Cherry Valley 30k Report...

Sunday mid-morning:

On Saturday evening I finally decided which bike I was gonna ride at Sundays Cherry Valley 30k Cycling Time Trial as the weather forecast was looking very foul for Sunday…all day! I decided to put back together a few outdoor pieces of equipment on my ole’ school ’93 tt/tri Cannondale bike for this rainy TT event which I determined to just get out and use the event as a training event as the Ridley Dean wasn’t about to be broken in this type of weather conditions. Luckily I have kept my Cannondale for reasons like this.

As I loaded the car early Sunday morning the rain was continuing to fall at a decent pace and it continued all the way to my drive out to Cherry Valley which is just a few miles east of Rockford, IL. As I pulled into the region of the race start at about 8:45am the 1st rider was scheduled to start racing at 9am with increments of one minute between each rider starting. I picked up my race number #40 and my start time was at 9:40am as I then parked my car with all intentions of taking out my Kinetic trainer for a proper warm-up to my start. Literally as I turned the car off the rains started to fall heavier and I suited up for my ride. Luckily I packed extra riding clothes because I definitely needed it on this cold, rainy and windy day. Since the rain never let up I really decided to turn this into a training ride for the journal as this is a long season and I didn’t want to throw caution to the wind by risking a crash. So I arrived at the start house 90 seconds before my start time without any sort of warm-up.

I started promptly at 9:40am chewing on the big 56t chainring with my simple 8 speed cassette on the back Zipp 404 wheel. The rain was coming down by now pretty good as I headed southward on the out & back course riding at a comfortable pace on some nice rolling county roads that are lightly traveled by vehicles. The weirdest sound during the ride was when a large droplet of water would drop from a tree overhead and land on the aero part on the back of the helmet…each time this would happened it was deafening. I passed I believe either 3 or 4 people on the way out plus one guy passed me #44 whom was a serious cyclist like I was standing still. At the turn-around the undulating rolling terrain slightly worked uphill with the winds more off the front of our right shoulder. I got passed by two more serious riders #41 & 43 but I didn’t pass anyone else on the way to the finishline.

I ended up with a finish time of 51:11:xx for an average pace of 21.85mph and a max on a slightly downhill of 29.3mph with my average cadence coming in at 89rpm. My average HR was at 138bpm with a max climbing a small climb of 144bpm which told me that I wasn’t recovered from yesterdays 3/1 – 14 mile lakefront run plus the cold, rainy weather has crimping it a lot…normally I can ride a TT of up to 40k averaging an HR of about 160bpm.

When I got back to the car I loaded the bike and went to the restroom to change out of my water saturated clothing…I swear I was carrying 10 extra pounds of water weight in my cycling clothes and shoes even with aero booties on! I was finally starting to warm-up and I walked up to the ABR canopied race headquarters. I saw my friends Jen & Jerome earlier but only from far away and I went up to introduce myself to Jerome for the 1st time (he probably thought I was some sort of nut) as he informed me Jen had gone out after her ride for a 30 minute run…what a brick workout day…dedication! Shortly after Jen returned from her run and we chatted for a little bit but this weather was not getting any better. Hopefully Jen the Galena race will be nicer to all us racers :-)

After I got home, unloaded the car and took a hot shower I felt much, much better after this unique event day…below are the official race results:
http://www.ambikerace.com/2009/Results/Cherry_Valley_results_2009.pdf

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