A Sprint, Followed by a Time Trial

XC mountain bike racing sounds like fun. Why not try? There are races practically year-round nearby so it makes a nice off-season training event. There was a series of three races this Fall known as the "SoCal Triple Crown Challenge". I thought I'd be sandbagging as a beginner, since I'd done lots of road racing and felt I was quite fit. Turns out sandbagging is the norm, the guy who won the series had over twenty MTB races under his belt and handed me my ass two out of three times. It made me wonder if there was any order in NORBA, but I suspect that mountain bikers generally are not big on rules - which makes sense. It's an odd undertaking, and the MTB crowd is more focussed on things like fun and adventure over results or racking up mileage. This is a good thing.

Since I've found that I'm not good at working on blog posts over a period of time (usually I just forget I started writing) I'll break down the races in other entries. Here are some general observations:

• The groups I started with ranged in size from seven to over a hundred. The promoters would decide between starting all Beginners (now Cat 3) together or dividing them by age category as well. Can't say I had a preference, but I did best when we all went from the gate together. My crit training came in handy, it could be some competitors were a mite nervous elbow-to-elbow going full blast.
• As a practical matter, these are time trials. You finish in a chute and I worried that things would get a little testy going into the last 400m or so. This never happened to me, even while trying to hold on to second place in the points series with the guy in third 20 meters behind in the last race.
• Skill and prep count big-time. In my first race I fell down fairly hard once and threw a chain getting third. Stayed upright for the entire race second time out and won it. Then got tangled up multiple times on the last and most difficult course, barely holding fourth. It's really hard to go downhill either chasing or being chased.
• Lots of waiting around. After a crit I would cool off for twenty minutes, go to the car and have a snack and then have a look at results. Since the MTB promoters are posting everyone's time for the course, things just take longer. Count on having lunch (or brunch) post race and hanging out with friends for over an hour or two.

Double Fun

I was remiss in not reporting my impressions of the Eastern Sierra Double Century, a Planet Ultra product. It was like riding a hard century. Then an easy one, with lunch in between. All of this with generally beautiful scenery throughout, something that the Mammoth area pretty much guarantees. Describing any double century as "easy" would be a little weird, since my butt hurt for about 130 miles of it. Luckily, the pain didn't get any worse after about mile 90, although it worried me. I used Descente Strata shorts and lots of Assos chamois creme and still got some chafing. I think bibs would have been better, since the chafing was not really in the crotch so much as toward the outer edge of the chamois in the back. I've now invested in the bib version of these shorts to minimize chafing by limiting movement of the chamois relative to my body.

The link in the first line of this blog entry points to a complete description of the ride, so I'll assume the reader knows how to use this interweb thingie and I'll just give some impressions:

• $80 is a lot of money for a ride. On the other hand, a $40 century isn't considered unreasonable these days and it's not like there's any economy of scale. Planet Ultra is clearly a business, and that has its pluses and minuses.
• The rest stops (known as "checkpoints" in planet ultra lingo) were well stocked with provisions and workers. The food I needed to carry at the start was enough calories to get me to the first rest stop at around the 30 mile mark. Lunch at Mono Lake was sumptuous and well placed at the 110 mile mark. This ride featured "Bonkbreaker" energy bars - well cubes really they are very compact and tasty.
• Regarding shorts, since I am posting this way after the fact I can now report that I've found the right ones for me. As you probably know this varies from person to person, but for me it's the Pearl Izumi's with the Pro 3D pad in bib form from now on, or until PI changes the design (sigh!). Just FYI the most experienced riders tend to use use Assos.
• I hadn't ridden over 90 miles on a single day for the previous six months. My training averaged about fourteen hours per week, with a lot of interval work. I did make a point of doing two 90 mile rides with 10,000' of climbing at altitude in the month prior to the event though. My wife says Lon Haldemann told her that "If you can go hard, you can go long" so do yourself a favor and include some high-intensity work while training.

Sorry, Francois

Okay, if I'm going to blog I need to do it daily. I let things slip and missed a comment from I nice person named Francois inre the Polar iRDA interface. The answer is I never even suspected the CS600 would work with the old interface so I didn't even try at the time. Polar is a very frustrating company. They tease you. First they offer power monitoring for about half the price of any real competitor (notwithstanding the latest from iBike, I'll believe it when I see it) but then you find the IR interface is an extra $50. The installation involves wanting to grow an additional appendage and then it drops out seemingly at random during use. When this happens I stop and move the pickup unit a couple of millimeters (really!) and we're back online. The AAA batteries in the power unit seem to last a random amount of time, sometimes as little as 60 hours (vs the published 300 or so). But then they include some cool software which does almost everything you want.
In spite of all this I found myself defending the Polar in a class my coach was giving on using power measurement to reach training goals. In his opinion the Polar was marginal. This was based on the fact that most of his clients who tried the Polar later switched to the more expensive PowerTap or SRM and I was the only person who made the Polar work consistently. He related that there were numerous complaints about the PowerTap, especially the wired one. It appeared the SRM was pretty trouble free, but that may be due to the maintenance being handled by team mechanics or household servants.
I guess everyone lives somewhere on the "Frustration-Money Curve". The more money you have, the less frustraion you need to bear up with (unless acquiring the money is frustrating - which brings up a different discussion). For me, there were two sound reasons that the other systems seemed crazy. First, you could buy an additional bike for the price of either one. Second, hubs and cranks wear out - I like the "no moving parts" feature.