Sunapee Preview

This Saturday I'm racing up at the Lake Sunapee Bike Race in west central New Hampshire. Sunapee is one of the oldest events still on the New England calendar, and is one of the few events remaining that has been around longer than me. Because on Sunday I'm also signed up for The Shamrock Duathlon in Glastonbury, CT, I'm harboring a bit of concern regarding par-boiling my legs on Saturday's rolling course. The 45+ Masters race will likely feature numerous attacks and long breakaways, because let's face it, the 45+ race always does. Not the best warmup for a duathlon, so, I made an executive decision to skip the masters race in favor of competing with the Cat 3s.

Will racing with the kids be any easier? I doubt it, but I've convinced a few of my other mates from the 35+ group to join me, and we'll be helping youngster Feltslave take on the likes of the Automaton in the 46 mile event. A fairly sparse field of only aroung 35 riders is signed up right now, but maybe it will fill in some more today. NEBC has about eight riders on the list, so they'll be responsible for dictating the race.

The Sunapee course is deceivingly hard. Here is a section of last year's Polar graph, showing approximately one lap of the course. I did not have mileage for this, so the x-axis is time, which distorts the hills a little bit.



Take note of the little climb right over the 41 minute mark. This is the one that seems to be the most trouble. I did some checking here, and it seems we climbed just over 50 meters in 2.5 minutes. That's a VAM of over 1200m/hour. No wonder my HR was maxing out. Yeah, sure, this isn't anywhere near the 1600m/hour the big boys churn out on the alpine passes in the Tour, and it's only for 2.5 minutes, not 25 minutes, but this kind of pace on the climbs is what makes racing more than just training. Lather, rinse and repeat this process over the five or six lumps on the Sunapee course profile (and then do it for two laps, or in the case of the 1-2-3 race, three) and you have a tough little rolling race. I'm looking forward to it as usual. Thanks for reading.