DWC Champs Stage 2 - MTB TT 2012

Durango Wheel Club Champs: Stage 2 - The MTB TT

Today’s race was a total blast! There were 36 men and 9 women racing in the mountain bike time trial (TT).  The race started at the corral in Horse Gulch just above the Meadow.  The course was Meadow Loop to Stacys to Cuchillo back to Meadow. A short 5 miles…

I warmed-up for 45 minutes and did some basic openers getting the heart rate(HR) elevated and most importantly to formulate my race strategy.

First, the race is a short 25’ish minutes. So, the strategy is fairly simple, full gas, max effort maintaining my HR within the low 170s.  (This is my above threshold HR.) Being above threshold effort is similar to a small can of nitro in a race car. It is a small container with only so much super-power. For me, this is roughly 30-40 minutes of my heart rate at or greater than 170…  Once I use up my can of super-power, I will then pop and need to recover…

The mentally tough part of this strategy is maintaining that level of effort, it hurts!! You are gasping for air, breathing very hard, and trying to maintain focus on a twisty and sometimes technical single track. So, I was off, since this was a TT, each racer starts at a 20 second interval. I quickly got my HR to the upper 160s and felt the pace was decent. After the first ½ mile I got in my lower 170s.

Every so often, my body would want me to do a quick recovery on a flat section. I caught myself letting my HR drop to the low 160s during this time and went through the following mental dialog:

Self: “Can you get that HR back up to 170?”

Self: “let me do a quick scan of my body: legs good, breathing hurts but good, so yes, I can!”

Self: “Good, then start pushing it again, you just lost 10 seconds…”

I would pick back up the pace.

Here is a graph of my HR over the course of the 27 minutes.

Overall, my focus was good, (even though I had to dismount once for a minor chain issue which probably cost me 20+ seconds including the time to get back up to pace), I felt like I was on rails, and I actually caught 3 riders that started ahead of me. There were a couple of times I went through that dialog and a number of small sections where I felt I could have pushed through it a little harder.  But overall, I was happy with the results and held true to my strategy.

Below is the 40-49 results.

 Also, here is the Strava link to this ride:  http://app.strava.com/rides/21675824