Recovery

Rather than just write up a race report for the Sturbridge-Palmer weekend, I thought I'd share a little discussion I had with one of my wiser teammates while warming up yesterday. John says to me "Most people don't know how to recover. They think a two hour tempo ride is a recovery ride." Amen bro. It's easy to say "hard enough on your hard days, and easy enough on your easy days," but it's hard to do. If you accomplish the former, the latter should come naturally. So far this season, I haven't felt the need for too many recovery rides. As often happens with masters with more to do than train and play video games, my recovery days usually mean late nights at work and no riding at all. It's not ideal, but I get more recovery that way than I would with a two hour tempo ride.

John went on to detail how he avoids group rides unless he wants some hard work between races. Again I agree. I feel training alone is very important, because you can always make the ride hard enough without making it too hard. When I'm recovering, I ride around the neighborhood in my climbing gears, barely keeping pace with the little kids on their BMX bikes. Living in suburbia has its advantages, because I always find that open roads in more rural terrain encourages one to push a bit more than tooling around here does, with stop signs every quarter mile.

I'm writing this because I'm tired. Last night after Palmer I was really tired. Not smoked legs, just overall drained of energy. Sturbridge seemed pretty hard. In the past I've always skipped it and saved myself for Palmer on Sunday. By in the past, I mean 2004 to present. You see, Palmer 2004 was my first race back after a seven year hiatus, so it feels like a homecoming of sorts. This year I went to Sturbridge to try to help the team. The race is on a seven mile circuit, with an extremely fast downhill run into the finish. The unique thing about this race is the promoter, Mike Norton, secured use of the entire road for every field, so we had a rolling enclosure and no yellow line rule. This guaranteed aggressive racing, because even though some of the course is on fairly narrow country roads, there was plenty of room for our 75 rider Master 45+ field.

Right away I knew it wasn't a good finish for me. It also didn't look good for a break. We were flying, doing laps in the 15-16 minute range (~27 mph average). The finish stretch was over 40 mph. I just sat in for three laps, then had a go at an attack just to warm the legs and see how it felt. I got a nice gap, but didn't dig hard and got reeled in on the hill a few miles later. Laps four and five were more aggressive, and eventually Eric Pearce (Bethel) bridged to and rode right through a four man break on the hill. He got about a minute up the road solo, and Tom Officer also got away, but never caught Pearce. On the sixth of seven laps, I attacked and bridged up to Tony Settel (Demo's Wonder Wheel), who was chasing Officer solo. I caught him on the little climb before the finish stretch, but he was laboring and called to me to wait. I hesitated, but we were only a few hundred meters clear of the pack, and he looked spent, so I made a split second decision to keep going. Maybe I should have waited, as he's really strong and would have been good company on the flats if given a few seconds to recover.

I pushed on but didn't make much of a dent in neither Officer's nor Pearce's lead before retreating to the pack shortly before the final time up the largest "climb" on the rolling course. Over the top Officer was still in sight, as was Pearce, at maybe 25 and 45 seconds respectively. After the downhill I recovered a bit and went to the front of the single file chase line, where Gearworks had a man on the front pulling hard. I took over from him and did about two k in the 12, taking it into the bottom of the little rise where I'd caught Settel a lap earlier. Spent, I swung off with Officer at only about ten seconds and Pearce looking like he was easily within reach of the sprinting pack. I lost contact before the finish road, and just rolled in. Later I found they got Officer, but Pearce miraculously stayed away and took the win by about 20 meters over the sprinting field. Duano and John got in the top ten, but I was pretty pissed that we didn't catch the break. I fucked this one up. I should not have tried to bridge solo, as it was too much of a longshot. Instead, I should have used my energy to pace the field more on the last lap. I was proud of the effort I put in to pull back Officer on the last lap, but it wasn't enough.

Short version of the Palmer report: The race seemed hard and fast, but my average HR was only 136. I think this means I was tired from Sturbridge, as well as very crafty and experienced at Palmer. I managed to ride a decent race without expending too much energy. I made one effort to assist with keeping the race-long five man break from getting too far ahead, and then with about 10K to go when they looked to be buzzard meat, just twenty seconds ahead, I made a bridge effort. I thought at least one or two riders might come with me, and if three of us made the bridge then we might be able to rejuvenate the break and keep it away to the end, and then use our fresher legs to finish it off. I guess nobody else felt the same way, as I ended up almost getting across solo before the field wound it up from behind, reeling in me, then all of them a short time later.

This was where the fun really started. The run into town was pretty insane. Usually at Palmer, the field gets very pointy at the front and the attacks fly and it's fast but pretty safe. This year it was an angry swarm of bees, like a Cat 3 race. I was heading up the gutter when two or three guys tangled hard in front of me, but thanks to some superb bike handling by two of them, they somehow stayed up and I escaped what looked like a certain "right in front of me nowhere to go" wreck unscathed. In the final two K I got on Graydon Steven's wheel as he made his way up the left, taking serious end of race liberties with the yellow line rule. At 400 meters to go in the uphill sprint, we were about twenty back, out in the wind a bit, but he was still moving forward. At 200 meters he pulled in to the right to force himself a spot in the train, but I choked and started my sprint up the left side, where there was plenty of racing room. Too little, too early, as I had nothing and the sprint wound up on the right and left me like I was nailed to the road. I went backwards at least a dozen spots before blowing up completely and sitting down with fifty meters to go as another dozen swarmed by. I haven't seen the results, but I was at least thirty back at the finish, maybe more. John G. got 7th and the Cronoman rode the train for 10th, so it wasn't a total loss for the team. That's it for now, go get some recovery, thanks for reading.