Sometimes all's ya can do...is all ya can do!

Sutton Road Course

Yesterday was CORC's XC race at Sutton Road, a course I had previously placed first in Sport B Men late last year when I had some reasonable form.
The day dawned cool and overcast, the outlook was for a chance of showers but nothing arrived during the morning.
All the pre-race activities went smoothly with no dramas, and I got a pre-ride in of the course to ensure that I there were no surprises lurking anywhere. The lap went OK other then getting lost after following a junior off course (yeah I know look at the markings rather than the rider!)

The start was the usual bottom of the fire road deal and off the line I got swamped, falling back as far as 12th before the single track. Having ridden here a couple of times, I knew that it was really easy to go too hard too early so I slowly set about picking riders off one by one.

After about the first 1/2 lap I knew I wasn't on a good day, there felt like not much in the engine and my bike piloting skills had gone out the window.

So I just kept plugging away picking riders off to move up into 6th place with 2 laps gone.

There were a couple of spectacular crashes through the race due to the combination of wet and dry loose conditions. The loose stuff wasn't the normal bull dust more marble sized rocks for a change. My front tire choice (Maxxis Rendez, good for Stromlo, sh!t for here) almost had me on the ground 4-5 times, with one of them having think that a shammy change might be necessary.

So after making 6th spot I could see 5th place just up the trail but wasn't making any in roads. So it was a case of keeping the pressure on and watching the laps count down.

So the overall result was 6th, but this doesn't really tell the true tail of the race.

Analysis
So on the way home I had the normal cyclist things running through my head when you don't get the result you want, "I need to train harder!", "More intervals!", "I need to train longer!", "Loose weight".etc etc

However after calming down and properly reflecting on things, I thought I would wait until I had a proper look at the numbers before passing judgement.


So first up is the raw number from the race, The normalised power is higher than I expected and most of the durations seem to be OK... so the problems not there.


Raw Numbers from WKO

Next up was to perform a MFA on this race and the previous and see where the differences lie.
So as you can see the numbers are almost identical the normalized power is in fact a touch higher this time around but the overall speed for the race is down. So there is nothing conclusive power wise to draw from here. It maybe that I struggled more with the track conditions this time through with the mixture of wet & dry... but I'm not sure.



Multi File Analysis Graph

The final area I had a look at was the quadrant analysis, an it's here that I spotted that there had been a shift in my high end pedalling. The graph showed that there was an ~ 6% shift from quadrant I to quadrant II. So effectively from high force/high cadence to high force/ low cadence. Now whether this can be attributed to the "sluggish" feeling during the race i.e no snap I'm not sure but it is the only measurable difference between the two files.


Quadrant Analysis

So in summary, while I was slower than the previous race on this course my power output was on par with my previous performance. So what does it mean? Well "sometimes all's ya can do...is all ya can do", we as athletes put alot of pressure on ourselves and sometimes forget that there are things outside our control ie other's performances that we have no influence on.
In this instance there were five people who had a better day than me on the day.

Footnote: Looking at the results from the race and the top-3 from Sports B men all out performed the winner of Sports A men and would have placed mid field in the Open Men's category.