40km TT

I put my helmet on this morning and glanced down at my garmin and saw my heart rate at 125. Um. Anxiety, anyone? Started warming up as easy as I could trying to calm myself down... watts <100 and HR mid 130s. Holy crap. Take a deep breath, Michelle. It's just a little local bike race!

A few weeks ago when I did that 20km TT I had *zero* expectations, but since then I've been riding more and numbers show fitness has gone up significantly, so today I had some expectations of myself. I think I'm better when expectations are low!

I spun easy warming up and saw the sun coming up over the ocean. It was a stunning sight and I wished I had my camera. Then I thought I bet somebody has a camera and will snap a picture of that. Sure enough, my friend Lou posted this on Facebook today. This is exactly what I saw. I love Hawaii.

With a TT course along the coast, you know it's going to be windy. Given my excessive nerves and corresponding heart rate, I changed my garmin settings to just show me avg lap power and avg 30" power. I didn't want/need the distraction of seeing HR numbers through the roof, but I was curious to see the data at the end.

Going into this race, I was hoping I could avg ~210w. Given the ~220 I held for 25 minutes 4 weeks ago at Makaha, I figured -10w for over an hour (2.5x the distance) would be a legit effort and to be honest, I wasn't sure I could do it. But why not try?

The first half we had a pretty strong cross/headwind. I remembered Marilyn's mantra- When the course is hard, buckle down and work! So when my avg power was closer to 220w vs 210 on the way out, I gave myself permission to push that. 210w with a 20mph tailwind is a huge ask so I knew power would fall on the way back... and it did... but coming home speed went (way!) up (weeee!) and effort was still there for sure, even if 30" power dropped <200w at times. I feel like I lost a bit of focus coming home, but let's face it, 66min is a LONG time to stay 100% focused. Overall I think I did a decent job of staying focused on the task at hand and keeping my foot on the gas. Data from my garmin proves it too- avg HR 170 with max of 174 shows that I really did have myself pegged for the whole distance. And I hit my goal of avg 210w!

I sort of thought 210w would be enough to put me top 3 OA, but it wasn't. I ended up 2nd AG and 5th OA. Damn those gals are fast!! I can't be disappointed in my effort though. I did exactly what I wanted to do this morning, and then paid for it the rest of the day. I think I'm too old to push that hard for that long. Yikes! #trashed