My first 40km ITT - Wisconsin State TT Championships

Today was my first 40km ITT. I had signed up for the event a week or so in advance with the intention of getting a 'gold standard' workout to base my training upon. I was not realy worried about the results because i hadn't trained specifically for the event at all and don't have a time trial bike, or even clip-on aero bars for that matter.

After driving the course the previous Wednesday I pretty much decided that I wasn't going to do the race because there was so much up and down to it and i'm 192lbs at the moment. I've been working hard on shorter intervals and haven't even done a 2x20 or similar workout for at least 3 months.

Well after a 1.5 hour ride on Friday i decided to do it anyway. According to the PMC I was sitting at -29 TSB, but i wasn't relying too heavily on that yet as in my past 28 days i only had 15 rides, with a 7 day period in the middle with no ride logged.

The race was the Wisconsin State TT Championships and the course profile (created by me using the website) is located here:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=441389

I expected a gap between my average power and normalized power as after driving the course i came up with a makeshift variable power pacing strategy in my head. I was using 265 watts as my expected FTP but again kind of a shot in the dark since i haven't been training threshold. This spring i did a 20km ITT with AP 273 watts & NP 276 (very flat course). On this ride my AP was 236 and the NP was 254.

Peak 20 min wattage was 265 and was the first 20 minutes of the course. The wind was from the SSW and my pacing strategy had me going out pretty hard based on the course profile.

I don't think I have any specific questions for the masses out there, but I've been diligently reading the threads here for quite a while and I thought i'd contribute one finally.

Fire away with questions / comments!

Attached Files

Johnson_Matthew_9_17_2006.zip (26.4 KB, 37 views)

Wow! Good for you. Not only do you set out to ride your first 40K ITT, but you guesstimate your FTP and work out a VP pacing strategy to boot. Bravo! It doesn't matter how you did, your thinking is on the right track.

That was a helluva hard course! Good ride.