Race Report: MoSpeed TT Series Race 1 of 5

Last night I kicked off the spring time trial season with a 15 km race out in Lewisville, NC.  One of the local bike shops, Mock Orange Bikes, is hosting a bi-weekly TT series on Tuesday nights this spring.  Riders are sent off every minute on the fast out-and-back course of smooth country road.

It was a bit of a rush to get out to Lewisville and register by 6 PM (thankfully I had decided to throw my bike and gear in the back of my car before leaving for work in the morning!), but nonetheless, I made it out there with about 20 mins to get a solid warmup in.  Unfortunately, during my warmup, I saw the screen on my Powertap LYC start flashing "LOBATT".  Sure enough, by the time I finished my warmup and took my place in line for the race, the LYC was completely dead.  I was kind of bummed because lately, I've become so dependent on my power meter for race pacing, and I really wanted see if I could nail a target of ~120% FTP for my power output.  Plus, I love to look/obsess over my power file after a race and see if I can set new personal power records.  But, overall I think that I still had a pretty evenly paced race.  One of my bread 'n butter workouts on the trainer is 2 x 20 min intervals at 95-105% FTP, so I knew if my perceived exertion was at the upper end of how I feel on those intervals, I would be near my target power output.  The only thing difficult about the course were the very long and shallow inclines/declines.  Without my power meter, I typically tend to slack on the downhills when I "feel" like I'm going fast, but in reality, my power output is generally below target.

I have no clue what my true power output actually was in the race, so I have no idea how to interpret my time or speed, but I took 7th overall and scored 57 points in the series with my time of 22:36 (23.9 mph).  I'm happy with the effort, considering that I've been more focused on long course endurance for the past few months rather than short course speed.  I rode this TT with my "training" tires on and I've got a fresh set of Vittoria Corsa Evo CX II's in the mail that I will probably put on before one of the next races.  It will be interesting to see how throwing on a tire with a much lower crr will affect my speed.