Tour de Palm Springs

I'm getting some down time in this weekend...and what else to do, other than ride a bike for a hundred miles while you're on vacation?

I road the century at the Tour de Palm Springs, and it was a great time.  The weather has been unseasonably hot, with highs reaching into the upper 80s--I know a lot of the United States is covered in blizzard conditions and entrenched in snow, so I feel very lucky to have this kind of weather for a long weekend getaway.

Elevation profile for Century Ride

The Palm Springs century has a great first half of the course.  The first 13 miles are a climb of about a thousand feet, which is just gradual enough at times that you don't really realize you're climbing that whole time.  There are definitely steeper and less steep sections for variety, but anything that seems flat is actually still a gradual uphill during that time.  It took me an hour and ten minutes to reach the top.  Following that, there's a screaming descent for about ten miles, and then some rolling hills before you reach another descent to the 51 mile mark.  That portion of the course is beautiful and scenic--taking you through windmill farms, and uninhabited back country on the North side of the freeway from the desert cities.

Century Route (101.5 miles)

The back half of the course leaves something to be desired.  It routes through neighborhoods of the cities of Indio, Palm Desert, Cathedral City, and eventually back into Palm Springs.  While there are times that it goes through some more scenic venues (like Palm Tree farms), there's a lot of traffic lights to deal with, and it's an open course, so a lot of traffic to deal with as well.  The combination resulted in a lot of time waiting at stop lights.  It also dealt me the hand of getting pummeled by this one peloton of riders taking off at every traffic light for about 20 miles, only to catch them and pass them before arriving at the next light.  This is the curse of the constant wattage mentality of the triathlete banging up against the surge-and-cruise mentality of the pack cyclist.

In order to fall in line with a pack, you'd generally have to hammer in 300-400 watts to accelerate with them from a stop, and then draft off the back of them, and drop down to something small, like 120 watts.  While that kind of riding has its place, it's not the way that training goes down for someone working on their ability to sustain an effort for an Ironman or Half Ironman distance race. Since drafting is not legal in the sport of triathlon (aside from the format reserved for the elite few that race at the ITU level), your ability to race well depends on your ability to average higher wattage over the course of many hours, and generally speaking, each of those bursts of power takes away from that capability for a given ride or race.  It also makes it much harder to have a good run if you've spent your time hammering in massive spikes in power over the course of 56 or 112 miles.

Blue skies for a relaxing day at the hotel pool

I'm extraordinarily happy with the way this ride went--after my surprise half marathon PR last weekend, I spent several days extraordinarily sore, and my knee was irritated and tight.  My running this past week suffered--an easy 3 mile run one day, 4 miles another day, and I still had knee pain going on.  I biked easy until Thursday, when I was able to put some decent intervals on the bike.  Approaching this century ride, I asked my coach if she thought I was in a position to make it through this ride, and I had already figured an escape route if I started having issues early on in the ride.  We decided to let it be my call on the morning of the ride.  At about mile 30 of the century, there's a merge back into the 55 mile course that would create about a 68 mile ride instead of the 101.5 miles for the full century.  I got to that point and felt good.  There's also a way to cut about 20 miles off the course later on, and I got to that point and felt that was unnecessary.

I completed the century ride in about 6 hours and 40 minutes (stopping time included).  My actually moving time was 5 hours and 50 minutes.  (Lot of stop lights and a couple of SAG stops to refuel and re-sunscreen).  More importantly, my normalized power was 2 watts higher than my best ironman bike split--156 watts, so it was a complete shock to me!  Even without the difficulty recovering from my run last week, I wasn't sure how well trained I was for a long duration bike ride, since my off season rides have been in the range of about 3 hours up to this point.  It all worked out really well!

And now I'm off to enjoy my last morning of lounging by the pool before heading back to the real world.