Battenkill Retrospective
First off, let me apologize to all of you who ended up on my last blog post looking for a blow by blow race report on how things unfolded in the Cat 4 Orange race. A quick search on Twitter and Google will point you to quite a few blogs that will deliver the race details if that's what you're looking for, but that's not really what you got in my last post. I indulged myself in a little self-therapy at your expense, figuring by focusing in on the thoughts swirling in my head sufficiently to commit them to the keyboard, I'd have an easier and faster time in getting over my disappointment.
Turns out that did the trick, but it also had an added benefit. In sharing my thoughts, observations, and question marks, I readied myself to move on as I had hoped, but I also exposed enough information for a few friends, fellow racers, and even the Coach to subsequently weigh-in to offer some needed encouragement, as well as a few sound ideas as to what might have gone wrong for me. So for those of you who sent me messages on Facebook, emails, blog comments, or phone calls -- I owe you a big thanks! For everyone else, I'll share with you what I took away from the feedback I received.
A number of folks were quick to try their best to deal with my damaged ego. If my 34th place at Battenkill had been the only race result for me to point to, or if finishing 15 minutes back of first was more or less routine for me, then everyone would agree that perhaps I've aimed my expectations a tad bit too high. However, as the Coach pointed out, you don't finish 10th and then 4th at the Johnny Cake B race (aka Trooper Binkerhoff Memorial) without having some pretty competitive fitness levels. I'm certainly not a 20 something genetically gifted stud destined for the podium each time he races, but I'm good enough to at least aim for the top of the Cat 4s (but acknowledging I won't always hit the target).
The next most common theme was that I was dressed for winter weather while racing on a warm spring day. I honestly never felt excessively hot during the race -- warm, but not over-heating. But when someone during the race asked me "Where are you from? My guess is Ecuador!", I took it as a hint that I was perhaps standing out in the pack for my poor clothing decisions. Based upon the post-race exchanges I've had with folks, it does seem like I was one of the very few who happened to be wearing way too much for what the weather called for.
Supposedly there are scientfic studies that conclude that if your core body temperature rises too high, your performance will deteriorate. I was one of the few boneheads who needed to strip down, so it does beg the question as to whether or not I handicapped myself more than the vast majority of the field. In any case, in the future I'll be erring on the side of lining up feeling a little cooler next time around (or I'll just outsource my clothing decisions to someone more qualified, like my wife).
Delving into the numbers
The most interesting insight I got was focused on observations made from my PowerTap numbers (of course I find any insights gleaned from numerical analyses to be interesting!) Before I show you my Battenkill charts, take a look at a "normal" interval work-out for me where my normalized power AND my average power were both roughly at 270 Watts for ten minutes.
Normal 10 minute work-out interval
Without going into the details on the difference between normalized and average power, the fact that the two numbers are so similar implies that despite the zig-zags you see in the yellow line above (Power), I held a pretty constant output throughout the interval. Even where I upped the power (as observed in the two plateaus above), it was done smoothly and with very little variation (you should see a similar interval done on the trainer -- almost no variation!).
Now for comparison, take a look at a ten minute stretch before my legs shut down at Battenkill.
Representative 10 minutes from the first two hours of Battenkill
That snippet is more or less representative of the first 60% of my Battenkill effort, until my legs gave way and were replaced with a toy car engine powered by AAA batteries. While my normalized power is roughly the same as what you saw in the interval from above, the average power here is just 221. Again, without going into the technical details (partly because it would bore you, and partly because I doubt I could explain it properly), at the end of the day that discrepancy, combined with the massive variation in the yellow Watt line in the race snippet, is evidence that my legs were repeated going from a resting state to a massive exertion, and then back again.
Now the initial conclusion you might draw from this comparison is that I just didn't properly prepare myself. While I stressed my legs with the effort in the intervals, it wasn't done in a way that would have properly prepared me for the race day experience. And to a certain extent, I'd have to say there's an ounce of truth to that (and perhaps gives support to the idea that the best way to prepare for a race is to do more racing).
But...the feedback that I got on my Battenkill power curve (like the one above) was that it looked an awful lot like one taken not from a road race, but instead, it could easily have been snipped from a Crit. There would have been little for me to write had I not excelled at a crit over the weekend, as I really haven't been training to do well at those races. So, while it might be a surprise that I didn't do so well at an event that looked like a Crit through the lens of the power data, it does come as a surprise that someone well qualified in such matters characterized what he saw from my road race as being very Crit like.
I know that the field was lively at Battenkill such that you could never just settle in to a constant cadence or wattage #. However, it wasn't so punchy in my opinion such that it should have required crit like efforts where every 1 km you go idle four times (easing through a 4 cornered crit course) and then stomp out big watts another four times (coming out of the 4 corners).
I'd like to get more input on this one, so if you don't mind, share a comment or drop me a note. Does my snippet above look odd given where it came from? Am I perhaps without knowing it opening up gaps as I'm resting too long and then forcing my legs to unnecessarily burn match after match to keep things together (and more importantly, stressing my body in a way very unlike how most of my training has been done). For those of you who did Battenkill (maybe even from my race) -- were you maintaining maintaining steadier RPMs and Watts with lower variation?
Closing Thought
Despite my yearning for learning and desire to root cause what went wrong to that I can tinker the plan and execution for the future, perhaps in the end I'll have to just fall back on what might be the best input I've heard over the past three days. To paraphrase, I'm a human with a thousand variables, racing against 100+ other humans with a thousand variables each, on a course with so many features that it alone adds another thousand variables. Don't get hung up perhaps looking for a needle in a haystack, and instead, get back out there and get ready for the next race!
