Bike race

This past Sunday I participated in another cycling race. It was held just outside the city of El Alto, at the same 4000 meter 13,000ft altitude than the city; once you go up from La Paz until El Alto, there it's pretty flat. La Paz has literally nothing flat for riding or running except the trainer, so it would be great to go ride on the flats regularly, but on a bike it takes over an hour of terrible urban riding to get out of El Alto. So, I never really go there. In a car the trip is faster, but still feels pretty long.

Anyway, in my memories from that area and on google Earth the race course looked pretty easy, but in person it turned out to have constant rollers. Not steep, but a lot of long hills. My goal for the 60km 38 mile long race was to make sure that I wouldn't miss any breakaways, not even by a single rider, because in my last bike race a single rider got away pretty early and did ride away. Quite early a good rider I knew broke away a little bit, so I decided to ride hard and catch him, which I did, but then after maybe two minutes the whole group was together again. Then a really skinny rider took off super hard going up a hill but was caught in a few minutes. Soon there was another hill and the same dude took off again. And again it looked like he was sprinting his absolute maximum, so I didn't think he was going to make it very far but he did. The front group still had about10 people, but it took at least 20 minutes of really hard riding to catch the skinny guy. Pretty much the entire first half of the race I was waiting for a small group of maybe 2-4 to drop the rest of the pack, and I felt like it was going to happen because so many times I was sprinting so hard to keep up. I put out 928 watts just 14 minutes into the race, and averaged 404 watts for one minute just after the first 30 minutes.

 But when the skinny guy was caught we were still 8. For some time everybody was taking it easier, until the hard riding started again and I had to make some huge efforts, but the group was together until the last long hill before the flat finish. In the sprint I got 6th, the next 2 being a little further back. I should practice sprinting and maximum peak efforts to do better in cycling races.

The next day I did 3,5 hours of training, but after that my back started hurting a lot like something's not in place. Hopefully it goes away soon, but today I was not able to do anything.