These season review questions appeared on Joe Friel's Blog a few days ago. They sort of assume that you are a serious competitor and train in order to get better race results. Close enough, right? Why don't we all pull an OJ and take a stab at them? I'll go first.
Here are five questions to answer at the end of your race season and before starting to prepare for the coming season:
1. What was the high point of your season? Why does this stand out for you? Was it what you thought it would be at the start of the season?
I'll divert and say the entire month of August. This was probably because the weather in the spring and early summer was not so great. When August came around, rather than being burned out, I was loving my bikes, riding at every opportunity, staying out until past dark because I didn't want to put the bike away. Of course we had D2R2, and the weeknight TT's went well, but other than those I did nothing stellar race-wise. Yet it stands out because I was enjoying decent form and putting it to use by loving to ride.
2. What was your greatest disappointment? Why did this happen? Is there anything you could have done to have avoided it?
I will have to say coming up empty-handed at both Jiminy Peak in the spring, and Bow in the fall, in both cases more due to poor tactics than to lacking fitness. I had great form at Jiminy and wasted it on a dumb attack 5k from the end because I thought the winning break was long gone. Turned out they were caught in the final kilometer. That finish climb has been very good to me in the past and I should have been in there contesting the win. Bow, maybe not the win, but attacking with 1.5 laps to go was stupid and it prevented me from doing battle with the other contenders on the last lap. I have too much experience to waste good form making stupid mistakes like these.
3. Looking back, do you think you trained as wisely and as hard as you could have trained?
Wisely? Maybe. Hard? Probably not. The spring went well, beginning with a huge week under the sunny California skies. In the spring I did a lot of racing. Then I even got a power meter. At first I did some specific work to test my abilities at various durations. For a little while I even worked on my greatest weaknesses, sprints and other extremely high power efforts. Then the summer came and by June I was pretty raced out and could have used a break, and in July I got the swine flu or whatever it was that caused me to crap my way from 170 pounds down to 161 in just 48 hours. When I got going again I was more focused on the TTs and so I can't say I ever put together a meaningful block of Special High Intensity Training like I should have. On the other hand I am up to 374 hours on the bike in the past nine months, by far the most I've done since back when my training diaries were handwritten.
4. What is the one thing you most need to work on for next season in order to perform better?
See above, but also I need to get tougher. By that I mean that masters races are always up the road and I need to be able to ride up front more and still be able to have my strength at the finishes. I'm still pretty good at efforts of 3-5 minutes and in races like Jiminy and Sunapee I can be in the mix on the short final climbs. However, I have been relying too much on a race being "easy" and staying together up to that point. And of course I need to work on my shorter efforts as well. Lastly, even though I am a road rider and this is a road season post, one thing that I learned/confirmed with the stupid power meter is that I am most efficient at high cadences, or perhaps more accurately I suck at low cadences. Having never been a grinder, I guess this makes sense and I always knew this to some extent, but I never realized just how badly my power falls off the map when my cadence drops. This knowledge is helpful for performing in TTs and on certain climbs, but it also identifies a weakness. Some situations favor a rider who can put out big crank torque at low rpms, cyclocross being the prime example. Just one more reason why I perform relatively poorly in this discipline compared to peers I own in road TTs, and a weakness I should address with training.
5. What would you most like to accomplish next season? Is it a good stretch and yet within your reach if you do things right?
Winning a race would be nice. It's been a long time. Yes it is within my reach. Helping team mates win or do well too. But most of all I want to have fun, relax, stay healthy and be able to keep on doing this for another 25 years at least. Thanks for reading.
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