Nice roads and a long hill

Went out at the weekend for a couple of longer rides than normal, while I had the chance of riding on uncongested smooth tramac instead of fume filled potholes. Both days were quite nice at around 3 hours with a test on the 2nd outing to see if I could set a new 5 min power. One of my theories is that cooling is far more important to 5min+ efforts than what is generally looked at for performance improvements, hence the test. During an indoor effort I set a 5 min record of 421W at the begining of July, which had fan cooling only on the upper body. The test ride at the weekend was out in the open with approx 20C broken sky conditions and I managed 449W, which put me into the CAT1 are on the power profile. Either I managed to get better motivation riding out in the open (30%), improved by 28W in 2 weeks (10%) or had better cooling (60%). The percentages being what I think the difference came from - a combined effect.

During the home bound section of the ride on Monday I ended up on a time trial course with 2 riders ahead to chase. I managed to pass one of them and then stayed about 100m behind the other, who had better aero performance than me (on a section at 33mph he was pulling away slightly). The aero element is something else that I need to work on so that I do not have the profile of a brick.

So, all I need to do now is (appart from the impossible) to maintain my 5 min output for an hour and then I can enter the toru next year.... ha... ha...