Peter Teeuwen Time Trial #2 race report

Peter Teeuwen Time Trial #2
Masters State TT Championships
Chesapeake, VA
Sunday, July 29, 2007

I had hoped the Tour de France TT on Saturday would be super motivating. It was certainly good to watch. But maybe all the events leading up to this race were all bad omens. Maybe I should have stayed home.

1. The hub on my front aero wheel cracked at a spoke a few weeks ago. This rendered the wheel untrue, and pretty much not reparable without a new hub. Because of this I used a standard wheel in the front.

2. The bike shop that sponsors our team has a few TT helmets, which we borrow when we do TTs. We had 2 Mediums and 2 Larges. One of the Mediums went missing, and one of my teammates had the other Medium in PA for a race. Thus, I took a Large with me. It didn't fit, and I decided it would be too much of a distraction if it fell down over my eyes and took away my ability to see the road in front of me.

3. It was HOT. Somewhere around 90 degrees by 10am, and I wasn't going off until 10:48. I was sweating just walking to the porta-potty.

4. I put a computer on my bike. Last time I didn't know how fast I was going, only what my heart rate was. I thought this may have helped me keep an eye on my speed and therefore tell me when I needed to go faster. I think this was a huge mistake.


See, last month I set a personal record on this course, at 56:09. Yesterday I was aiming for a 55 minute time. I had tried a new TT strategy (go out a little slower, work into an effort I could hold for an hour, push a slightly bigger gear, slow my cadence down a tad, and hopefully keep my heart rate down a little, too.) It had appeared to work.

I get to the start with the Large helmet, and realise I probably shouldn't use it, so with about 4 minutes to go I run to the car and switch back to my normal helmet- the one with as many vents as can be fit into a helmet without it being little more than a basketball net on your head.

Standing on the start line, I'm breathing okay. The heart rate is a little high, but I attribute that to the heat. I get the 5-4-3-2-1-go, and I stand up, clip in, and I'm moving into the wind. In the first minute I look down at my shoe, and notice that my shoe cover has flipped up over the toe, which, on a good day, aerodynamically would have cost me at least about 4 seconds. I stop pedalling, flip it down, and keep going. I probably lost 6 seconds right there, for a net loss of about 2 seconds.

Second minute, I should have had a heart rate of about 155, slowly on my way up to my LTHR, which by my not-so-super-scientific calculation (basically last month's TT average) of 169. I am instead at 174, going 24.5mph, which is way too high and much too fast for the start. And I know, very early on, that I will never recover from this initial effort. I back it off, though, to about 21mph, and the HR stays higher than I want it to, so I try to settle down to about 172 instead.

After about 4 miles and 12 minutes, I've already lost about 30 seconds per mile compared to where I wanted to be, and my HR has not come down, because the headwind is kicking my ass (I take solace in the fact that everyone is dealing with the wind). At one point I was doing 19mph and my HR was still over 170. It's obvious that this isn't going to be a fast day.

I picked up some speed on the second section, and started feeling better. My HR had come down a little, and my cadence was getting better. But then came turn 2, which put me not only back into the wind, but also a false flat on a road surface that was not conducive to smooth pedalling. It was at this point that I got passed by someone who'd started behind me, and I started losing my motivation.

The third section should have had a slight tail-crosswind. It didn't. Or maybe my mind was playing some kind of cruel joke on me. I struggled with every gear, and stood up a few times to get myself going a little faster. Every time, though, within a few hundred feet or so I was back to the square pedal stroke, forcing the pedals over and not going very fast for it. My shoulders and neck were hurting, my legs felt almost numb, and I was sweating to the point that I had to remove my salty and sweat-soaked sunglasses in the middle of the race. There goes another 7 seconds, plus or minus...

Everyone had talked about the tailwind in the last 6 miles, so I was looking forward to that, if nothing else. Again, the mind is a cruel torturer, though, and I felt none of it, whether it was there or not. I couldn't maintain 23mph until I could see the finish line, at which point I cranked it up to 24. I crossed the finish line at a time of 1:02:03 or so (I didn't stick around to find out the specifics), changed, got in the car, ate, and started driving home. And there was much rejoicing.

I lost 6 minutes to my fastest time on that course (but was only about 2 minutes slower than last year's best time.) I could say it was the wind, but I know that the wind was only one factor. My head wasn't into the race, and my preparation wasn't as good as it could have been, either. I actually felt horrible from the beginning, and in a race where it's just you and your own engine doing the work, it's hard to overcome the obstacles presented.