RunFar was having their last time trial of the season today, and since I’d never ridden a timed loop before I figured it was a good opportunity for me to check it out. I met up with Marcus and Bill down by the Veloway, signed in at the truck, and got my timing chip.

The course was very simple; we were to ride out to MoPac, head South and ride over the timing mats. That was the start. Four miles down and 200 feet up to the end of the road, swing over to the inside, loop around the U turn, back to the outside shoulder, and then back to the corresponding mats on the Northbound side another four miles (and 200 feet down) later. Easy, right?

My only concern was that I didn’t want to ride too hard considering that I had some form of speedwork with the Gazelles in the morning. I wanted a realistic baseline, not a complete sandbagged time, just not a full on race time.

I won’t bore you with a mile by mile breakdown, but I think I did alright. I wobbled a few times messing with my water bottles, and had a bit of a scare on the halfway point when I felt my wedding ring get loose (!) and try to slip off, but other than that it went very smoothly. Shifting is getting a lot more natural and I was able to stay within the 85-95 rpm range for most of the ride.

My final time was 25:26.6 or 18.9 MPH, one of the slowest riders out there and almost 10 minutes slower than the 16:46 course record. Still, I ended up ahead of Marcus by 3 seconds (and we didn’t ride next to each other, he was a traffic light behind me before the start) so I can’t complain! I’ll be very interested to see how much I can pull this time down before the first trial of next year comes around.

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