Makaha Time Trial Race Report

Saturday, February 11th, was the Makaha Time Trial. Once again my heart clouds my race results. By that I mean my actual heart, the one beating in my chest. Or is it the one in my head? 

On this occasion I decided to ignore heart rate and pace myself strictly by power. In that regard I am totally pleased with my results. We always believe we could have gone harder, and my review of the results suggests that I could have gone a little harder than I did. The challenge is that the closer we get to our ideal performance, the greater the risk of falling over the endurance cliff. Of blowing up. Many a cyclist has started a time trial believing they can go really fast, only to run out of gas well before crossing the finish line.

I did this time trial on a whim. A friend happened to post about it in Facebook, and when I saw that my good friend Ben Williams was the race director I decided to do it just for fun. For experience, too, as I had never done one outside of the bike portion of a triathlon.

I am planning my season to peak late in the year. Across North America, athletes are doing early base training with a goal of being race ready by late spring and peaking for their “A” races during the summer. If I were to follow that schedule I would peak much too early, and holding that level of fitness from from, say, June through November, is virtually impossible.

Originally I decided to train as if I were doing Honu, and do a big weekend around that time. That would have me starting serious base training in early January. Then take a small break and ramp up to November. Along the way I will establish performance goals that I must meet before following through with Ironman Cozumel. This is standard planning practice.

Then I took a long, hard look my last couple of years and arrived at two key decisions. First, I would pay a lot less attention to what my heart rate was doing, particularly in races. Second, I would postpone true base training and use this early season time to focus on form and technique.

When I abandoned the 2021 Honolulu Marathon due to my heart, I did not have a diagnosis. Now that I do, and am confident that my condition is not life threatening, I believe the best thing to do is to get out there and go hard, no matter what my heart rate monitor says. As for form, I hoped that working on technique could make significant improvements in my swim and run efficiency. This should reduce the effort required to meet those nasty cutoff times, and maybe even make me faster.

I decided to arrange my early season blocks into sport-specific blocks, in order to keep the form work focused on one set of muscle movements. I got this idea from Coach Trevor Conner at FastTalk Labs. 

The first round would be one week focused specifically on one activity. A second round would have two week periods but with a small amount of other activity blended in. The cycle would begin with swimming, only because my legs were beat up after the marathon. The sequence ended up being swim - bike - run. How about that!
 

The first block came during the holiday season and my son was home for the holidays, so lots of family activities and eating. No strength training and no real effort to follow the plan precisely. By the second block my schedule was back to normal, so I made more of an effort to stick to the plan. Heavy strength training twice a week, and a few of the other two activities.

On January 22nd I did an Andy Cogen style bike training zone test in order to set training zones for the following two week block. My FTP came out at 108, which WKO agreed with. I am not surprised it is so low because I have not been riding much.

As you can see, the Makaha Time Trial on Feb 11 came smack in the middle of the second run block. That’s OK. It was just for fun.

During the bike block I had done a 4 x 5 interval session, and since it felt hard but doable I decided to stick with my FTP of 108. WKO has my time to exhaustion - the duration I can expect to hold FTP -  hovering around 30 minutes. That would be roughly the duration of the race. So my race plan was to go out at 100 for five or ten minutes, then see what I could do while holding back efforts much over 108 in order to avoid overcooking myself.

Sure enough, as I settled into the opening, fast, downhill section I felt strong and saw numbers like 150 and 170. I got it under control and kept aiming for 100. I was fine until the turn around. After that I found myself backing off at times. I really had to focus to stay above 100..

Respiration rate typically tracks rate of perceived exertion (RPE). I have no way to measure respiration other than to say I was breathing hard but not desperately. No stars, no tunnel vision. Just what I expected; my legs should be the limiting factor, not my respiration. Good.

Now for some plan/actual metrics:

So that’s pretty good. Slow, but I could not have expected more given that I did not train for this event, or anything like it. 

Here is where the red flag goes up. Average heart rate 145 bpm. Wait. What? That is way too high!

Just to prove to myself that 145 was way out of line, I went back and looked at that 4 x 5 workout I did on February 3rd. The plan called for four intervals of five minutes at 103 - 113 watts, targeting FTP at 108, separated by two minutes of easy spinning. You should expect heart rate during these intervals to creep up a bit. (If it doesn’t, you aren’t working hard enough.) I was able to keep the power steady throughout each interval. Here are the results.
 

Overall very steady and consistent. The falling cadence suggests the effects of fatigue, which correlates with the increasing heart rate. These are good results.

Now compare the heart rate values. Why should there be such a huge difference between heart performances? Yes, there are many variables. Heat can be a factor, but the temperature on both sessions was 71-72. No different. Hydration? I was fresh both days, well hydrated. Caffeine? If anything I had less before the time trial. Same bike. Same equipment. 

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is the room. The setting. In one I was alone in my garage, just doing my thing. At the other I was at a race, surrounded by people, doing something unfamiliar. At least the location was familiar - I had ridden up there not so long ago.

Now for some more numbers. Do these muddy the waters even more, or add clarity? I’m still not sure. I did the test upon which I based my 108 FTP on January 22nd. It has a five minute all out segment, and a twenty minute all out segment, separated by a ten minute rest. Standard stuff. Max heart rate for the five minute segment was 137 and should correspond to VO2Max heart rate. I don’t think I got there, because the maximum heart rate for the twenty minute segment was 146, and average was 135. The difference between 135 for the FTP test and 145 for the race is not huge, but still. Could it be that driving to Ford Island for an FTP test provokes some of the same stress that a race does? Think about it. If you have ever done an FTP test you have probably approached it with some degree of apprehension.

I said I was not going to pay attention to my heart rate during the race. Well, I lied. Many months ago when I configured my Garmin head unit race profile I put thirty second power in big numbers smack in the middle, with cadence and distance and a few other metrics arranged around it. At the upper right corner I have heart rate zone. Throughout the race it was somewhere in zone 5. I chuckled when I saw it. The same thing always happens at Honu after the swim and I thought I was supposed to take it easy until it came down. Now I know better. 

Now, consider this. The mind is a complicated thing. Just seeing that number may have caused me to feel as though I was going too hard. I said I was tracking power, but who can say how things might have gone differently had I not displayed heart rate at all?

Or, can we say that trying to hold steady, consistent power for thirty minutes is not possible with heart rate well past threshold? It’s one thing to ignore the number, quite another to conclude it has no impact on performance.

There is no easy answer. The good news is that this is nothing to worry about. As my cardiologist told me, if my legs are working hard I should just keep going.