Hugh Trenchard

In an effort to do a quasi-simulated stage race this weekend in order to prepare for the upcoming 5-stage race in Tobago, I capped off four quite hard days of training with the Masters race in Cedar, a few km south of Nanaimo.

Leading up to the Masters race, this was my week:

After the 50km TT last weekend, I did a couple of easy days Monday Tuesday, followed by:

Wed
2 hours – up Munns Road and area, but not pushing hard

Thurs
2 hours – Russ Hay’s group ride, where Mike Korb, Curtis Deardon (recently third at the Provincial TT champs) and I did a hard three-up tempo off the front of the group to Matticks farm, followed by a more relaxed pace and a sprint or two.

Friday (had the day off work)
4 hours, hard – Munns Rd, Finlayson Arm, Malahat, new subdivision climb/roads out of Shawnigan Lk, around Shawnigan Lk, and home. Legs felt good, but I definitely pushed them hard.

Saturday
3 hrs – Burnside group – a small group, but as usual for this ride, there was an airport sprint followed by tempo paceline around Landsend. After the airport, where the original group of about eight disintegrated, the paceline group consisted of Nick Rowe, Duane Martindale and me, after Andrew McCartney had to pull off due to some issues with a flaring IT band injury. We continued with some hard efforts past the ferry terminal. After Duane turned off at Broadmead, Nick and I did another sprint effort and some more medium paceline work around the waterfront. When Nick turned off, I did two more sprints.

Sunday – the Masters race

Feeling somewhat fatigued from the previous few days, but still wanting to push my body extensively, I decided to ride from home to Cedar (about 100km) before doing the race (63km). I’d arranged with Vaughn Marshall to drive my car while I rode up so we could return from the race together in the car. Vaughn was good enough to start his drive early and to stop twice along the way, once on the Malahat and once in Duncan, to see how I was doing. As I was doing well and on schedule, I continued on my way to the race start in Cedar.

A couple of people asked me why I would choose to do a long ride before the race rather than afterward and begin the race fresh. There are a few reasons: riding home after the race would mean a very long day, as the race started at 11:30; also I find the motivation to ride much after a race to be quite low and the potential quite high to say, after the race is over, “oh that was hard enough, I don’t need to do anything more”; but most importantly, if you are preparing for longer and more competitive races, there is enormous training benefit to doing a race following a fairly hard ride. Masters races are perfect for this because they are low-key and short enough that one can, if he has solid base fitness, do a hard ride first and still be able to race effectively, push very hard, but without the potential of being dropped as might be the case for a Category 1,2 race.

As it was, in the Australian pursuit, there were about 35 riders in total: 2 or 3 in the 60-64, going off first, and then about 10 or so in the 50-59 group, followed by my group, the 40-49 group, consisting of about 15 riders, and only two, I think, in the 30-39 group. I’m not sure of the time gaps between groups, but my group likely had to close a 4 minute gap on the 50’s, and another three on the 60’s (or vice versa, possibly). With only a couple of riders in the 30 group behind, we weren’t very worried they would catch the leading 40’s, but it was going to be difficult for us to catch the 50’s ahead, with strong riders like Derek Tripp and Mike Sevcov in the mix.

As my legs were tight from the ride up, I found the first 10km to be quite hard, but after a couple of accelerations, found my legs loosening up. Ryan Calbick was riding very strongly as were a couple of Vancouver guys, who started out immediately with a short breakaway – pulled back after about 5k. Aaron Dusseault was also looking strong, as were others in the group. We kept a fairly even paceline for the most part, but Ryan and a couple others were throwing in some hard accelerations over the short climbs of the 21km course (done 3X), causing the group to split and to yo-yo a fair amount. After two laps the group was down to about six or seven of us. On the third lap, Ryan put in a hard acceleration up the hardest of the climbs, with about 15km to go – I went with him and then accelerated again over the crest. I was hoping to take Ryan with me, but I discovered I was on my own. It was largely into a head wind and my legs were beginning to feel pretty sapped, but I decided I might as well go for it, and kept pushing hard. While I had about 20 seconds at one point, they were chasing hard behind me, and I could see on a couple of descents that they were taking the time back quickly and my little breakaway was over with about 5k to go.

With three to go, Ryan jumped. I followed. Aaron followed me. We had a sizeable gap, until misfortune occurred: on the last of the descents before a short climb to the straightaway to the finish, I took a pull and crouched into a tuck; Ryan was behind me and, as I tucked, I could feel Ryan’s front wheel contact my rear wheel, heard a scream, and a crash. Ryan went into the ditch and broke his collarbone in two places. The motivation to maintain a hard pace was lost and part of me wanted to stop to help Ryan. But the rest of what remained of our group came up and we continued on to contest the finish. In the end, Aaron took the sprint, with a Vancouver guy second, Tony Wakelin third, and me, half a wheel back of Tony. Ryan came in a few minutes later, bloodied and holding an arm against his chest – an unfortunate ending to a great race for Ryan and to his season.

For the overall, our group caught everyone ahead except for Mike Sevcov, Derek Tripp and David Mercer. We were barely 10 seconds back of David and Mike at the finish, and Derek had another great race to stay ahead of those two by about 20 seconds.

For me, I accomplished what I set out to do – had a fantastic training and racing day. I was tired, which was of course the intention, but with some recovery now these last two weeks will have been very good preparation for Tobago in three weeks. I haven’t quite figured out what the schedule will be from now until then – but it will start with this week being very easy.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.