It was an overcast, windy and rainy day for the 35km time-trial out at the Jinshan area. However, the rain had eased off by the time the first rider went out on the course. The roads were still pretty wet and slippery. I was starter no.9 behind a Chinese-Taipei rider, I just had a 9 minute warm-up on the rollers outside my tent and had a can of REV 3 to rev me up 🙂 More than half of the Deaf riders that were there were on full-time trial bikes with aero helmets and skin-suits. I did have a nice black New Zealand speed-suit to wear along with a slick white UVEX Fp2 helmet. I used my road bike equiped with Profile carbon TT2 bars and dropped my stem down two carbon-spacers to have my frontal section as aero as possible. I only did this the night before the time-trial event and never got to practise in the new position. I did ride for one minute around my warm-up area to see if it felt comfortable enough (it seemed fine).

This event was not my priority and my coach had even advised possibly skipping the event to focus on my other events that I specialise in. Since I chose to do the time-trial, I was told that I had to pace it at upper endurance or low threshold pace. I had my Cycleops power unit on and the Mavic Open pro wheel (I did have a deep dish HED Jet 60 wheel for the front) to help pace me for the time-trial duration. I did not take off fast from the starting ramp like I normally do, but just eased into it, the first 800m was a twisting circuit with about 500m down-hill that I took carefully since it was still wet. In the first five minutes I was a little excited and felt good pumping out the watts, but it was quite abit higher than what I should have been doing. I averaged 350watts in the first five minutes, after that I paid more attention to keeping the wattage around 260-280watts for the rest of the time-trial. My coach also told me to do five 1 minute surges/intervals, so every 10 minutes I put in a good 400 plus wattage effort and then resumed at 260watts.

I had a tail-wind going out to the half-way point (it was an out and back course) along the flat to rolling coastal road, that kept my speeds between 26 and 30mph. But on the return leg, it was harder work since it was a stiff steady head wind that I only averaged 24mph into. I had to be careful not to put out too much wattage, so as not to over-cook myself. I felt like I had plenty of reserve and the last couple of minutes saw my max one minute power numbers for the TT duration. I had a lucky break with 300 metres to go! I was powering up the hill towards the finish, rounding the bend and there was this big cop walking across the road with his head looking the opposite direction waving down a scooter that was trying to ride onto the course. He walked right into my path and I shoulder barged him. I managed to stay rolling on the bike to sprint the remaining 300 metres to post a 52min 01sec time.