Fast nights in the A-Group!

A nice set of races at the track tonight.... and because of other obligations I was nicely tapered not having been on the bike since Sunday.

The first race was a 30 lap Tempo, always good for a fast pace and tonight was no different. Average speed for the 30 laps was 49.3kph, with just under half - 14 laps / 3:20 minutes - averaging 50kph! Can't remember a race this fast. At least not one I was able finish.

I was on a 51x14, about 95.2" for racing after doing a solid 20 minute warmup on a 52x14 (97.1"). Since my form was good this felt very comfortable and I had no trouble hanging in even as the the pack speeds hit 52-55 and stayed well over 50 for extended periods.

Even my heartrate stayed well down, only hitting 182bpm for the final lap. Average for the race only 170bpm.

As always, as long as I can stay on top of the gear overall the bigger I go the better I can do. I'll continue with the weight program to see if I can continue to get raw strength up so that I can move up to the 52x14 for racing and maybe 53x14 (98.9") for training.

One side effect of the bigger gear is that it makes it more comfortable to get up off the seat for short efforts even when at speeds over 50kph. Typically leg speed makes it uncomfortable to push hard standing at much more than about 125 RPM. But on this size gear 50kph is about 120RPM and that I can do standing and get a nice jump.

In the second race, a 3x10 progressive points race the A's actually let me get over the top and attack with 3 laps to go.. they are a really polite bunch letting us old guys do some work at times.

Not that I did much... Jacob Schwingboth and a couple of others bridged back on to my wheel and went over me at the final sprint. Still it was fun. Someday I'll surprise them and stay away :-)

I'm playing with some of the new options in the online version of trainingpeaks. While heavily flash based the results are still quite nice and it is easy to make workouts available. See here for the tempo race and here for the progressive.

They also have hooked up with facebook and twitter and you can have your uploaded files automatically summarized and posted to either of them. This can be done either automatically or only for specific workouts. I'll play with posting them to twitter as I only have about 5 followers and as far as I can tell they are all some random people I don't know. They think they are following some other stuartlynne.