Not much going on for me this weekend as far as racing.

After spending two weaks in beautiful Alaska off the bike, I wisely decided not to do the grueling Charlevoix stage race this weekend. This race consists of a time-trial and criterium on the Saturday, and arguably the toughest road race on the Quebec circuit on the Sunday. The gaps are of reasonable height, about 1500 feet, but in the beautiful Charlevoix region, if you have been there, you know that the road builders back in the days, did not know what switchbacks were. So every climb is basically straight up with grades of 12-16% very common. With 3 or 4 of these gaps in a road race, the selection is done from the back of the pack rather than from the front.

This week on Wednesday I used the local Laval criterium as a workout. I had one match, and used it on a 3 man break that lasted 5 laps. Fortunately my efforts were not completely in vain, as it triggered David Albert's and Gordon Stoval's counter attack, which proved to be the winning break. Congrats to both teammates, with David winning the A group, and Gordon winning the B group.

So this morning I was planning to do a practice time-trial, but heavy rain all morning got me sitting on the fence for a few hours. I finally decided to do an 8 kilometer time-trial on the Computrainer. Something I try to avoid because doing a time-trial on a stationary bicycle seems to be twice as hard as outdoors.

I was curious to see what my numbers are this time of year, in a season where my training has been slow to get started. Well..., the Computrainer doesn't lie - you don't get fit by doing a few hikes in Alaska. After calibrating properly, I warmed up about 15 minutes and started the effort. After 6 kilometers my average watts was 260 slowly fading, and windows decided to do an automated update and reboot the computer! A little advice, if you use a Computrainer, make sure the Windows updates are not automatic. 260 watts is a bit low for me this time of year, as I checked my last tests from a few years ago, and usually I would be at about 270-275.

I did do the time-trial on my TT with a very aero position, so I may have traded off a bit of power for a better position, which obviously the Computainer does not care about! My average heart rate was 184, which is nice to see that it hasn't gone down in the last 5 years even as I approach 40 next year. Most people probably think I generate a lot more watts to sustain speeds of 42-45 km/hour when I time-trial, but this stresses the importance of a very aero position even at the expense of losing some power. Being aero will make you go faster, than having more watts and just using to "fight" the wind resistance.

Next weekend, there is no major race on the Quebec circuit, so I signed up for an Olympic distance duathlon in Mont-Tremblant. I'll keep you posted.