The Rape of Wintergreen

Its been a good weekend. To get everybody up to speed, 2 weeks ago I took a major recovery week after a hard 5 week block. Since then my rides have been suckin fat balls: incomplete intervals, exhaustion, lack of motivation, tired legs, loss of appitite, mood swings, bloating, and the passing of vaginal fluids. Some say its overtraining, some say PMS... Coach tells me its a common occurrence in highly trained athletes and is part of the "periodization" process i.e. in another week or 2 I will start having my best form of the season and that the symptoms I'm experiencing hes experienced year after year directly before his best career results. Naturally I was dubious as this rational doesn't quite make sense but my orders were to keep the training short and intense and stick this shit out.
Hokay, so...I sign up for the VA State uphill ITT Championships at Wintergreen. As you can see from the map, the start line is in a lush green landscape full of joy and joyness, and the finish, a brown desolate rock of pain and torture.Naturally I am confident that im gunna suck it bad as my training has been suckin it bad. There were many points during the preceding week where I was half tempted to get my Grant Patterson boots on and bail on that shit like its the Titanic; nevertheless, I could be found at the base of Wintergreen Mt. on the cold morning of May 5th. To get in a good warmup I crawled my way up Brent Mountain 2 or 3 times making sure not to overexert myself before the race. During the warm up I was noticing a crisp snap in my cadence that I had not seen in about a month...this could mean good things, but while going all out up a mountain, anything could happen. At 10:57 I rolled down the ramp and began the TT. The first few miles were false flat with a few pitches leading up to the Wintergreen Resort entrance. At the start I gave a good 1 minute effort to get up to speed then settled in at threshold to see how my legs felt. The results were unbelievable; I continued to edge up my watts past threshold power to see where my barrier was, but it kept going up until I was rolling at about 380watts. I felt amazing but knew that 380 was 50 watts above my tested LT and it could not be sustained for the 35 or so minutes I predicted the climb would take me so I brought it back down to 360. Then the shit show started...upon entering the resort the scene got ugly, the road turned up to a painful 15% grade time and time again. There were points where I had my chest on my bars to keep the front wheel on the ground. From the get go I was wading through riders like they weren't moving...rookies ...I could see their confidence dwindle as many a rider walked his/her bike up the pitches, watching me rise out of the saddle to show them how a pro owns a mountain! 36 minutes and 28 seconds later I hammered across the finish line. I had set a new PR for myself: my 20 minute threshold was 10 watts higher than I had thought and my Functional threshold was also about 10 watts higher. Exciting news for a rookie pro. My confidence was quickly shattered upon seeing that I did not have the fastest time of the day. That privilege went to Ian Ayers of the Rite Aid pro cycling team. He threw down a course record, beating his own by 10 seconds, of 33:42. I looked down at my gut hanging over my jeans and knew that if I weighed 151 and not 159 I could given Ian a run for his money...guess its lettuce and water for the post race meal . Regardless I had the second fastest time of the day and won the Cat 3 race. Got a sweet champion jersey out of it too
Well...guess it time to keep hittin this diet to try to lose this excess poundage. Hopefully a nice fat Cat 2 upgrade comes from this win. later suckas.