I haven't really been on my TT bike since the crash and so I wasn't sure how it would go. I had concerns on a few different fronts, how would I go with the handling, how would my shoulders go with the extra load of being on aerobars, how would the rest of my body cope with being back in aero tuck?
Well, in short, I had no reason for concern. Sure the handling was a little nervous at the start but I quickly relaxed. My shoulders got a little bit stiff, but nothing unbearable, and as for the rest of the body it all coped with the aero tuck surprisingly well, no real soreness to report. In fact the only physical distress I got during the session was from my contact lenses. I was amazed to see just how much my contacts dried out when riding in the aero tuck into a raging headwind. Even with sunnies on. Something about the way you are looking upwards a bit when you are on the aerobars I suspect. That was unexpected.
The bike might have felt a little unfamiliar when I first jumped on, but one thing that I found hadn't changed was the speed that came from the TT bike. Today's ride was nice and fast. Much faster than I expected to be honest. The speed came easily in the first half of the ride, but a big chunk of that was to do with the healthy tailwind I had as I headed south along the Freeway cycleway. The real surprise came in the second half of the ride when I turned around and it became time to work back into the wind. When I turned I was expecting the worst, the wind really wasn't messing around. Some guys I spoke to when I turned joked that they were thinking of calling a taxi to avoid riding into the wind. I got the impression that they were perhaps a little bit serious. However, despite those reservations, the ride back into the wind was surprisingly quick. I started to hurt two thirds or so of the way back, but part of that was fatigue. The pace itself was only a little bit slower than it had been on the way out.
The ride once again reminded me just how well the Falco V copes with moderate yaw angles. The wind today was a cross headwind and so I probably spent much of the ride with the wind in that classic range of 5 to 10 degrees yaw. I have noticed before that the Falco really shines in this range of yaw and today was no different. It isn't that you don't feel the headwind, it is just that it doesn't slow you down as much as you expect it to.
The ride was the latest reminder I have had that things are slowly returning to normal in terms of fitness and power. This session hurt a bit, perhaps more than it should have, still I was very happy with how it went. I would have been happy with this bike session pre-accident, I am thrilled to be back to this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment