RACING AT THE DRIVEWAY

     For those not familiar, The Driveway is a race course and premier criterium racing is here every Thursday evening for eight months of the year.  This is for young folks (under 60) for the most part, but I need some criterium race practice to be ready for nationals in August.  And, last year and so far this year there has been an older gentleman who races and I figured he would be my carrot.  Unfortunately, he didn't race last night.
     The plan was simple, the peloton usually averages eight laps, or roughly four minutes per lap (on the Grand Prix circuit, the longest one) and I would come in around four minutes, forty-five seconds and try to hold on for three-quarters of the first lap.  That would get me lapped around the twenty minute mark.
     That didn't happen, and as I warmed-up, I knew it.  The legs had no real life.  But on to the race.  As the countdown started, my computer turned off.  Pook, ding-fu!  I was resigned to racing without data, and found a large body to hide behind as we got up to speed.  So far, so good.  We hit the small downhill and the leaders exceeded 30 mph and I couldn't, and lost contact with the big guy, who also lost contact.  Actually, I knew this acceleration would happen and had prepared to go all out to keep up.  Unfortunately, my HR was maxed out and further acceleration impossible.
     For the rest of the race it was me and my mentor.  The Driveway has mentors who shepherd new or slow guys around the course so they don't get into trouble and give tips as they go.  Halfway around my computer came back to life and started giving data, so I will also.
     My max HR as best I can tell, is 159 although I haven't hit that this year.  From when the computer came on, my average in this race was 152 with a max of 157, so I was at 95% or more the whole race.  My laps were very consistent,  4:49, 5:05, 5:04, 5:03, 5:13 plus the unknown start plus 2:12 seconds.  And my cadence was good, averaging 90 rpm.  It was my power, at 179, and speed, at 18.6 that was lacking.  This was rather disheartening in that I should have been around 200 power and over 20 mph.  BTW, the peloton was energized and was doing about 3:30 per lap rather than 4:00.  All that being said, Training Peaks gave me six Peak Performances, the twenty-minutes average power and five HR performances: 5 second at 157, 1 minute at 156, 5 minute at 154, 10 minute at 153, and 20 minute at 152.
     I have nine weeks to bring things up to snuff.  Maybe next week I can do better.  Stay tuned.