So, yesterday was the NC State RR Championships. Cat 3 was 67 miles, rolling terrain (a few sharp nasty hills but no sustained climbing), 5 x 13.3 mile laps.
Temperature was 95-100 degrees on the road. Crazy hot.
I was in 2 separate breaks on the first lap, one of which lasted 15+ minutes. Also did a lot of bridging to other breaks later in the race, and also pulling the group back to breaks as well. My goal was to finish with the lead pack while having made it a "difficult race" for everyone else (as opposed to sitting in and waiting for the field sprint and having lots left in the tank afterwards).
I cramped horribly on the first climb of the last lap and limped home with 2 other riders, finishing 20th. Over 20 riders had been dropped and DNF'd by this point.
What was interesting was my power numbers. The first hour I normalized at 281 (my estimated threshold is 285). Through 2 hours it was 262. I ended up with a normalized power of 251 for 2 hours 45 minutes, and that includes the final 10 miles when the lights were totally gone out and I couldn't put out much over 250 even climbing.
Based on this, would you say I need to retest soon, or just bump up my threshold estimate a bit?
As an aside, calculated IF for the entire race was 1.000 per my CycleOps Joule 2.0...
Temperature was 95-100 degrees on the road. Crazy hot.
I was in 2 separate breaks on the first lap, one of which lasted 15+ minutes. Also did a lot of bridging to other breaks later in the race, and also pulling the group back to breaks as well. My goal was to finish with the lead pack while having made it a "difficult race" for everyone else (as opposed to sitting in and waiting for the field sprint and having lots left in the tank afterwards).
I cramped horribly on the first climb of the last lap and limped home with 2 other riders, finishing 20th. Over 20 riders had been dropped and DNF'd by this point.
What was interesting was my power numbers. The first hour I normalized at 281 (my estimated threshold is 285). Through 2 hours it was 262. I ended up with a normalized power of 251 for 2 hours 45 minutes, and that includes the final 10 miles when the lights were totally gone out and I couldn't put out much over 250 even climbing.
Based on this, would you say I need to retest soon, or just bump up my threshold estimate a bit?
As an aside, calculated IF for the entire race was 1.000 per my CycleOps Joule 2.0...