Diary of a Rookie Veteran Racer – April 2011

The big news this month is that I competed in my first ever race of which there are more details below. First of all though, the science bit.

This month I started experimenting with heart-rate variability analysis to detect over-training. It’s early days yet, but the basic idea is that there are natural small differences in heart-rate as you breathe, lie down and stand up. These differences get smaller as you approach a state of over-training. So most mornings I lie down wearing a heart-rate strap and start recording my heart-rate with HRVTracker. After a few minutes I stand up, and a short time later the whole recording is fed into the Kubios HRV analysis software to produce a whole bunch of graphs and numbers.

The first figure below shows the analysis after a couple of easy days training and the second figure is the analysis after a couple of 4 hour hard hilly training sessions (click images to enlarge):

Easy training

Hard training

You can see that the easy training graphs show a greater range of heart-rates (more spread out, higher SD1 value) and the heavy training graphs show the heart-rates clustering more tightly around the mean with a lower SD1. With a few more weeks’ data I should be able to detect over-training or impending illness and take a rest day when needed. The ultimate aim is to work out the best metrics for this and include them in Golden Cheetah so that other folks don’t have to wade through a ton of numbers and graphs to get the same information.

Those two 4-hour hilly rides I mentioned are part of preparations for the Tour of Wessex at the end of May, which will be three back-to-back days of 5-6 hour hilly rides. For the first of them I made the most of the Good Friday bank-holiday and met up with fellow Shutt VR racer Damon Largent to show him what the Surrey Hills look like, taking in a number of 10%+ gradient climbs along the way. Damon coped well with the suffering and his form continues to improve hugely – it looks like he’ll peak nicely for the Tour.

On Easter Sunday it was back into the Surrey Hills, this time for a rendezvous with the Kingston Wheelers “hard training ride” led by Jim Ley. I managed to hold my own in the group and managed a few turns on the front which was encouraging – I must do more of these rides in the future. Riding at a fast pace in a group was really good preparation for Thursday: the Surrey League Handicap Series race at Kitsmead Lane, just one mile from my house and the true start of my career as a Rookie Veteran Racer.

I got to Race HQ (which was a trestle table at the side of the road) an hour before the start, showed my Surrey League ID card, signed on and handed over £15. In return I got a race number (17) and pinned it on to my new Team Shutt VR jersey. To be honest it felt like the first day at a new school with a whole crowd of unfamiliar faces, including some first-timers like me and experienced riders from local clubs chatting about what they’d been up to in the off-season. I quietly sipped my pre-race drink, rode a couple of warm-up laps, and made small talk with a few riders. Fortunately my wife arrived a little later to give me some much-needed support and to take some photos.

As this was a handicap race we’d be set off in groups, with the Cat 4 guys like me going off first, followed by the 3^rd cats, 2^nds and finally the 1^st cat and elite riders. The start time arrived, and Surrey League organiser and former pro cyclist Keith Butler called out ten names including mine. We 4th cats lined up at the start and with a slightly anticlimactic “off you go” from Keith, off we went.

For the first half lap this felt like the training ride from Sunday – a spirited tempo pace and a loosely-organised paceline with each of us doing 10-20 seconds on the front before someone else came past to do some work. All this changed as soon as we hit the first incline. In training I’d been changing down to the inner chain ring for this part and spinning a gear up and over the motorway bridge – but not in the race. In the race I didn’t use the small ring once, and for the up and over bit I had to accelerate hard just to keep up with the bunch. After the bridge was a gradual downhill section which, in theory, gave us a chance to recover a bit. On the plus side, going downhill in a bunch freewheeling at 56km/h meant that I wasn’t pedalling much. That said, my heart-rate was still sky-high from adrenaline as I tried to maintain my position in the middle of a pack of similarly scared & inexperienced racers going at high speed, feathering my brakes to stop running into the guy in front, pedalling to catch his wheel again, and keeping eyes in the front and back of my head to make sure I didn’t hit people coming up from behind or dropping back from the front. Relaxing it was not.

After the downhill section was a left-hand turn onto a rolling few hundred meters leading back to the start line. Sounds straightforward when it’s just words, doesn’t it? In practice I knew that this part of the course was critical – the turn and the lumps would stretch out the field, so I needed to try and get near the front of the bunch, make the turn (without hitting the gravel patch on the white line) and then sprint like hell to stay with the bunch for the next lap. For the first few laps this worked beautifully (if painfully) and by the start line I was in the first handful of riders. The highlight of the race was about lap 3 where I was actually leading the race into the first turn:

After that lap we got caught by the 3^rd cat group and the pace went up a notch – and for the first time I was entertaining the possibility that I might get dropped. I focussed on my racecraft: sitting on wheels and staying low on the drops to conserve energy, hammering even harder over the bridge, recovering on the downhill and cheekily running down the outside of the bunch as they slowed for the final turn and sprinting for all I was worth to stay with them to the start line – all this repeated for another 5 laps. You can see the pattern from the map below, where my power is coloured from blue (coasting) to orange (sprinting).

At long last we passed the start line as the last-lap bell was being rung, and I was still with the lead bunch. I knew I could hang in there for just one more lap, so I dug really deep over the bridge and managed to get near to the front on the downhill as the Kingston Wheelers leadout train got into position. I gave it everything I had for the last turn, managed to hold it together as a guy in front of me hit the kerb and crashed, and thrashed my legs like never before to make it over the line about halfway through the bunch, a great achievement for my first race! Looking at the video of the finish below, it looks like I was somewhere between 12th and 15th place.

In that final push I logged my best ever power figures for a 1-minute effort – and with more sprint training I have a feeling that there’s more to come… a top-10 finish and some BC points perhaps?

April summary:

Picture credits: my wife for the photos, wplatt of Kingston Wheelers for the video.

Tags: RookieVeteranRacer