Hot, Hilly, and Crowded

Silverton! First OBRA race of the year for me. Hell of a race to start with! I think I heard 81 starters mentioned by an official at the line. It sure looked like it. And 81 degrees, too. And 6,000+ft of climbing over 4 laps. Bleh!

Some stats:

Duration: 3:01:04
Work: 2523 kJ
Norm Power: 299
VI: 1.29
Distance: 112.535 km
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 1122 232 watts
Cadence: 29 193 85 rpm
Speed: 3.6 76.6 37.3 kph

OK, got that? That's the grand total. For the 3 hrs. Now let's see what the hardest hour was... oh look, it's the very first hour of the race:

Peak 60min (258 watts):
Duration: 1:00:01
Work: 928 kJ
Norm Power: 325
VI: 1.26
Distance: 37.675 km
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 926 258 watts
Cadence: 30 183 85 rpm
Speed: 16.6 76.2 37.7 kph

325W normalized for the first hour with 256W average explains why we started to shell guys. That's a decently solid pace. But the first 20min were even the hardest 20 minute of the ride:

Peak 20min (284 watts):
Duration: 20:01
Work: 341 kJ
Norm Power: 351
VI: 1.24
Distance: 11.732 km
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 926 284 watts
Cadence: 31 183 87 rpm
Speed: 20.3 76.2 35.2 kph

20 minutes at 284W isn't bad at all, but normalized to 351 means that, if you weigh what I do, you probably needed to have a threshold power near that number otherwise you were going to be one hurtin' unit, and pay for it later if you hung on. Scale for size, of course, positioning, ability to shelter from wind, etc etc, but that's a good guesstimate.

And what did the very fist climb look like? Like this: 5 minutes at 393W at 27.3km/h (that's a guess on the actual climb time as my PowerTap doesn't do GPS - just picked what was likely). Uphill with wind. That effort started the 20min effort listed above which also started the hardest 60min effort... which is why, after the first two laps, we pretty much had half the field left. Or something like that.

So then what happened? Well, some really fast guys rolled off the front early. Then HP Chiro decided to chase. And chase. And reel stuff in. But not bridge or create big selections. So after the first lap I drifted back to watch, thinking it was going to be just attrition. And it was. And by lap 3, we were all just hanging out playing games.

We played a few different games, which included:

- Let's Guess Who's Going to Chase Now!
- Avoid the Front!
- Let's All Watch Ryan Trebon! (very popular game)
- Attack! (Just Kidding)

Then, on (I think) the start of lap 4, another group got off. I attempted to follow some moves and do some of that bridging suff, since they weren't that far away most of the time, but it never really went anywhere. And everyone was looking a little bit stuffed. So, at the last corner maybe 4k out I kind punched it into the head/cross wind and sure enough, they all let me go. I did an 8minute time trial, or something like that. La-di-da, I got 10th. At least it's in the money.