At Ride Sally Ride over the weekend I raced the 35+ 3/4 followed by 93.75% of the Cat 3 race. I'll do a separate post on the 35+ 3/4 since it's a complete race file. The most interesting story from the Cat 3 race was the wind.
That's been a recurring theme this year. The wind has been brutal at a bunch of races - RGS Title Chantilly, Carl Dolan, Fort Ritchie were all so windy I opted to run 25mm alloy clinchers instead of my carbon wheels, which themselves are pretty conservative at 50mm. I did run the Kazane carbons at Ride Sally Ride though - the wind was apparent, but steady. Here's what 10 practice laps looked like on the course ahead of the Cat 3 race:
Remember that the iBike works by measuring wind, and then calculating power based on bike speed, aerodynamics, weight, slope and wind speed. The white and blue chart in the image is the wind and wheel speed. White is wheel and blue is wind. When the blue is above the white that's a headwind. Below is a tailwind, or drafting. (Here it's just tailwind since I wasn't drafting on my warmup laps.) Average wind speed is 18mph during my warmup, though you can see some 30mph gusts. Not many though - it was pretty steady.
You can follow the dips in the elevation (brown at bottom) to get a sense of where on the course the wind was blowing. The dip is on the straight right before turn 3, and there's a nice tailwind there each time. The headwind is at its worst after Turn 1.
This becomes important about an hour later, when the tornado hits. Here's the graph from the Cat 3 race. Follow the blue lines across from left to right and you can't miss it:
I spent a little time in the wind in the Cat 3 race, though most of it seems to be on the stretch with the tailwind, so it's hard to spot from the graph. But with 6 to go coming into Turn 3, I saw lightning flash. I feared they might ring the bell at any time so began to move towards the front to be in contention for any last-minute sprint finish. I held my position around the top 12 or so as we passed S/F with 3 to go. The sky had been getting progressively darker and more ominous. We rounded Turn 1 and the wind jumped out at the pack in full force, as if it were an ambush. I was on the inside but with room and the wind - now blowing 37.5mph according to the iBike - had already slowed the pack by a few mph. I let my momentum carry me by the guys who were slowing, and the wind abated for a fraction, baiting me to accelerate. I did, and as soon as I was clear the wind launched a massive counter-attack, hitting me in square in the face at 52mph. That big blue spike you see is me face-first into the tornado, trying to make it to the corner and into the crosswind. It's 30 seconds into an average headwind of over 40mph, slowing me from 26 to 17mph. Oof.
We're actually all pretty lucky the wind struck when it did. If it had ambushed us 20 seconds later the pack would have been through turn 2 instead of just getting through turn 1. Instead of blowing in our faces and slowing us down, it would have hit us from the side, scooped us up by our deep section carbon wheels, and knocked us down like so many bowling pins.
Look also at the brown graph on the bottom of the above chart. That's elevation. No, we didn't ride the entire last lap downhill. But elevation changes are measured by changes in air pressure. And changes in air pressure accompany tornados. (I'm a closet meteorologist.)
