Church Creek Time TrialMABRA TT Championship

Early in the wheelsucker's group riding and racing career it became apparent that he had no sprint. We're not talking a less-than-impressive sprint, we're talking your grandmother could outsprint the wheelsucker. So the wheelsucker shifted focus to trying to get into breakaways, and doing Time Trials. And there was some promise in the wheelsucker's early TT results once he had a TT bike.

And indeed the only races the wheelsucker has ever won were TTs. Several years ago he did the Deep Blue 50+ and 30+ and no one good showed up for either field and the wheelsucker won both.

So it was with some expectations (and hope, and worry) that the wheelsucker arrived at the start house for this year's Church Creek MABRA TT Championship. His primary goal was to go above his previous best average power -- 273 watts -- and do it with better pacing and a negative split. The wheelsucker tends to feel good when he starts, and goes out too hard, and his average power drops for the rest of the ride. This year he still went out too hard, but managed to curb his enthusiasm, and ease up soon enough to save something. The wheelsucker's best times (two of them), were fractionally below 57:00. so he checked his average power at 29 minutes and saw 273 watts. "Perfect!" thought the wheelsucker. Now all he had to do was beat it in the second half. And the wheelsucker did in fact manage to do this, averaging 276 for the ride, his best average power ever. So presumably average power for the second half of the ride was about 278-279 watts. The wheelsucker is quite happy with these numbers since his threshold power has been 280 watts for several years, and the wheelsucker is confident he can hold higher power on his road bike than "in the position" on his TT bike.

But the strange thing about the wheelsucker's ride is that he went 1:03 slower than his previous two best times. Go figure! Also, the wheelsucker frequently has rides and workouts that when displayed in the PowerAgent software, show less than zero (negative numbers) for power in a few places. This is usually a zeroing issue, but the wheelsucker is almost always zeroing his Powertap before a ride. So maybe he actually did slightly better than 276 watts, or maybe not.