Recent FC508 Analysis
October 8, 2008 2:01 pmThis past weekend, Paul V. and I competed as a two man relay team in the 25th Furnace Creek 508 bicycle race. We started on Saturday morning at 9:00 am and finished on Sunday afternoon at 5:17 pm, for a total time of 32 hours, 17 minutes. I wrote a race recap here.
One stage that I didn’t feel I did well on last year was this stage 3, from Trona to Furnace Creek. This year my time was 6:03 compared with 7:17 last year, so nearly a 45 minute improvement. Part of this was due to less stopping time overall but most of the improvement had to be while on the bike.
Still I wanted to see where that improvement came from because I did not feel I was climbing any faster due to a strong headwind while climbing Townes Pass this year. Looking at my Polar HRM data, I can see that this year I actually took 5 minutes longer for the climb.
Breaking Stage 3 into three sections, 1) from Trona to the turn up Townes Pass, 2) to the Summit, and 3) from the Summit down into Death Valley to Furnace Creek, I get these results for this year and last year. You can see all of the time savings happened before I even got to Townes Pass. Since I had a stronger tail wind on section 1 and a stronger headwind on section 2, it is hard to know if I really did the main climb any better.
Furnace Creek 508 Results for Stage 3 |
||||||
|
Section
|
Miles
|
Climb
|
Time
|
Stops
(minutes) |
Avg/Max HR
|
MPH
|
| 3 Sections: Trona to Townes Pass, Townes Pass Climb, to Furnace Creek | ||||||
|
2008
|
||||||
| 1 |
46.9
|
2,300
|
2:08
|
137/156
|
22.3
|
|
| 2 |
11.4
|
3,900
|
1:50
|
2
|
139/145
|
6.3
|
| Summit |
2
|
|||||
| 3 |
41.3
|
1,000
|
2:06
|
3
|
122/141
|
20.9
|
| Total |
99.6
|
7,200
|
6:03
|
7
|
15.2
|
|
|
2007
|
||||||
| 1 |
46.9
|
2,300
|
3:11
|
141/164 |
15.0
|
|
| 2 |
11.4
|
3,900
|
1:45
|
6
|
140/149 |
6.9
|
| 3 |
41.3
|
1,000
|
2:21
|
13
|
131 |
19.9
|
| Total |
99.6
|
7,200
|
7:17
|
19
|
13.6
|
|
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