Time Trial / Time Trialling / TT

Apologies for the wall of text. It was written for the running club - hence the added descriptions.

Racing against myself - a report on the Ferryhill Wheelers and Cleveland Coureurs 25s.

Time Trialling is, in its very essence, a race against yourself. An individual start time, set to depart the line alone, to push against one’s own capacity and to race the clock, a lonesome journey through the course, unaccompanied other than the occasional passing by or passing of other riders, a purely solipsistic voyage to the finish. Of course, for those contesting a podium place, there are other people to consider, but fortunately I’ve never been burdened with such possibilities. The only time of any consequence is my own, and even that is arguably inconsequential.

But where am I in all of this? Several months ago I acquired a leg injury – painful damage to the adductor muscle in my right leg, torn while making an awkward and powerful high step while rock climbing. Completely unaware at the time, but awaking in the middle of the night in significant discomfort, it’s an ailment that hasn’t been quick to depart. Progress with rehabilitation has been made, but it remains slow. Squeeze the pillows between my legs while sat on the sofa – that was the instruction from the physio. I can at least roll over in bed without having to manhandle my own leg to relieve the strain and avoid the stabbing pains now. But running, never mind fell racing, remains firmly off the cards. Cycling however doesn’t seem to aggravate the injury at all – a fixed axis of movement with feet clipped into pedals – no need for torsional stability here. There’s normal bike racing, but with its categories, licenses, teams and propensity for bikes worth more than my car (admittedly not saying much), I have never been tempted. But time trialling seems different. It is the cottage industry of bike racing, as far as I can tell. Village halls, keen enthusiasts, races that accommodate all abilities and ages – it definitely seems a kindred spirit to the fell racing I miss so dearly. And now I have found myself ensnared by this niche subdivision of bike riding.

What I have also been discovering, is that the race against myself seems to stretch over much more than the 25 mile courses I’ve been riding. For fell races, I have a shopping bag that lives in the boot of my car – inside it the various elements of the mandatory kit required for the aforementioned events – a set of waterproofs, a hat, some gloves, a compass, a whistle. I might have to procure a map in advance, but as long as I’ve filled my water bottles, thrown in a cereal bar, and remembered the right shoes, there isn’t really much preparation required. Arrive and park in a field somewhere, fill out the standard photocopied A5 entry form, hand over a few quid, receive your number and pins, and off you go. Even pinning the number on is easier – bang in the middle on the front of my running vest, no assistance needed to achieve an aerodynamically compliant attachment. It suits me well. There’s always a rush – be it a morning or evening race – to get there, get registered, use the facilities and get to the start line, and hopefully with a warm up squeezed in somewhere too. It is no great logistical challenge.

But when it comes to time trialling, so far at least, it seems rather different. Now I have a bike to sort out. I have to enter weeks in advance. I even have to make space in the car itself (oh the humanity!). With limited time available, I find myself time trialling almost every element of the preparation as well. For my last two TTs, the week beforehand has been a blur of past midnight tinkering and bike fixing. I have an hour and a half on Tuesday to actually try the bike I’ve bought to race on. I probably should have actually ridden it before race day, but with local streets littered with broken glass and other tyre slashing debris, the fast but delicate race tyres look a little too fragile for the local tarmac offerings. Alas now with the first race of the season approaching, I must run the gauntlet. The tyres survive the test ride but the rest of the time was spent trying to adjust the spaceship-like carbon handlebars at the side of the road. The futuristic control station seems to have been flying a little too close to the sun. Stripped bolts, hairline cracks, and splodges of various resins concealing a variety of concerns, all revealed as I try and cajole the bars into a ridable formation – something I do not achieve. Each adjustment is somehow worse than the last, and my faith in these aerospace appendages crashes out of orbit. Heralding more red flags than a communist conference - especially for someone who had their face rearranged after the spontaneous structural failure of a bike component the year before – I concede that I need to sort a suitable replacement. A small inconvenience that consists of changing the base bars, adding different extensions, swapping over the shifters, swapping over the brake levers, changing all the cables, adjusting the brakes and gears, wrapping the bars with new bar tape, and replacing the barrel adjuster on the downtube which seems to have snapped. Exactly what you want to happen on your cursory “I’ll just check that the bike is fine” ride, a few days before the race. I yearn for the “shopping bag in the boot of the car” method of preparation.

A few hasty online orders for spare parts and several late nights of mechanical toil later, the bike appears to be ready. Nothing went smoothly of course. The barrel adjuster was seized, and would not submit to bolt removal tools, which in turn meant a fiasco of drilling, tapping threads and re-riveting. The brake levers were of a design unfamiliar to me, which lead to an excruciating hour of teasing cables into their sheaths, before realising I had been doing it in the wrong order and would never had succeeded with my method until I saw the error of my ways. And all the while, each step of mechanical intervention manages to reveal further concern. The bike, it appears, was merely a vessel for the mechanical neglect of the previous owner (here, I must remind myself about people in glass houses, my own maintenance regimes usually landing somewhere between spartan and non-existent).

