Sunday was the first race of the season, since the previous week’s race fell victim to the weather and got itself canceled. I had signed up to do two races–the Masters 40+ race and the category 3/4 race…which just happen to be back-to-back.
I was a little worried about the first race of the season because my legs were not feeling quite right. Both legs have been hurting a little lately, mostly in the big muscles of my thighs and calves, with my knees feeling slightly tender. I spend a good bit of Saturday night running the massage roller up and down, icing, and heating. To help warm up, I took a steaming hot shower the morning of the race, hoping the heat would loosen up my legs, and then I slathered on the Tiger Balm. During the warmup with a friend on another team, we ran into a guy from Target Training who was also warming up, and we may have pushed it a little ahrder than I should have: my thighs had a little tingling burn in them that didn’t feel quite right.
Once the race started, I felt fine, good enough, in fact, that I attacked to bridge the gap to the Keltic guys who had jumped hard at the very start of the race. Unfortunately, I caught them just as they blew up, and the pack was right behind me. After that, I drifted to the middle of the pack, and floated there for most of the rest of the race.
As the pack was screaming around the course (there were laps approaching 30 mph average), I realized that I had no idea where we were in the race. I couldn’t remember the last few laps at all, and I felt in this strange foggy zone. Even stranger, I felt a complete, but dreamlike, awareness of everyone around me. I could even feel the guys behind me on my wheel, and the riders in my periphery were oddly present the way peripheral things usually are not. The paradox of being both hyperaware but oddly not present felt a lot like literary descriptions of being dead. I was not really a part of the race, but I was completely in it at the same time. I know that makes no sense at all, but that’s how it felt.
About 15 laps into the race I fully appreciated the training maxim about having clear goals for yourself. I had no real goal for this race, and, since I was going to race again about fifteen minutes after finishing this one, I felt disinclined to push in any serious way. At one point, I was off the front, with a few cyclists in unorganized patches here and there down the road, and I had no idea what to do. I have not felt this lost without a strategy since I was a cat 5. For next week, I will need to set some clear goals, and then try to implement them as forcefully as I can.
After finishing somewhere in the middle of the pack (I drifted up to the finish at an easy pace–no sense in sprinting for 25th place), I prepared for the second race. This one was harder than the other. Although the pace was faster, it was actually easier because it was a little more steady, but my legs were beginning to hurt. A few times I pushed to the front, and I seriously thought about contesting one prime lap; each push, though, made my legs hurt more. Finally, about 20 laps in, I realized I was sitting almost at the very back of the pack and thought I should move up. Taking advantage of the hill, where everyone slams over to the left, I moved up fast on the right, only to feel both quads shriek out serious alarms and threaten to cramp. They did cramp up slightly, and, as I was breathing and letting them unclench, the pack passed me and left me in the dust. I decided to end my race then–discretion, valor, all that jazz.
Despite not finishing the second race, I feel okay about things. I know I am strong enough to work hard in both races, largely because my heart rate stayed well within my range, and I never felt outgunned in any way. No, the problem is not cardio-vascular fitness, but leg fitness, which will actually be easier to deal with. On Friday, I will go in for a massage, and I am riding very smart this week to build up my muscular endurance. Next week I will race the first race seriously, in an attempt to help out the two teammates in the top five, and to try to get myself a top ten finish if I can do both. It is going to be a very different season from last year, where I was chasing upgrade points, but I will still need to focus on some sort of goal for each race, just to keep my mind in focus.
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