lactic implosion

Yes, it's true... I cracked yesterday. I cracked hard. It was mother's day, and the JRVS Sunday morning ride had a smaller group than usual. Missing were many of the regular heavy hitters, but present were the sluggers... Cam and Todd. Wow... I had not ridden with Todd at all this year, other than a few warm up laps at Tyson's this year. Todd is incredibly strong and is focusing most of his energy on road racing this year with the Snow Valley amateur-elite team. At one point he and I got off the front and he just hammered... I've never seen anybody hammer so hard, but so smooth.

Anyways, back to my morning. It seems the week's efforts were finally catching up with me; I can buffer a lot of lactic acid build up, but once it reaches critical mass... I'm done. Chris, breakaway specialist/lead out man extra ordinaire/fellow Cat3/fellow allergy sufferer, was also having a rough day with the legs. On the infamous col' de Stonehouse I popped... slowly bobbing and weaving at the foot of the climb watching the Snow Valley duo fly up the road. My plan was to salvage what I had left and ride back with Chris. Next thing, I see Cam dropping back... "great..." I thought, "know I've GOT to dig in an go". I woke up in the morning with heavy legs and tight hamstrings, not much spark, but they still worked. Nevertheless, I dug in deep to get up the road to Cam (who was going just easy enough for me to bridge up, but hard enough to make me dig deep). As I caught up with Cam, we could see Todd and Steve up the road.

I was completely spent... spent enough that if I was riding solo, I would've called it a day and spun home in the 39t. I had to dig in deep to stay on Cam's wheel... we were definately cruising, slowly reeling in Todd, but at a pace I could sustain. As we hit rollers heading inro the "Roubaix" stretch, the rubber band finally snapped. I was on my own. The legs refused to turn over. I was spent, my legs burned... and threatened to cramp. I could barely maintain 100 watts for the remainder of the ride. I've never cracked like that before... never so hard. In hindsight, I'm glad Cam dropped back and pushed me past my limits. On a normal day, I would've been able to keep up... and even contribute to the pace; I've never had that much lactic burn before.