First up was The Ferryhill Wheelers 25 mile. Run on a newish course (T253/4) near Catterick – the town known primarily for its army barracks – I arrive severely lacking in military precision. The standard mad rush of gobbling toast and inhaling cereal is followed by hastily throwing bike and gear into the car, and the automotive time trial to the start begins. Arrive, sign in, ask a stranger to pin my number as far down my back as they’re comfortable with and hope that the fit is more Spanx than windsock. There’s just about enough time left to try and get warmed up before the start. The time for cursory laps up and down the nearby lanes is eaten into when my saddle slips and needs adjusting, and my warmup is largely incomplete as once again I find myself rushing to the star line. I’ve failed to warm up and my legs feel poor. The short line of riders in front of me slowly dwindles minute by minute as they’re counted down, held in position and set off by the timekeepers. I’m counted in and I’m away. The goal is to finish within the hour with an average speed over 25mph, so with the bit between my teeth, I set off, hauling on the bars (reassuring solid metal replacements in place of the carbon death traps that arrived with the bike), straining to reach terminal velocity as quickly as possible. Levering the bars up against the downward stroke of the pedals, I feel like I’m trying to separate the bike entirely. Sadly, this is partially achieved. As I transition from the wide bars to the narrow extensions – positioned so that your forearms are together and stretched forward into an air piercing nosecone for maximum aerodynamic efficiency – I notice that rather than aiming dead straight, my nosecone’s trajectory is frankly a bit wonky. With no time to return to mission control for engineering adjustments, no precious seconds spare for roadside realignment, I have to accept my new alternative position. With each transition between bars, the misalignment worsens. By the end of the race, I’m about 15 degrees off course. Bar alignment surely didn’t help, but the double loop course, with its undulations, turns, and varying wind conditions all conspired against me. The 25mph average I was aiming for quickly ebbed away and I settled in, head down, legs churning – watching my average speed wane and fall.

I finished in 1:04.17, an average speed just over 23mph. Not the result I’d hoped for, but I was consoled by my more experienced friends, that with the winner finishing in 51:50, the course and conditions were likely slow. And if nothing else I had a season opener to improve upon. The time was marginally faster than last year’s first TT, I had obvious mechanical improvements to make, and the benchmark had been set.

The following week was very similar. Too much to do, too little time. I’d noticed that the front tyre had gone rather soft after the TT, which wasn’t ideal considering that it had started the day at a bullet hard 120 PSI. And under closer inspection the rear tyre was threadbare in places. More online shopping ensued and the requisite bits were on their way. One minor complication was that the specialist TT wheels took tubular tyres. Unlike the more common tubed clincher tyres I’m used to, that inflate with a rubber innertube inside a tyre hooked onto the bead of the rim, tubular tyres are just that – tubular. The whole tyre is a sealed rubber ring that is glued or taped directly to the wheel. Some YouTube research follows, and I ascertain that taping the tyre to the wheel is likely to be the least painful, and most importantly, least likely to destroy the carpets of my rented flat. Not to mention that glueing the tyres takes two days, as the wheel and tyre need to be glued and left to cure separately for 24 hours before being combined with a further layer of glue the next day.

But firstly, the tyre must be separated from the wheel. It’s a deep sectioned, pure carbon rim, which I am convinced is more delicate than an antique doily. The paradoxical forceful care required to separate tyre from rim costs me my patience and a decent layer of skin from my palms. Once de-tyred, the rim is quickly cleaned and the tape applied ready for its new outfit. Amazingly, the marrying of tyre to rim is incredibly straightforward. Egged on by this success, I go to strip the rear tyre from the spokeless carbon disc that is the rear wheel. Only at this point I discover that it is, in fact, not a tubular wheel. Instead it’s a normal clincher with inner tube. In some ways it’s a relief as the stripping process doesn’t need to be repeated, but simultaneously I don’t have a replacement tyre. Instead I steal the tyre from my road bike and mount that instead. The slightly larger diameter tyre only just squeezing into it’s much more slender new accommodation. But it’s another item on the ever growing list of problems to solve, that has happily been ticked off.

Next was the issue of my position on the bike. Amongst the various things one can do to go faster, getting your position right is both one of the most important and the cheapest. There’s no point being super fit and on the fastest bike money can buy (I can safely say neither apply here), if your riding position is as aerodynamic as a cardboard box. This concept greatly appeals as it is both free, and seemingly is a substitute for excessive fitness. I’d previously made my adjustments and thought that I’d fine tuned myself into the perfect aerodynamic contortion on the bike. That was until I saw some photos of myself actually on the course, and realised, as my mate put it, that I was: “about as aerodynamic as a transit van”. Right. So that needed dealt with as well. By this point, I’ve run out of time for tinkering. I’ve worked Monday to Thursday on day shifts, and Friday to Sunday I have to cover 630pm to 630am night shifts. It is now Saturday afternoon, and I have an hour to get my position right before I’ve got to leave for work, and the TT is on Sunday morning. My plan being to go straight from the nightshift, pick up my bike and other gear at home, chuck it all in the car, then drive straight to the start. The micro time trials of each stage of preparation keep adding up – again more yearning for the shopping bag in the boot method, but there’s no time for that now. Whatever happens, the position needs sorted and the only time is now. I manically re-shuffle the bars, flip the stem, and move the spacers to get me lower on the front, bringing my shoulders and head down, and getting my torso much closer to the horizontal formation favoured by the much wiser and more experienced TT riders I share the courses with. I send photos of myself in my pants in position on the bike to long suffering friends for advice (amazingly they even reply and offer feedback). And then I hurry off to work.

