Sunday, May 8, 2011

Interlude - Wintergreen TT

Yesterday was Wintergreen Ascent TTThe ride is pretty brutal but I finished, last in my class, but I finished and my time, 1:10:32.  I now own the Lanterne Rouge for my age group!  Marius, my riding buddy, finished 11th with a time of 0:48:34.

Marius and his machine

The scene at the start

Marius works at NIH and is a pretty smart guy.  Anyway he did an analysis of the ride and broke it down into 2 parts; the warm up bits and the really hard part.

The warm up runs from the start to the Wintergreen Resort entrance and is just over 3 miles.

 
As you can see, the warm up starts with a nice gentle grade for 2 miles.  Evilness starts here and the grade increases to over 10% for the last .5 mile.  So, one should be sufficiently warmed up by the time the hard part starts!

My start time was 10:26 and Marius started a minute behind me.  He passed me after about a mile (I've got almost 50 lbs on Marius) and I didn't see him again until the finish.

I arrived at the gate just trying to push the pedals.  A guy was encouraging the riders on and he started cheering me on when I got distracted and fell over near a guard rail.  I won't call it a crash cause I wasn't going very fast, sort of a slow motion list to the right.  The guy was really nice and gave me a push when I got clipped in to get me started.

The hard part of the TT is just 3.4 miles of hell!



The average grade for this part of the route is 8.9% with a max grade of 17.9%.  Ouch!  I was already riding with a compact crankset but I was hurting through this part of the route and the 13-26 cassette just wasn't enough for my fat ass.  If I do this ride again, I'll move to a 13-29 cassette and a mid-cage rear derailleur.

Wintergreen is an awesome event and I love the scenery.  Someday I hope to hand over the Lanterne Rouge to someone who has suffered more on this ride.