TNWC #6

I was going to do a 20' threshold interval before the race tonight...I'm glad I didn't. The wind was blowing pretty strong and it's one of those winds where you think a break doesn't have a chance (and usually you're wrong).

10 min into it Jamie attacks and Toby, Sammy and I get across and we start driving it. We're all working well and I ended up pulling most of the downwind backstretch and trying to keep it at around 28 mph. When you hit turn 3 the wind hits you like a slap in the face.

After a while Jamie dropped off...then Toby was gone. Sammy and I still had a huge gap and we were still working well but I was wondering if we could hold off the pack for 25 min. I was trying to take pulls into the VO2 range at about 120% of FTP (around 330w). Sammy was absolutely killing it tonight and I give him a lot of credit to the break's success. Very impressive effort by him.

We could see a small chase 15sec or so behind and near the end I used some tactics and told him to slow things down so that we hit the line at exactly 45:00 (the race was 45' plus 2). This saved us a lap then I drilled it for 1:30 to bring the gap back up.

On the last lap I said that we go hard till turn 3 (and into the wind) then we'll drag race it side by side to the line. I thought that was the best way to finish a long break instead of monkeying around. As expected Sammy beat me in the sprint (he told me later that he was cramping pretty bad at the end). It was a great race. Very hard, so hard that I didn't take one drink the entire race!