The race was this past Saturday, September 18, and for about two months leading up to the race, all I did was train for it. I didn't go out for "rides", but instead each time on the bike had a purpose, a reason, whether it was intervals, hill repeats, or a recovery ride. And each ride was done on the time trial bike as I put my bike away until after the race.
I shifted into a slightly uncomfortable big gear and turned my legs as quickly as I could. I got into a nice tempo and was flying. I was feeling great. For the first eight miles of the race I was averaging 27.6 MPH. Not too bad. The turn around point in the race was on a little hill that put a good hurt in the legs, but it also meant that you weren't flying at speed into the turn which was nice, no hard breaking required. As I rounded the orange cone at the turn around for the eight miles back to the finish line, I was able to regain top speed quickly.
With about four or five miles to go, somewhere around there, I noticed myself starting to slow down, and with that I started to panic. See, I wanted a podium spot very bad. I mean I worked my butt off for the last two months for it, and when I started going slower, that began bad thoughts creeping into my head. I was starting to convince myself that I wasn't going to make it, "Your too slow, you went out too fast and now paying for it...", etc. And the funny thing is that the more I thought about it, the slower I was going. Funny how that works. AND... just as all that was going on, my helmet strap came unbuckled, or so I thought. I reached up to re-buckle it and found that it was still buckled, but the strap itself came out of the buckle, so there was nothing I could do about it during the race. So I was having melt-down mind games and was getting slapped in the face by my helmet strap. Things were starting to really suck. But then I had another thought, "You gotta get your mind right boy!" With that, I stopped pedaling for a brief moment, took a real deep breath, put my head down, and started bringing my cadence up and with that my tempo and speed. 23, 24, 25, 26, 26.5 MPH. I got it back to where it should be and then concentrated on my breathing. Short, deep, powerful breaths. I lost a lot of valuable time but wasn't thinking about that at that moment. With the finish line now in sight, I put everything I had into it. I crossed the line at 33 MPH. At that point I had no idea if I made the podium, and it wasn't until around one hour after my finish I learned that not only did I make the podium, but I won! First Place! I beat the 2nd place guy by twenty-four seconds. Wow, I was shocked. Even with my "panic attack" and my helmet strap beating on my cheek distracting me, I made it. That felt so very good. With such an up-n-down season I had this year, it was nice to finish out with this win.
