Racetiming.ca Crit - Finally cracking the top 10!

As the title says, finally I was able to crack the top 10 in an E1/2 Ontario Cup. For some reason this race wasn't very well attended. It could be because of Killington Stage Race and Bristol Mountain Road Race being run the same day. But I also saw many fellow riders on strava that just opted to do their own ride, and they missed out on a great day of racing in beautiful weather!

So for this race it was just Aaron and I as we had two other riders at Bristol. It always takes me a bit to get into gear in a race, but Aaron was at the front right from the gun. I watched as he covered basically every move, potentially overworking, but always making sure we were represented. After things started to settle in a bit then I moved up and started to contribute. A break got away with Dan Doddy and Jordann Jones and I knew there would be no catching them as they were two of the strongest riders in the field. I saw Phil Sheffield attack and then thought I saw him panting at the side of the road about 1km later and it turns out he rolled a tubular. Ouch.

Shortly after that a chase group of 5 went up the road. I went to try to bridge across and Scott Elliot came with me. Peter Morse also bridged up but was just sitting on. The group of 5 was pulling away, and it didn't help that every time Morse did a pull, the speed would drop 3km/h. Stupidly, I always ended up pulling the entire headwind section, at 41-43km/h, maybe because I didn't trust the others to keep the speed high enough. With around 3 laps to go we somehow managed to catch the chase group. This is two races in a row that I have caught up to Veal's chase group because no one has wanted to work. Coming into the last lap, I had this idea in my head about attacking. I realized after that it was vivid in my head because I tried it last year and it failed horribly. Well this year was no different as they quickly caught on then let me pull the rest of the lap. They started to launch the sprint about 75m before the final right hand turn. I went to jump in but a couple riders were coming into me, so I ended up dropping back, not wanting to crash. I managed to come by Scott right at the line to finish 9th.

I don't have any good race pictures to share so I have some data to share! Note the following plots from Golden Cheetah software (free!) also contain my warmup and short cool down.

Garmin data: HERE

For cadence, you will see the peak is a little over 100rpm. I am not a big muscular rider, so I have to get the power out by turning over the legs faster. 

For heart rate, the peaks were around 175. Turns out I averaged 174bpm for the race, a number I didn't think I could do! My 1 hour threshold heart rate is 180, so I was pretty close. I had a bigger than expected taper into the race because of the bad weather, so that may have helped out. Max heart rate was 191. 

Power data! From garmin, my average for the race was 286w, and normalized 304w.  The histogram is hard to get a good idea of the upper intensity needed for a crit as the low values are filled up more from the warm up and cool down.