Racing season is in full swing this month, and I’m happy to report that I’ve won the last 3 time trials I’ve competed in. The neatest part about winning, outside of the satisfaction of being at the peak of my fitness right now, is the cool schwag you accumulate when you win. So far this season I’ve picked up $75 in cash, $55 worth of gift cards (Chipotle, Bike Beat, and Best Buy), a double wheel bag, $12 worth of Fiorucci sandwich meat, a bicycle pump, and a couple of odds and ends.

This week’s race was a 2-man team time trial out in Smithfield, VA. i was riding with my new teammate Jack. Jack and I live about 2.5 hours away from each other, so not only did we not train for the event together, we have never even ridden together (he wasn’t on the team yet when we had our team camp). Still, it was a good pairing. We split the pulls into 5 minute segments at first – I pulled for 3 minutes, and Jack for 2. Once Jack got a feel for the pace, and indicated he could do slightly longer pulls, we set up 4 min / 3 min rotations. Then towards the last 8 miles or so, we each did 1 mile then came off.

We were riding in the Merckx category, because Jack doesn’t have a TT bike. He brought an aero helmet, and I loaned him an old Mavic Cosmic front wheel and my Open Pro with a wheel cover (the rules for the Merckx were no aero bars and regular drop handlebars – but no restrictions on wheels and helmets). I wore my Giro helmet and ran my H3 front and 808 rear. Just to make the bike fully mass-start legal, I took the cover off the 808.

I’d like to think that most of the time was a product of the hard work we did – I averaged about 330W each pull (lower than I had hoped, but I couldn’t shift down into the 12 cog, and I’d put in 720 TSS over the last 5 days), but we put over 7 minutes into the second-place team. Comparing our ride to the full-on TT gear group, we would have been 6th, onyl about 4.5 minutes behind the winners. Serious confidence-builder. Makes me certain that I need to work on my position on the TT bike to regain some of the power I’m losing, but it’s also reassuring to know that even with the power loss, I’m gaining about 1.5 mph in speed.