h2ofun wrote:
Here is my 2 cents. Am a 57 old guy, so this impacts my thoughts.
I just did the Donner Olympic race yesterday. Lots of very steep up hills, and then down hills. One very important piece in my race strategy for short course racing is RPM on the bike.
So I run a compact 50/34 11/32 setup I was spinning up the 8% grade at 80 plus RPM passing lots of folks just grinding away. I tried to keep my RPM around 90 to 100 for the bike course.
I just about crashed with bike wobble going down donner last year so I went down super slow which really caused me to have a much slower bike time than last year.
But since I had tried to save my legs as much as possible, I was able to jump off the bike and set a PR for the run. Ended up with the 3rd fastest run split.
Shortening my crank arms also seems to have helped since I have set new PR runs times for basically all the races I have done this year which getting faster at my age
is fun since some are now saying quietly I must be taking drugs.
(And for the ones who have followed the transition threads, yep my run in my bike shoes is a terrible strategy, it just gave me the fastest T2 split time of everyone in the race. :o) )
Just offering there are many things you need to look at in order to have the fastest time to the finish. Split times do not mean much, unless you are old like me then this is all we
can shoot for. :o)
.
MY last course was fairly hilly, so I had some decision making to do. I had a plan for power, but 5 miles in, it was clear my legs were not going to deliver. So I rode as evenly and as strong as I could, but it was well below threshold, so ultimately there wasn;t too much risk to my run. Though similarly, the run course was even hillier comparatively, and they still refused to deliver. What was interesting was that it was humid, where I tend ot perform poorly... but because it was so hilly, on average everyone performed poorly in those conditions. So I still had a "fast" run split even though it was slow. In that example, going slower on the bike, tactically would have been a mistake as it would have placed me within sight of 2nd place and he might have pushed to reel me in. Instead, I arrive in T2 with a 3' gap and the race was over at that point.
So consider this.... if you ride fast enough, you can have the luxury of running conservatively.
To whomever said, you can always push harder late in the race. Ummm ya... have you tried that? IF it worked, I contend that you left a lot of time on the table the 1st 1/2 of the run.
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