Overall, this season was a bit of a bust. I only won one race (mountain bike), had one top 10 (cyclocross), several top 20s and a truck load of DNFs, mostly due to mechanical issues. When I was racing and not having mechanical issues, I could feel see the results starting to come in, but, the mechanical issues were so prevalent that it made progress hard to come by.
While results were slowly trickling in, I still had several issues when racing that limited my ability to beat the better guys in my category and they fall in to two categories:
- I lacked raw power when riding up extremely steep climbs
- I lacked repeatability on efforts above V02 (especially prevalent late in the race)
If I can correct these things, I think the next season will be even better.
On the training side of things, progress was amazing up until the July/August timeframe. I was predicting that I had an FTP of around 290, took a week off to go to the mountains (did a bit of mountain biking) and, when I came back, I had lost significant power and had a serious lack of energy. I went to the doctor and had tons of blood work done, but didn’t come up with any results. I did regain some of that lost ground, but didn’t recover near all of it due to how close to the season I was. Overall, I think my fitness during the season was OK, but definitely lacking.
Lastly, while my technical skills were above average for my category, I think I need to up my again. To do that, I am going to add more mountain bike racing to my early season.