Cheating Death

Today was the Altamont Team Time Trial which was also the District TTT Championship. It was the same course that Larry, Rob, Mick and I raced on in the spring, with a few miles added on to make it 40km. This time around our team was Rob, Craig, myself and Mark Volkman who stepped in for Mick when he got sick this week. We raced in the 35+ group.

We knew it would be windy today. It was windy in the spring and well, they put the windmills here for a reason! But hey, it wasn't THAT bad in the spring.

What followed was probably the most frightening 59:50 I've ever spent on my bike! Every thing was fine until we made it over Altamont Pass on the way out. As expected we got going pretty fast on the back side. What I didn't expect was the HUGE side wind gusts. Let's just say that getting moved across the center line at 50mph is NOT fun. My max speed was 52.5mph. I spent one mile where I averaged 45mph!!! I certainly wasn't in the aero bars and I likely wasn't pedaling much either! All told I probably spent less than 15 minutes in the aero bars and on some of those fast sections I wasn't even trying to go fast, I was just trying to control my bike and not go down. There were a number of occasions where we'd get blow over, get a speed wobble and fight like hell to get back in control so we could go again.

Poor Rob at 135 lbs was getting blown all over the place. We finally had to leave him as it was just too hard to stay in the pace line for him while he was getting blown all over. It was bad enough at 165 lbs...

We hit the turn around in 21:35 for an average speed of 34.7mph! On the way back there were sections where we were riding three abreast because the side wind was so bad. Where even in the "draft" I was putting out over huge watts just to stay on. This was the cross wind section. When we turned back into the teeth of the wind and started climbing back over Altamont Pass it was at least safe. But it was SLOW. I looked down during one of my pulls and saw that I was putting out 400W in my aero bars and going 13mph in my 39x21. Our return trip took 38:15 at 19.1mph.

We were the only team to break 1 hour. I have only once gone this slow in an individual 40km TT. Afterward, everybody I spoke to was in agreement that this was the scariest thing we had ever done on our bike. We all agreed that we spent far more energy on not crashing than riding fast on the way out. In retrospect a road bike with clip on bars and something like Zipp 404's front and rear would probably have been faster than our TT bikes today!

Happily as far as I know all the teams made it through and kept the rubber side down.