Last weekend I did the Climb for Cancer Time Trial up Zoo Hill. This was something new and different, I had a blast. I had 3 of my teammates join me in this suffer-fest: Michael H, Shannon C and Mark M. We all survived and vowed to come back next year and beat our times from this year.
Mike and I went to Starbucks for breakfast … old fashioned doughnut and coffee, the breakfast of champions J I figured that was probably going to be all I could keep down during the race. I rode my bike from there to the race start. This worked really well; I managed to get a good 20 minute warm up in.
You start the TT about 100 yards up from the bottom of the hill. The start is just inside the entrance of the first neighborhood on the left. This is also where you register in the morning and pick up your race number.
They have a clock there and start people off every 55 seconds. It’s a rolling start as you head out the entrance of the neighborhood to the main road where you start the climb. In my mind my plan was to keep it easy until I came to the first turn past the zoo…that didn’t work at all. I kept seeing 300+ watts on my power meter. 300+ ugh!! Lang had warned me about this… I knew this was not good. As I rounded the first corner I settled in and the numbers came down a BIT…now I was really worried! This was hurting …I couldn’t just stop so I kept pushing. I thought, “Well, go as hard s you can and you’ll find out how long you can tolerate this pain and we’ll get some good power info form this. Let’s see how hard you can go until you crack.”
After you round the first corner the grade is not so bad …I was able to get out of the panic state, thinking about how much farther I had to go, and deal with it a bit better. After the second turn, and before the hairpin curve, is a tough section. I was alternating sitting down and standing here. When you get to the hairpin curve you will want to go as wide as you can and stay in your lane. From here you have maybe another quarter mile until it flattens out again for just a tiny bit. The next turn is to the right. Now you will have a series of small hills…the last one being a total killer!!! I knew from my training rides this was going to be the hardest for me especially if I had gone really hard in that lower section, which I had. I don’t remember much about the ride in this section. At this point I was breathing so hard and it took every bit of my mental focus to keep going. When I got to that last hill I gave it my all. I had a huge power spike at the bottom and somehow made my way to the top.
I did it!!! It as a fantastic feeling to finish. I would put it right up there with my IM finishes. This was a very big mental and physical challenge for me. Following the race I did a 2 hr 30 minute ride with Mark and Shannon. We finished strong with a big hill climb at the end. That climb felt so easy compared to what we had done earlier in the day up Zoo!
Two days after the race I had a workout on my schedule that I had been dreading for the last 8 weeks. I went out and did it the other day and guess what …it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Yes it was HARD but after the Zoo Hill TT, riding 3x 8 min at 270 watts with 10 minute recovery seemed MUCH easier than weeks prior, where I was only doing 6x5 minutes at a lower wattage. Unfortunately I only had time for about 5 minutes recovery instead of the 10 minutes I was supposed to take between each set, and I still did it. BTW, don’t do that! I always do the recommended recovery time that my coach gives me… in this case I had to pick up the kids and only had x amount of time so I had to rush:-)
My whole idea of what I can handle in terms of power and time has been recalibrated (that was Lang’s term) …this is exactly what I was hoping would happen after doing this race and what I had hoped for my teammates as well. You will never know how hard you can really go until you do something that will push you right to that edge. I encourage all of you to take challenges like these and really test yourself…don’t be afraid to blow up once in a while. I f you don’t do this you will never really know how hard you can really go! Hope to see all of you at the Zoo hill TT next year! Team JFT2 will be training for this event:-)
Below is my power info for the TT.
After the race Michael and my husband Mike were talking about how heavy my bike was compared to Michael’s. The next morning Michael sent me this analysis:
I was checking into the weight differences between our two bikes and what that might save you on a hill climb. You're carrying extra weight on that hill climb with the power meter. I looked up that weight and it was only 580 grams (that seems a bit light, but let's go with it). I also made and estimate for your total body/bicycle weight and avg power for the ride. Given that this is just for comparison, I don't think the power estimate is critical. Here is what I discovered.
Given:
Hill - 7.4%
Power - 200 Watts
Base estimate with power meter
Total weight - 159 lbs
Speed - 11.48 feet/second (your actual speed was 11.9 f/s)
Estimate minus Power meter
Total weight - 158 lbs
Speed - 11.58 feet/second
Time savings over 2 miles = 8 seconds
Estimate with 4 lbs reduction (my guess at difference between my bike and yours)
Total weight - 155 lbs
Speed - 11.78 feet/second
Time savings over 2 miles = 23.5 seconds
The difference between our two times was about 14 seconds. If you were to shave between 2 and 3 lbs off of your bike weight, we'd be even on that hill. Just to be fair to myself, I am personally weighing in at 182 lbs, so I could listen to myself and shave off 12 lbs of body weight for a substantial improvement :)
I figured this would be a good fyi.
Michael
I sent Michael’s e-mail to Lang, my cycling coach, and asked him for his thoughts. Both Michael H and my husband were trying to convince me to take the PT off and use a race wheel for IMC:-) Before I sent this I knew what Lang was going to say…but I needed to hear it from the man himself:
The pacing advantage and valuable data the powertap provides definitely "outweighs" the weight penalty. A PT hub is only 200g heavier than a regular hub, which is less than half a pound. As Michael's calculations point out, shaving off a whole pound only makes you 8 seconds faster on the cougar mtn. climb, which is a really steep climb - I don't think there's anything that steep at Canada is there? I don't remember what kind of bike Michael has but I think it is a carbon road bike? in which case comparing that to an aluminum tri bike just isn't fair. That P3 in particular is rather heavy - I have the same bike and thus the same problem. For an uphill TT, a light carbon road bike is obviously the preferred steed, but for a long time trial over rolling terrain, a good aero position on a Tri bike is definitely faster, even with the weight penalty. If you wanted to drop some weight off the bike the best thing to do would be to go to P3C frame...
I will be using the PT at IMC…hopefully I will get a new carbon bike next year, we’ll see :-)
