Another Tuesday, another BMCC 10 at Weston on the Green. It was a beautiful sunny evening – 18 degrees and with a gentle breeze that dropped as the evening went on. There were over 50 riders, which is impressive for a club 10, but it is a very well run one, and the off-road nature helps. I wasn’t early enough at sign-on, so I ended up with number 48. At least it gave me plenty of time to warm up.

Having forgotten my shoes (!) last week, I was sure I wasn’t going to forget anything this week – I triple checked before I set off. When I got there I realised I had forgotten my HRM! Ooops. I guess I need to pack my bag with everything I need the night before.

Onto the race itself – I felt really good on the first lap and span happily down the back straight with a nice high cadence. Then I got into the headwind, and the long rise towards the finish, and my cadence dipped as my power rose a little. You can see this pattern repeated (minus the happily!) on the remaining 3 laps, thought I didn’t focus on getting my cadence up on the 2nd lap so I think I left behind a bit of speed there. It felt like I worked through the 2nd and 3rd laps and gave everything on the 4th, so I was happy enough before I saw the numbers.

My lap times were: 6:32, 6:52, 6:46, 6:35. Together with 26 seconds to get from the start to the finish on the first lap, this gives a time of 27:11, which is 50 seconds faster than 2 weeks ago, and beats my previous 10 PB of 27:28 on my geared bike on a road course last summer. Gotta be happy with that. 🙂

The power numbers are better than before, but I think there’s a bit more there. I changed my stem before this ride as well (the previous one was adjustable and was creaking alarmingly!), and moved the saddle back about 1 cm to compensate. I think this helped me generate a bit more power, and a slightly higher front end meant I could shrug better. Or maybe I was just trying harder! In theory I should be able to do another 5% or more above my FTP, but the FTP is a road bike number and the TT rig is a significantly different position, so that may not be possible. I think the key to going better is to be able to produce power on the spinny bits as well – I can hit 120 or more cadence on the trainer on the road bike, and on the open road where there is a downhill on the TT bike.

Next week BMCCC have a 4-up – I don’t know if I can find enough people to ride that with me. I guess it will be on a road bike as well. The week after that BMCC have their club championship 25, so I will probably do the Condor TT on the Thursday (on the road course near WotG, which is reasonably fast). The training plan has this week as a recovery week, so I’ll take it easy for the next couple of trainer rides, and then get back on it next week. I’m thinking I need to work on developing power at high cadences, so I’m going to do some VO2 Max stuff where I set the resistance and then drive the power by spinning. I also need to experiment with my new rollers! I’ll save them for another update though.