Originally Posted by
TheKillerPenguin
Raced saturday. Started a breakaway 1.5hrs in, 4 bridged up after a few minutes. Got completely raked over the coals until we were caught like 15 minutes later - simply couldn't recover from my initial jump and solo effort and was dying doing the equivalent of low sweet spot. I felt pretty bad for ruining the rhythm, I definitely prevented any sort of cohesion from forming.
Post mortem assessment - I am thinking it's a combo of not sitting out of the rotation for long enough to regain my composure and needing more race miles. I've done very little work above vo2 this year so far, so it makes sense that those sorts of efforts are difficult for me to recover from, and that should develop naturally the more racing I get in. I'm not really sure what I'd aim for during training rides to train this particular weakness so I suppose I will experiment a bit. On the plus side, this means I'm fit enough to instigate breakaways in p/1/2 fields, so I can't be all that far off.
I raced Sat too! I didn't hang around to see your field, had to make the 2hr trek back to my parents' home where I was staying this past weekend. I did the 4/5 40+ and basically sat on front the whole first lap, no one tried to animate things and I guess people were happy to just let me do all the work lol So that was 260w/266NP and only 22.2 mph lol After that people started to get more animated and I was happy to try and sit in as much as I could. I bridged up to a forming break on lap 2, but everyone was sitting up looking around when I made it to that group and the field was soon with us. A few other moves went which I really didn't concern myself with since it seemed like the group was up to chase anything down. I was 5th wheel coming close to the finish, was kind of poorly positioned for the sprint (I was on the right and there was a car parked so I had to choose a different line and not crash anyone). But finished 10th which is my best ever lol It felt good to be in contention right until the very end, hoping my A race in a couple of weeks will be similar, with the added feature of a climb to potential create more of a selection
I figured going into it that I wouldn't have enough to do anything on my own, my sweet spot power equates to 22ish mph like in the first lap where I was effectively riding solo and the laps where I sat in were 23.6mph (my teammates in the 1-4 40+ did 24.6 so my field was slow). Even having better wheels instead of my stock Axis sport wheels wouldn't have gotten me enough, I don't think. So eventually I'll have to pull the trigger on something slightly better since I've done all the other low hanging aero things!