2016 Season Wrap Up

Season Wrap up

The 2016 road season finished off with a couple of "fun" time trials, first the 33km Crossfield ITT and second everyone's favorite provincial time trial, a 30km course at Miquelon Lake. This season felt like a long one to me with 25 race days and of course all of the travel and angst associated with them. It was satisfying to end the season with a solid couple of efforts. I was super happy to set a personal best power for the provincial ITT, despite reading the "wrong" start time and showing up about 15 minutes before my start...

Stepping out of the car I was informed that I had about 12 minutes to get to the start line, which meant getting my bike and license checked, putting on my skin suit, shoes, and helmet, and getting to the start which was not immediately nearby. A friend helped me by getting my bike and license checked while I threw on my skinsuit. After struggling with the zipper for a few minutes I realized it was completely jammed, so I used some safety pins to secure it and drove to the start line, showing up with about 3 minutes to spare. The weird part is that despite having absolutely no warm up and having sat in a car for the past 3 hours my legs felt awesome right from the go. As soon as I got going I felt a sense of calm and all the panic from the hectic start sort of faded away. I was actually enjoying myself despite riding pretty much all out. The cooler temperatures felt awesome and the wind direction was favorable for most of the course, which somehow made it easier to produce power maintain momentum over the rolling course. Rolling across the finish line was a satisfying feeling as it marked the end of the what has felt like a pretty long road campaign! I uploaded the TP plot for anyone who is interested here:

Racing more time trials this year than usual has definitely got me thinking about upgrading my time trial bike, which is currently an old 10 speed felt AR4 road bike with some fast forward 90mm racing wheels. Naturally, I've been watching lots of youtube videos which review various time trial setups, and the chinese frames have definitely been catching my eye. Deng Fu supposedly makes a solid time trial frameset which is comparable to brand name superbikes. Pricing is about $1000 USD for a frame and bars, and comes with a two year warranty! Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Anyways, lots of things to think about. In the meantime I've been enjoying various off season pursuits including getting back into the weight room and dealing with massive amounts of DOMS. It seems that cycling all day every day does not condition any weight lifting ability. Things like walking down stairs and opening doors have become incredibly interesting activities.  I've also started dreaming a bit about the 2017 season. After seeing a friend win the duathlon national championships I've even been thinking about giving multisport a go, perhaps getting back into running. Triathlon too is an exciting prospect, as the swimming and running would both some welcome variety to a typical training week. Despite what seemed like a long season this year, I am still feeling the desire to compete and push myself, to see what I'm capable of with another year of training in the legs and some new goals to push towards. In the long term I'm hoping that I'm just getting started on the journey of training and competing in endurance sport.