I have raced the innaugural Yankee TT three years in a row now, and the first two years had nearly perfect weather for April in Michigan.  I guess we were due for a less than perfect day.  Conditions were on the cool side at about 50 degrees, low wind, and very light rain all day.  This wasn’t really a bad thing, the trail is very sandy and the rain helps solidify it quite a bit making for easier trips through the many sand pits.  The main downsides being all the sand sticking to you and your bike, and the slippery tree roots and rocks along the way.

This is my first year racing sport, and I was ready for a rude awakening.  I ended up with a time of 1:05:54 which was good for 20th out of 30 starters.  Course length was 11.4 miles by my computer, my ave speed was 10.3 with a max of 21.9  I felt pretty lousy about this result, but then I looked at my 2007 and 2008 times on the same course: 1:16:22 and 1:11:22 dropping roughly 5 minutes a year, I guess it looks better from that perspective.

Still, I had hoped for better after training a lot more for this year than in the past, dropped a fair amount of weight too.  This is a good wake-up call to start training with more intensity if I want to really improve.

Needs improvement/negatives: didn’t warm up properly due to time, that was just dumb.  My bike was not shifting properly in the low gears which was a bit of a problem on the uphill sections and had me preoccupied constantly looking down to make sure I wasn’t in the problem gear.  I also had a bit of a sore throat/congested feeling possibly from spring allergies.

Positives: carefully preplanned all foods and drinks for raceday by the hour, energy level felt good.  Bike otherwise performed perfectly, the handling was razor sharp and never let me down.

I might bite the bullet and take the bike to the shop, I can’t race again with it shifting so poorly.  Training wise I need to do some hard intervals on the mountain bike, going to stay as far from the road bike as possible.