No. 53: Fayetteville Stage Race 2012 – Race Report

Hey everyone,

I just came back from Fayetteville Stage Race and there were some good things and bad things about that race, with more of the latter. Unlike Mineral Wells Stage Race – where placement was determined by a point system (where you get points based on your stage finishes and the person with the most – or least number of points depending on how they score it – wins the overall classification), placement would be determined by cumulative finish time where the person who finishes the race in the least amount of time wins. Unfortunately, none of this ended up being relevant to me since I dropped out on the very last lap of the last stage.

Preparation

I couldn’t train enough because it rained a lot over the last two weeks. I do have an indoor trainer but you can’t really train at the same intensity or duration. It’s not that I didn’t get any better since Lago Vista, but I didn’t improve enough or gain enough endurance to match the physical demands of Fayetteville. Here’s a snapshot of my last training session before the race – 3 x  7-10 minute intervals:

HR vs Power 15.03.2012

Splits 15.03.2012

And here are the splits from the last time I did this workout:

Splits 07.02.2012

I’ve written a table comparing the average power output between the intervals:

Comparison of Power Between Workouts

There’s some good news about this – I was able to increase my power output by about 12% from a little more than a month ago. This isn’t exactly a fair comparison because my heart rate was also about 5 bpm higher this time – which means I tried harder – but that’s also good news because I didn’t know I could sustain a heart rate that high. What I’d do is I would start out the interval at around 150 bpm, and then work my way up to 170 bpm midway through the first lap and hold it there for the rest of the interval, averaging about 167 bpm for the entire interval. I still need to do two things though – I need to decrease the amount of time between intervals and focus more on time-based intervals instead of distance-based ones. I plan to focus on the former these next two weeks. For example, tomorrow I will do 2×4 lap intervals but only rest for 3 laps instead of 4 laps between the intervals (found out this morning that it would rain…I’ll try this on Thursday).

Stage 1 – Road Race

I felt optimistic coming into the race and I felt really good on the first lap and I didn’t have any trouble matching the accelerations and the only thing that really bothered me was this one rider who kept shaking as if he had trouble controlling his bike. I tried to avoid him but I ended up spending most of the time within 2-3 bike lengths of him. The first half of the lap was mostly downhill with a short climb (KOM) near the beginning and the second half mostly uphill. I didn’t find getting up the hill very difficult – it was mostly the few minutes afterward trying to catch my breath that was psychologically difficult. Said attempted to join a breakaway but the pack later reeled him in…nevertheless, he managed to stay in the front and continued to do a lot of the pacemaking. Sometime after the second KOM a couple of riders broke away from the pack (I later realized one of them was a semi-professional triathlete – Sean Schnur who ended up winning). Said ended up doing the bulk of the chasing but no one wanted to cooperate. I finally got sick of staying near the back with the guy with the jerky movements so I decided to move up to the front and help Said a little with the chasing. Unfortunately, that ended up being a really bad decision as there was a series of stair-step climbs immediately afterward and I ended up getting dropped when the pack surged.

I felt pretty stupid about that…it was the last hard part of the race and I think if I waited until after those climbs to bridge up I would have been alright. Instead I got dropped with just a quarter of the race to go and ended up 8 minutes back. Before the finish, I saw a Bike Barn rider trying to catch me but I managed to stay away from him at the line. Afterward, Said said he was frustrated since Bike Barn didn’t help him out with the chase – after the results came in, it turned out that half of the Bike Barn guys dropped early on and finished behind me…if that’s any consolation.

Anyway, here’s the data from the first stage:

Heart Rate v.s. Power for Stage 1

You can see the point at which I dropped from the pack. It’s where my heart rate fell precipitously at about 1:35. I spent a few minutes at 170 bpm at 1:25, working my way up to the front of the pack. Once I got there it dropped a little but still stayed above 160 bpm. At around 1:32, it went back up again to 170 bpm for about 3 minutes until I couldn’t hold it any longer. As soon as I got dropped, I saw an average of 213 watts…definitely the hardest 1:30 effort I’ve recorded so far, which is good news, but also bad news since I got dropped.

Stage 2 – Time Trial

The second stage was an 8.9-mile time trial – the second TT for me this season. I think I learned from my mistakes last time so I decided to be more conservative at the beginning so I could put a harder effort towards the end. The first 2/3 of the course was relatively easy (which is still really hard since I’m going at 170 bpm) since the course was mostly rolling downhill with a tailwind. I kept a steady pace of 25-30 mph at about 250 watts. The last third was really difficult for me – it was mostly uphill into a head wind and there were some points where I was only going 10 mph. My legs were really getting fatigued and I was scared that I might have gone too hard at the beginning but I kept it steady until the finish.

Fayetteville HR (Purple) v.s. MWSR HR (Blue)

The blue curve represents my heart rate at Mineral Wells whereas the purple curve represents my HR at Fayetteville. You can see that I indeed started more conservatively but managed to sustain a higher heart rate from about five minutes onward. In addition to that, I averaged 247 watts at Fayetteville against 220 watts at Mineral Wells – a 12.27% increase over the span of 3 weeks. Instead of finishing last like I usually do in time trials, I beat 6 guys in my category and 5 guys in the category above me. It’s nothing to brag about but it’s a sign that I’m getting better. I felt relatively good about the wattage and HR as I hadn’t held 247 watts or 167 bpm over 25 minutes before (the longest recorded time at that intensity was the training data at the top of this post).

Stage 3 – Road Race

I don’t really have much to say here – I was so fatigued from the day before that I didn’t have the legs for this day. I dropped out midway through this stage and I only managed to average 140 bpm. I dropped a little bit further out from the place I dropped on the first stage but instead of continuing at 200 watts I really couldn’t pedal at all and if I continued I would have risked injury. This wasn’t a good way to end the weekend, and I felt really demoralized afterward, but I feel a little bit better and more motivated after resting today. Said had a good finish for 7th place. For a more action-oriented race report, you might want to check out Cat 4 rider Jack Mott’s race report.

Recap

The races at this point of the season feel a lot harder than those of a month ago – the following table compares the watts and bpm of the last three road races I completed:

If you only look at the average heart rate, you’d think that I put in a similar effort at Fayetteville and Walburg, but it was much harder for me. Here’s a graph indicating the points at which I surpassed 170 bpm at Walburg:

And this one indicates those points at FSR:

You can see that I surpassed 170 bpm about 5 times at Walburg over the course of 2:10 whereas I surpassed that mark 9 times over the course of 1:30 at FSR and probably would have needed to do that 4-5 more times had I stayed with the pack. So, the difficulty is definitely ramping up. It’s disappointing results like this that sometimes make you want to give up, but as long as those numbers keep going up I’ll stay motivated to keep trying.