Race Report here

Here’s the piccie of my bike pre race. I normally do this ahead of the race but I forgot my card reader. This is perhaps  the last piccie of that particular bike as it is cracked and being sent back to Cervelo hopefully to get a warranty replacement.

Thought I’d do a little race analysis.

OVERALL

Totally chuffed with how I raced. It’s the hardest I’ve raced in a long long time. I was in the race and knew it. This was so much fun. Racing to win was a pleasure even though I failed.

SWIM

I was pretty relaxed going in to this race and given the small field I was pretty sure I’d be one of the fastest. The aim was to either sit in the front group or break clear on my own. I had a lucky break at the start to be swimming on my own about 10m to one side of the main group. I could establish I was going faster before we merged and at that point chose to push on to ensure they didn’t get on my feet. It worked well and I managed to relax from there. At an early turn I was able to look back and see some of my wave fairly close – this was enough to keep me pushing. I was able to swim bilaterally and ended the swim not out of breath. For  me thats sure signs of a well paced swim.

BIKE

Though I had a power meter I was just tracking data not using it to decide pace. I did look down at it a few times as I pushed on over rises to see figures in the 500s. I pulled back knowing I couldn’t do that too often.

This shows altitude plus heart rate (blue) and power (red). The lines are smoothed over 2 minutes. I’m happy that I produced a reasonably steady ride. My average heart rate was higher than I’d thought it would be (149) but having never raced with a HRM I just took it that my association of ‘effort’ with HR is skewed. I had aerobic decoupling of -1.63%. If my understanding of this is correct it means I was getting marginally more power per Heart beat in the second half. Sounds good to me ;o)

This shows my power with no smoothing. Though my average of 245 and normalised of 253 are about where I’d expect the spikes above aren’t great. I think I would have been served better not having any of those spikes above 400 possibly even 350 would be a better cap. That probably cost me a little on the run.

RUN

I raced this. It felt great. I was leading the race and headed off at the pace I felt was required to win the race.

These are my run splits. There’s definitely a trend. Probably went off a little quick but at least it was a concious decision to do it. Mainly to try and make the chasers believe they couldn’t catch me. My pace through to halfway was definitely enough to not be caught. If I’d ran the second half at the same pace I did 10-15 km I would have been right there with a shout. I am satisfied with this. I tried to win and blew up. I could have probably got a faster time with going out slower but I certainly couldn’t have won the race doing that.

I do wish I had heart rate data for this run and am planning to find a watch for this. Looking for something that will pick up my Garmin ANT+ HR strap. Anyway – during the first half of the run I was breathing hard and working hard. After 15k it was like my legs just would not function fully. My breathing dropped. It felt like the legs just couldn’t handle all the oxygen my aerobic system could supply. Pretty clear run strength is still my limiter and I need to work on my run muscular endurance.

This fills me with enthusiasm for Kona. Perhaps I can finally perform better than my first time there. I’m now got a couple of weeks down time whilst I move house then I’m planning to start my build for Kona.