Pre Match Nerves

I spent the night dreaming I was bike racing, it was so real I could feel that I had sore legs when I woke up this morning. Its a mix of nerves and the fact I'm currently devouring bike racing books to fill in the gaps due to training less.

I'm starting to get terrors about not training enough now as I'm tapering down my activity to conserve and build up energy for race day. I have expected this as I'd read about it in a few books but since I was aware of it then I thought I would not suffer from it. I was wrong. Its quite a surreal experience, I know its all mental but I still can't shift the worry that I'm wasting away. Surely you can't lose 6 months of training effort in 12 days...

I've been training 6 days out of 7 for the last 8-12 weeks and doing double sessions on some of those days. The last 4-5 weeks I've been training up to 12 hours solid per week. The last week excepted where I've dropped down to a single short session every second day. In most normal people's lives keeping fit with 3 x 1hour long sessions of mixed sport a week would be more than enough. I spent most of my teenage years thinking a 90 minute game on a Sunday and an hours football training on a Tuesday night made me superman.

I did a 20K time trial today round the usual route. I needed to bed in/test the new tyres and chase away my training demons. The tyres were pretty deflated when I checked them this morning, I suspect this is due to using pure CO2 rather than just pumping with air. I know that racing cars use pure nitrogen in their tyres as the molecules are bigger and so don't escape so quickly though the natural gaps in the rubber. As any party animal knows , when you wake up on the couch in the morning the balloons have always deflated overnight as the air escapes through the wall of the balloon. Its the same principal for tyres and tubes , especially at such high pressure of 8bars. I'm assuming C02 escapes easier than Nitrogen as the molecules are smaller than pure Nitrogen and therefore its not as good at keeping the pressure up as a normal air mix which is 80% nitrogen naturally and only 1-2% of CO2(dependent on your proximity to Al Gore).

It was quite blustery so I didn't think I'd be breakng any world records. The new tyres felt very smooth on the good road sections. The gear changes were better but still not 100% perfect and it even slipped off the big chainset to the small at one point. I think maybe more lubricant as I just cleaned it up yesterday.

I finished in 39:29 which is I think is just 15 seconds slower than my previous personal best, its certainly under the magical 40 minute mark which shows me I'm still as fit as I was and am not quite wasting away yet. My heart rate was pretty high throughout and averaged 159 but I did have two double expresso's before heading out. A short sharp session was all I needed to keep my mind at rest and I recovered very quickly apart from feeling a bit sick at the end but that was due to me having drank coffee and eating two croissants shortly before I set off.

Technical changes - Bike

I've put on my two new tyres , Continental Grand Pix 4000S. This is a change from the original Michelin Race Pro 3's I had on the bike from new. The tyres felt nice and went on without too much difficulty(still not as easy as it looks on the internet though). I pumped them up using CO2 cartridges to give me a little practice in using them before the race.

I was having some difficulty in gear changes yesterday between 5-6 and 7 but when I checked today after cleaning the sprocket and chain etc the gears changed fine. I'll do a quick test run tomorrow morning. This will let me bed in the tyres and also check the gears are OK.

I'm leaving the tri bars on for the moment but will make the final choice dependent on how the course looks next week. If I see a lot of straights where gear changes and braking are not required and the road surface is good then I may keep them. However at the moment I'm seriously thinking of dumping them on weight grounds and the fact I'm not using them much and feel the bike is unstable during the short periods I am using them. I really don't need an off on the bike whilst trying to imagine shaving a few minutes off with wind resistance.

Right now I'm off to shave my legs :O)