Nashua-Keene-Nashua
Today was my alumni XC race at Keene State College. I wanted to go run, but the way my weekend plans were, today was the only day I could get a long ride in. Friday was my long run - 11miles. Sunday is my long ass open water swim with The Beckinator before she heads back to college, and Monday is…a secret for now.
So I decided to ride to the race, run, then ride back.
We left the house at 7:20am. Original itinerary was for a 7am departure, ETA 10:30am if we rode an ass slow pace of 15mph. Messing around searching for extra spare 700c tubes for Andy put us back 20minutes, but at 7:20am I was not worried about missing the race start.
We climbed over Temple, through fog and wind, under dark clouds, despite the sunny blue skies that were just behind us down in the valley. The pleasure of climbing Temple is the ripping descent into Peterborough (obnoxiously WASPy village made famous by Thornton Wilder’s stupid play Our Town). I had ridden over this part of 101 dozens of times and was quite familiar with this climb. I completely forgot about the second climb.
Dublin NH is known for having the highest elevation village center of any town in NH. The climb up it is rather, uh, interesting. Despite countless drives between Nashua and Keene, I never thought of Dublin as being that high. Whoops. I was wrong.
Now here’s the thing - we’re carrying backpacks full of running shoes, soccer sandals, running clothes, a clean pair of cycling shorts, 8 Clif Shots, 3 tubes, and a CO2 pump. So climbing was somewhat, uh, compromised, to say the least.
I looked at the time as we crested Dublin and started doing some quick math. Fifteen miles left. I always get paranoid when I am doing any kind of destination ride. If I plan on riding to an event, it becomes my mission to get there with as much time to spare as possible, even if there is no use for spare time. So I started hammering the descent for fear that we would not get to the race “in time” for an 11am start.
I think we upped our overall mph average by 3mph in the last 15miles simply by keeping it as close to 25mph as possible. This, however, was working against my initial plan of riding there “easy” so as not to trash my legs for the race. We arrived at the KSC cross country course at 10:27am. Hmm. Plenty of time to spare. Legs trashed. (sigh)
The race: it’s a 3k cross country course. It’s the alumni race - graduates against the current team. Results are unofficial, everything is hand timed, and the competitors are limited to a bunch of 18-22 year old college cross country team kids and the few alumni still willing to lace up a pair of spikes and toe the line.
I had not raced anything close to this short in a year. Speed is not something that is currently in my vocabulary. Endurance? no problem, I mean I just rode over 3 hours. But speed?
The race began with an unoffical start (”When I say go, you guys go..OK, ah…GO!”). Within about 400m my hands were numb and tingly and I felt like lava was coursing through my veins. My ironman friend John Hirsch used that analogy when describing his first P123 bike race. See, when you train for endurance events, you don’t train the body to go HARD for short periods of time.
So after my summer of sampling triathlon and shunning bike races and 5ks, well, a 3000m race felt like lava. Seriously. My hands started going numb and I was wondering if maybe I was having a heart attack and this was it.
The damage was 13:07, less than a minute slower than last year, but a minute in a 3k race is an eternity. I blame that minute on my combined lack of high intensity training and the 54mile ‘warm up’. I still beat 20 of the undergrads. You kids have some work to do.
After the race I realized I had lost a bar end plug, so I rode over to a bike shop (conveniently located about 400m from our XC course) to get another. Then we rode the 4ish miles to coach’s house, ate pasta salad and green salad (Andy had steak and pork chops), then changed into clean cycling shorts and rode the 54miles home. We were back in our driveway by 5:30pm, and the only point of issue on the return trip was somewhere on 101 in Milford where I suddenly got shaky and realized within 30 seconds that if I did not have a gel RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT I wouldn’t be seeing straight for very much longer.
Thank you, Apple Pie Clifshot.
Here’s a link to the elevation profile of the ride today. Note the climbs.
