Dirty Duo Deux
“Nice work! On your second lap?” No…
So the first race of my training program for BC Bike Race 2016 is complete. It was a success, and a failure. The trailside exchange quoted above took place half-way up the Old Buck climb (biggest single climb of the race at 300m of elevation gain in one go) and by ‘second lap’ he thought I had just completed the 27km trail run and was now doing the 30km bike. After a miserable attempt of the race in 2013 this was supposed to have a bit of redemption. Not so much.
Starting with the good I succeeded in being within a 200% threshold of the winner, but just barely. With the winner at 02:09 and me at 04:05 I had five minutes to spare [full race results available here]. And let’s face it, that is a pretty conservative goal, but if you recall in the What is a good finish? post this time will, generally, get you in the top 80% of riders at BCBR.
Now for the bad. I felt horrible, walked many sections, and came in dead last.
Right from the start I realized I really messed up my nutrition and eating as I felt like I had a kettle bell in my belly and got stomach cramps for the first hour. Oh, how clever I thought I was being eating a balanced meal 3 hours before race time, with gel shots during the race. I also started getting proper hunger pangs with 1hr still to go in the race. Lesson: a 2 litre smoothie 3hrs before race time is not an advisable pre-race diet. Sure, I made sure it was loaded with 1 cup of rolled oats, 15g or protein through hemp seeds, etc., but it was clearly the wrong thing to do. More research required.
The next thing that just wasn’t right was my lower back. This is an injury that really set me on the whole racing journey to begin with. As my mobility suffered and constant pain increased I wanted to do something corrective, and needed a goal to really kick my ass into action. That’s BC Bike Race. After much focus and work reprogramming my whole core I thought I had this mostly under control, but in the Dirty Duo it was sore for the whole thing. Lesson: More work is required on the core/back, and not just stretching.
The last of the ‘big three things that sucked’ was my leg power. Right from the start I just didn’t feel like I had any gas in the tank or power in the legs. It could have been the lingering cold I’ve had for 3 weeks, the lack of recovery time from training, my bad nutrition plan, or just hitting it too hard too soon off the start line and never fully recovering. Lesson: Adjust my training schedule to include more muscular tension intervals to build base power (to the sacrifice of some of the higher cadence work I’ve been doing during base training, which i’ll shift over to the in-season plan).
So, it was the best of races, it was the worst of races.
Most importantly, it was a beautiful day on the trails, all the people were awesome, I had a smile (sometimes forced) the whole time, and I finished!
I’m happy I did the Dirty Duo even if it was a little discouraging. With all the 6:30am training sessions I thought I would feel a little better. Placing last is humbling but more importantly I just didn’t feel like i was riding anywhere close to an acceptable level given the much bigger challenges ahead. It’s a good motivator to up the training and make adjustments based on the lessons learned from this experience. It could be that I’m building myself up from such a low physical starting point this is just what the journey looks like. I’ll need to have confidence in the training plan and trust my daily effort to achieve the final goals when the time comes.
