Wreaking my rewen-ge

Turns out I was supposed to do a repeat of the recovery spin today, but I didn't check my email so instead I popped by BBN for a bit of redress. Maybe it's difficult to actually wreak rewen-ge on a concrete track, but not so difficult to do to oneself!

I was momentarily thrown off plan by happening to bump in to the same chap from back in April - who's bought a new track bike and is looking for some racing! So it was nice to chat, but I really wanted to get out there. I was trialling straps on my pedals for the first time - they felt good when on (though they're only cheapies, so I don't know how long they'll last) but getting in and out of them is going to take some practice!

Anyway, after a bit of a warmup I did a couple of half-lap powerjumps (which at BBN is... well, about 165-odd metres, because I went from pursuit line to finish line) on 86", hitting only 50.9 on the effort from ~30km/hr. Bit low, I thought. I then switched up to 99" and did the same, from ~10km/hr and ~30km/hr. Hit 52 this time from 30, which again, felt a bit low. Not by an order of magnitude or anything, but still. Enough to make me concerned that perhaps I wasn't going to make much headway on looking for an improved F200 time.

But I headed out from the chute, and wound it up over the abridged BBN F200 distance. On Sunday I jumped late from... actually, it's hard to tell! Certainly above 40. But it's a rather gentle 'jump' in the garmin record. I crossed the line at about 49 and eventually hit a max of  54.5km/hr before gracefully curving back down to 51kmh, for a time of 14.185 at an average of 50.76km/hr. I don't have such precise timings, of course, for today and a direct comparison is meaningless because of the different conditions - there was all but no wind today, for example. But I can say that I jumped from just on 35km/hr, crossed the 200 line doing pretty much smack on 50km/hr, hit a max of 55.3km/hr (and held above 55km/hr for 5 seconds or so) which decayed back to ~51 again by the time I crossed the finish line to record an average speed of conservatively 52.99km/hr, generously 53.67km/hr and most likely 53.5km/hr. Which makes for a F200 time of somewhere between 13.587 and 13.415 seconds.

That's still a little slower than I'd be happy with. But I'm much more satisfied with that as a measure of where I am than with what I managed on Sunday, conditions notwithstanding. And there's useful info there, too - accelerating after the line is okay, but by 5km/hr? Probably a bit much. So jump should probably have started earlier - more like the start of the clubrooms, perhaps. The question, of course, is could I hold the speed all the way to the line in that case. Crossing the 200 line at something closer to 52 and holding the same sort of pace as in today's F200 to the line would see me riding something more like a 13.28. Which is closer to where I feel I should be at the moment. Wouldn't necessarily mean I'd win any more races, because there's a whole lot more to it than speed over 200 metres, but it's a start!