Prerace routine and not getting caught up in the numbers.
My usual prerace routine involves an easy spin, a 7′ tuneup/test and a quick wipe-down, lube and check of the bike. Today, my team mate and I had the luxury of preriding the course, which is only 10′ from our neighborhood. It’s a flat, 4 corner crit. The only areas of potential interest are 1) out of turn 2 with a few meters of false flat at the beginning of the back straight. If you come out of the corner hard enough, you might be able to get a small gap. The rest of the backside is slightly downhill, making turn 3 really fast. 2) turn 4 into the finishing straight –again seems to be false flat and if the wind is coming from the south, this could be the (only) hard part of the course. It’s a long way from the turn to the line, so you’d have to be an animal to hold it, but it’s worth trying to avoid the usual chaos that is a Cat 4 field sprint.
The last 2 weeks I’ve set new season bests during my 7′ prerace tuneup. Today, I was down a bit, and initially panicked. Can I really be losing form just before the most important races of the year? But then I realized that all three average powers were within 2% of each other. The accuracy for a PT is claimed to be 1.5-2%, so I’m calling them all a wash. I may not have improved in the last three weeks, but I have certainly maintained the same level.
My moment of panic illustrates the danger of combining powermeter data and an academic (all right, perhaps geek would be a more appropriate term here) — the potential for overthinking. Overthinking during planning and training is not necessarily a bad thing; as long as you actually get the training done, all that thinking had done is kill a few hours. However, in a race overthinking is a serious problem, one that I still haven’t quite solved. All too often when the crucial moment in a race happens, I hesitate. Usually, I justify this hesitation in my head by thinking I’m following the cardinal rule of bike racing — CONSERVE ENERGY. But what’s the point in conserving energy and finishing 20th when you could go all out and may be finish top 10? Conservation might be a good idea when it comes to the environment, but in the last few laps of a crit, it’s a sure way to mediocre results.
