Form is building for Rutgers

Well, we're 6 weeks into the semester now, and I've laid down some pretty consistent improvement in my form since I started training on New Year's Day. Its also pretty sweet that within the last four of those weeks, I revived the Wentworth Cycling Team (again) and already have a bunch of new freshman recruits to hopefully take over when I graduate.

(What is wrong with this guy?)

I don't train with a SRM or powertap or anything cool like that, but its nice to get an idea of power output in numbers rather than going by feel. I have a Garmin, so at some point if I feel like investing in power at least I have a computer than can pick up the signal. Who knows, maybe this year when they come out with the Vector it will be the perfect fit.

I've had two tests so far this year, the Harpoon Indoor TT and the Landry's Indoor TT. Something about indoor time trials gets me excited, I don't know if its the atmosphere, the beer, or the thought of kicking the asses of triathletes with stupid-ridiculous bikes. They made a pretty cool video on this year's event:



Harpoon was about a month ago, and needless to say I was still in an early base period, building form off pretty much nothing. I went into it with an ambition of maybe winning the collegiate heat. They were running behind schedule, and the collegiate heat was the last of the day, so what our 9:45 start time was turned into about a midnight start. Problem? No, I just didn't anticipate bringing alot of food to keep my energy up. So after sitting, a beer, waiting, and warming up, I wasn't feeling that great, the course wasn't easy, and I posted an okay time of 21:44. I couldn't see any of the other teams (BC's and MIT's) times because they were on different screens, so I was really just gauging my effort off of Gregg Izzo, who threw it down right at the end to beat me by two seconds. I averaged 289 watts, okay, whatever, not the end of the world, I'm sure I'll get better.
Test#2 came about at the BTT ITT (too much TT) at Landry's six days ago. I just got the official results yesterday, so I could figure out hour much improvement I've had in three weeks since Harpoon. Not surprisingly, I got beat by Natan (BU) but not by too much. A lot of the collegiate and GLV guys signed up for the 1:40 heat, so we could throw it down together. Bruley was up front, Natan to my left and Izzo to his left. Bruley jumped out to an early lead but faded back to fifth half-way through, I tried to follow Natan as best as I could but never could bring 5-8 second gap down enough without blowing my legs up for the rest of the race. Natan finished second to some random guy next to Bruley, I followed in third about twenty seconds or so back of him, then Izzo, Lachance, and Rosenholtz weren't too far behind. Averaged 333 watts over 16:47, so the form is steadily improving, and I'm losing a little weight too so thats helping the watts/kg ratio of 4.0. I've lost 7 pounds in the last few weeks, hopefully I can keep that momentum going and lose my German beer gut.

Rutgers is now less than a week away, and I'm pretty pumped. The ITT is always classic, and I hope they keep the circuit race running in the direction as it was last year. That crit though, I'm not that fond of. The last turn is a bit extreme, so maybe expect crashes in the lower categories.

(picture of this last turn from a few years ago)

Hopefully the A field will run through it fairly safely, but I expect UVM to pull some crazy shit like they always do and take the crit win. I'd watch Derek, that kid got fast (not that he wasn't already from winning overall in B's last year).