I did the Wolfgang Frietag Memorial 2-Person 50K Team Time Trial this weekend, and wow, what a freaking blast! It was so brutal and so much fun at the same time I don’t even know how to explain it. I did this race last year and had fun but this year’s experience far surpassed last year’s race.
I was finally paired up with my official race partner Steve last week, and we were able to get in a good practice session on Saturday morning. It turns out that Steve was the guy I was supposed to ride with last year so it was pretty funny that we were successfully paired up this year. We practiced taking pulls together, worked through our game day strategy and got a feel for each other’s strength and speed. All in all we felt that we were a good match for the race.
Race day morning we warmed up and finalized our plan of attack. The race was a 2 loop rectangular course and our plan was to hit the first loop at a 7-8 on the PE (perceived effort) scale, gauge how we felt at the halfway point, and try to ratchet it up to an 8-9 on the second loop before giving it our all on the final leg home. We’d start out with 1 minute pulls, if one of us felt good or bad we would adjust our pull times as necessary. We assessed the wind scenario and discussed what side we’d be drafting off of on each leg of the course.
We lined up to wait for our start time and before you knew it we were off! We started out at a moderate pace for the first leg just to settle into a nice rhythm. Pretty soon we were trading off pulls like clockwork and everything was flowing smoothly. The first turn came and now we had a strong cross-wind to our right. We lined up really tightly and were practically on each other’s hips at this point. I was really happy with how tight we were riding, especially after having not practiced that much together. So far so good. We hit a direct headwind coming back and that was pretty rough but again we kept a tight formation and a steady pace and we were rocking it.
Second loop starts, and now we look at each other and decide we can kick it up more. We picked up our speed and starting pushing it harder. This is when the race got rough. Man, we were pushing our limits pretty hard. Luckily Steve and I were pretty evenly matched on power and we were able to keep up with each other even at this brutal pace. We did a great job of communicating with each other on where we were at on the PE scale and made sure we didn't blow up before the end. The headwind on the way back seemed harsher than before (turns out the wind did pick up a bit) and by the time we hit the final stretch home we were both at 9’s easy. The final leg is a slight downhill and we knew we could really pound it home so we just called out “ready?” to each other and proceeded to give it all we had on the way home. Now, Steve and I are both triathletes so we don’t normally do too much sprinting, which made this all the more fun! We hit that last stretch hard (but still in a tight 2-Man TT formation) and left it all out there. They took a great picture of us out there gritting our teeth and giving it our all on that sprint home.
I was completely spent after the race! I haven’t been that tired in a while and I had to sit for a long while before I could get going again. It was a great feeling knowing I left everything out there on the course and that I was able to match my teammate’s intensity the whole way. Overall a great time out there in Herscher IL. VQ had about 10-15 teams racing that day so we were well represented. Some of our teams did really well and took awards home. Steve and I didn't place (our category was pretty stacked), but that’s alright. Now I’m looking forward to my next TTT, the 4-Man TTT in September!
No comments:
Post a Comment