630am rolls around and the race to the start begins. Today I’m headed towards Middlesbrough, for Cleveland Coureurs 25. What follows is a rapid departure from work, a pitstop to load the car with equipment and bits, and to load my stomach with toast, cereal and coffee, back on the road for 730am, with an ETA at race HQ around 840am. My start time was 9.30am on the dot, so the margins aren’t as generous as I’d hoped (but also about what I expected them to be). The slightly manic run begins on arrival. Scrape myself into the tight racing skinsuit, sign in and receive my number, ask a stranger to attach it to my back with safety pins, make my final loo stop and apply chamois cream to any vulnerable spots, before rushing back out to warm up. It’s a hot day, with a gentle wind blowing, but warming up feels awkward. My body still half asleep from the late shifts and refusing to be roused into action. I stop to double check that my bars and stem are tight this time – fool me once and all that. I notice that my rear brake is threatening to rub on the rim (essentially applying itself constantly, a definite no-no for going fast) and my hurried attempts to bodge it back into place seem to only half work. I check the clock and it’s 4 minutes to my start time, so tinkering hours are over. I head to the start to join the short queue. Watching those in front be counted off in minute intervals until I’m sat on the front, held upright by the timekeeper, as the other counts me down: a minute, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and away. Much to my relief, the initial heave off the line has not altered the alignment of the bars this time, and I settle into the extensions, full steam ahead, all pointing straight and true. I’m not sure of the exact benefit, but I definitely feel more aerodynamic. Tucked in, head low, arms pointing ahead. The course is very straightforward (quite literally), down the A19 for 12.5 miles before turning and coming back. The tarmac is smooth. The road undulates gently but is about as flat as you’ll get round here. The headwind is gentle, but some solace is offered by the prospect of a tailwind on the return leg. The cars flying past are remarkably loud – the outer shell of my teardrop helmet seemingly acting as one giant diaphragm right into my ears. I cautiously remain on the gutter side of the white line, intimidated by the traffic off the smoother tarmac and into the rougher graded surface. But soon confidence is bolstered and I take my place on the road proper. Average speed is looking better than my previous effort, I just need to nudge it over the 25mph mark. It’s tickling it, but I’m unable to maintain it. I feel like the headwind is perceptible but unsure to what extent the difference it’s making – if any at all. The hope is that the small reduction in speed will be returned in kind on the second leg. There’s a small downhill before the turnaround and I crack the 25mph average. I’ll no doubt lose it on the double loop to get back on the road facing home and the climb that follows it, but with a little help from the wind, the window of opportunity for the sub hour time seems to have opened. I climb the hill at 18mph – far below where I want to be overall, but hopefully enough to minimise damage. The slight headwind is now a tailwind and it seems to be making more of a difference than expected. Average speed slowly creeping up. The second half definitely faster than the first. Just keep on. Count the miles down. If not now then when? When else can you try hard? These minutes of hard effort are rare. The opportunity isn’t often presented, so take it with meaning. Enjoy it. Grit the teeth. Kick the pedals. Worry less about the slowing on the inclines and more about trying as hard as I can. Drop a gear or two, spin the legs faster when the torque runs low. Feel the heavy breath and beating heart. The average is even threatening 26mph now. Come on. 23.5 miles down. Hypoxic mind unable to do the maths on the time left. Try and spot the finish. Try and empty the tank. I spot the finish too late, but I’m happy that not much has been left out on the course. I’ve gained a mile per hour in average speed over the desired 25mph, and taken away over a couple of minutes under the hour that I was aiming for. I shout my number to the timekeepers as I pass the finish marker. And then roll slowly back to HQ.

There a selection of sandwiches and cakes await – the small reading rooms in the town filled with jubilant riders. It seems I am not the only one to have taken full advantage of the fast course and prime conditions. One rider tells he’s just broken a personal best that he’s had since 1996 – going under 50 minutes in a timed event for the first time, his previous best being a tantalising 50:01 – yet today he rode a 49.17. Chapeau! The course record is broken by ex-Olympian Adam Duggleby riding a 46:10 at a blistering 32.5mph average. Undoubtedly, it was a good day to be out there, even after the night shifts. And everyone seems to be sharing in some kind of communal glow. The day was definitely a success, my sub hour goal for the year complete – but now it begins in earnest. Surely I can be fitter, faster, more powerful. I just have to keep trying and training, and hopefully find out! Until I can run again, anyway.

Massive thanks to Ferryhill Wheelers and Cleveland Coureurs for organising these events - I enjoyed them both massively.

Pictured:
Bars askew, in “transit van” aero position.

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