Wet, windy but happy

After the initiation by fire last weekend yesterday was wind and water as, surprise, the BBC forecast turned out correct and it bucketed down and blew a gale at Thruxton for my second road race.

Arrived, signed on and sat in the car, only emerging at last minute for a couple of laps at the pits and almost missing the start. Learning from last week checked how many laps and was pretty relieved to hear that we would just be doing 8.

I wanted to go harder than last week, the more so given the weather so as to keep warm. Start was again hard but not fast as we pedalled into a gale, the wind blowing in a very different direction. As a result the climb into the chicane at the end of the lap was not too difficult but the approach was made tricky by a vicious cross wind.

On the second lap some of the youngsters made a break and I tried hard to close them down. The was the first of a number of bursts of enthusiasm from the juniors and each failed, some learning from me. I did a fair share of leading, though the group as a whole seemed to lack any organisation, people taking long turns to pull at the front.

The going was tough, I did not spend much time looking at watts but when I did (mainly on the short climb) I was pushing well over 300. I had little trouble keeping up and with the lead and despite, again, losing count of the laps I stuck with the front group actually being in the lead with half a lap to go. But no push left to power up the final sprint and trailed in around 15th or so.

Did a few warm down, very wet, laps then headed home. Got very cold unshipping bike and was happy to get a warm bath.

Downloaded the stats for the ride and was slightly surprised to see how hard the race had been. Averaged 292W/309NW and set an all time PB for 60 minutes normalised power of 299W. Given that 8 minutes of this included the warm down this left me pretty pleased. As result have changed WKO so my threshold is now 299W.