where everybody crashed when it was cold.

The venue was very cool, on the UofA's campus.  The streets were pretty nice, grass everywhere, and palm trees.  There were a lot of spectators, making it a lot of fun.

When the race started I just wanted to stay in the front 1/3 of the pack, stay safe, do zero work.  My garmin ended up getting wonky on me, but from the data I collected, I did a good job not working at all when I didn't need to.

I am also happy to report that on the fast pair of turns on the east end of the race, I was faster than the other riders.  I guess because I could carry my momentum through the turn.  That same inertia hurt me more than it helped on the tricky, dog-legged turn.  I popped off over 1,100 watts twice, and over 1,000 repeatedly in the short 11 minutes interrupted data I collected.  All in that one corner, all just coming back to speed, not attacking.

It became very quickly apparent that whoever went into the last turn (the tricky one) first, would be the first to the finish line, provided they didn't slide out in the turn itself.  For one of the prime laps I was 3rd wheel in the corner and had no chance.  Each prime and the race itself was won by whoever was first in that corner.

If I had a time out during the race, or was smarter, I'd have changed my plan from a late break away to just getting on the front on the back half and pulling the whole field to that turn and gunning it out of the corner!  DOH!

During the race several guys tried to get away and none did.  I tried three separate times, and never got very far at all.  On the last lap I just tried to stay in front of the people in that were in the omnium competition.  I ended up coming in 4th in my category and 7th over all, and I did let one of the omnium competitors slip away, I didn't see him.  So, after day 1, I'm sitting in second place.

Here's the footage from my GoPro from today's race.  It was a lot of fun.  It was also nice seeing Rich Horn out there cheering me on!  What a teammate!

Tomorrow's race has a lot of climbing, twice ascending a long category 2 climb.  Who knows what surprises the day will hold!  I'm built for crits, not hills...but I ride hills not flats, so I'm comfortable when we go up and down.  I might surprise a few folks tomorrow.  Then again, I might get spit out the back right away.  We shall see!