Spring Forward and Bike Fit

Well, it's been another busy week. But I need to cover my quick race report from Spring Forward last weekend, and talk about my awesome bike fit down in Geneva!

I was the only team member going into spring forward rested. I just came off of a recovery week, and everyone else was in their blocks. I got there about 45 minutes early, grabbed my timing chip, had Amanda pin my number, and started getting ready to go. I was excited! With 30min to the start I went out for a short warm-up, just to get my legs moving, and loosened up. I didn't make it far before I ran into Mary and Kim on their mountain bikes. They were talking to Don while he did his hardcore car warm up. After chatting for a bit I put in mile or so easy, then headed back to Amanda to get ready for the start. We headed over towards the start line and joined up with the rest of the Train-this group. We all got to hear about Alexa's issues, and her awesome gel pocket in her shorts. The race plan from Mary was pretty similar to the Johnny's plan. Take out the first half at a good effort pace, but she wanted us to hit the 4.5 mile mark ready to pick it up for the second half. I'm pretty sure not many of us were really able to do this. I started off well. Alexa and I had to do some offroading, because we started further back than we should have. Just a quick note here, if you're running a race please don't line up in the front and proceed to walk. In the future, I will be lining up much closer to the front. It didn't take too long to find some space, and I spotted Tim up ahead. I decided that I didn't want to spend all day chasing him, like I did at Johnny's, so I decided to get up with him. We ran pretty much together for a while in the first 5k. He was having some trouble with the hills, and I ended up pulling away. I was happy with my ability to pretty consistently pick off people ahead of me on the climbs. I have some trouble picking it up on the downhill though. It was enough to not really get caught though.

I saw Mary and Kim at about halfway. They gave me a big cheer, and it put some extra kick in my step. I was feeling great. I picked it up for a while, like the race plan called for. But, the back half of that course has hills. It's definitely hillier than the first half. I knew at that point that I probably wasn't going to negative split. So I just decided to push it as hard as I could, and at least maintain the pace I set the first half. At this point the field was spread enough that I wasn't consistently picking people up as I was before, but I felt like I was closing distance on them. I came to the 10k mark, and I was starting to feel the race in my legs a bit, but I knew the biggest climbs were behind me, I just had to keep pushing. Mary and Kim came by again on their bikes about as I came to the lat water station. There was a girl a little way up, and she yelled something about not getting chicked. I didn't actually hear her, but I saw her point, and the look on her face was all it took to get me to kick it up a notch. Scary! I came up on a small group as we neared the park, and we really started racing. Again, I gained ground on the climbs, but gave up a little on the descents. Luckily there's a decent climb from the last turn towards the finish, and I had enough kick to hold my spot on the last little downhill to the finish. I crossed in 1:02:45, which put me at about the same pace I held for Johnny's over almost twice the distance. I was really happy. Especially considering where I was last year with my running. I'm really getting to the point where I'm enjoying it. I'm sick of giving up places on the run, I can't watit to see how the season shapes up!

Monday I had a crazy day! I did my tutoring hours in the morning, went to class 12-1, then basically ran to my car, and changed while driving to make my bike fit appointment appointment in Geneva at 2. RIT -> Geneva transit time: 50 minutes, pretty darn good! The bike fit was amazing. Chad was great. Geneva definitely gained a customer for life there. He went through my flexibility and such, and apparently for a guy I had good flexibility, and no other issues to consider for the fitting. My seat got moved forward, and up. My cockpit was too low too. He tried to just add spacers to pick up the armrests, but didn't have long enough machine screws to run all the way through 25mm of spacers, and my basebar. So we ended up fitting a new stem. Same length, more angle, pulled my front end up and back a little. He also tweaked my cleats a little bit. The end result was amazing. I feel like I could live in the aero position now. I'm more comfortable, and just as aero, and excited to see how it feels on the road.

I'm finishing up with my powerlab teaching (a two day lab marathon for people who can't fit the regular weekly schedule), and have a two hour run on tap for later today. Tomorrow I have a 4ish hour ride that I'm going to do with Mary, and some others. It should be fun! That'll be the longest I've been out on the road in a long long time. It's supposed to be like mid 60s! It'll pretty much be amazing. Period. Well that's all I have for now.

106 days to go! (this means I should check in next Friday for the 100 day celebration!)