 So let's now move to the road race, where the day prior, Southeast Queensland declared flood warnings, where the Gold Coast should prepare for a month's worth of rain in one day. Just the news you wanna hear when you've got carbon rims on a rim brake bike and all the cycling are already declaring the course to have a super dangerous corner. Yay! So welcome back to the Friday vlog series where today I wanted to share with you some scenes of racing at the men's masters nationals titles on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, which actually occurred at the back end of last year, December, 2020. And as you can see here, there's a time trial, a criteria and a road race. And here you can see we're at the start line of a criteria on a purpose built track in Runaway Bay on the Gold Coast. Now personally, I have the worst frame for time trialing. So I skipped that, I went down for the criteria and I stayed for the road race, which we'll get to in a second. So the agenda for this video, where we'll spend most of our time on the road race is as follows. Number one, I'll share with you an energy saving tactic I used on a technical section during the crit race. Number two, I'll show you some positioning mistakes I made in the road race and the effect on wasting energy. Number three, getting my legs ripped off, repeating a nasty 90 second ascent 12 times at 7% average and some scenes of eating dirt and rain in horrendous conditions for 2.5 hours in the road race. But before we get into it, I just wanted to thank today's video sponsor, being Surfshark. If you're watching this video, I could almost guarantee you've got the internet and the unfortunate thing about the internet is there's all sorts of strange units doing weird fraudulent things such as ID theft. Well, thanks to the Aussie dollar for now just under $3 AUD a month. Way less than a coffee. You can secure your internet with Surfshark's award-winning VPN, which is essentially like having an online security guard as you enter the online world. If you want to jump on board Surfshark and secure your internet, check out the link below and enter the promo code CAMNICLES to get your less than $3 per month offer, which includes three months extra free when you sign up to the 24 month program. Thanks once again to Surfshark for supporting my channel and also the great offer for the audience. Now, as you can see, we start off quite slow and steady in the criteria. And for your information, the master's categories are split into different age groups. So at 39 years of age, which is what I am, I just scrape into master's too, which is ages 35 to 39. So I'm essentially racing blokes around my age. Now, this event was originally supposed to be in Victoria in Australia, I believe, and it was never really on my radar. So I decided to compete in it for 2021, but given COVID, the event moved from Victoria to Queensland in the Gold Coast. So massive kudos to Ozcycling for still getting this event going and roughly a couple of months prior to the event. I decided to throw my hat in the ring and get involved as the Gold Coast. It's only 2.5 hours drive down the road from my house and given the COVID situation around the world, I thought, how fortunate are we? We've got the opportunity to go race our bikes like this. So we'll skip forward a touch here. And as I was essentially cramming before the exam, the best thing that you can do in my opinion when you're cramming before the exam is to prioritize one race over the other. So I decided to focus on criterium training, but as is often the case with cycling, I was much more satisfied with my event in a different race, being the roadie. But before we get to that race, a quick showing of how a lapse in concentration can cost you big time in a criterium. And this was a super windy day with winds blowing as a headwind down the main straight. In fact, it was probably more of a crosshead down the main straight, which made, I'd call it an S-bend, become quite a technical part of the track. So here I wanted to quickly show you going through this S-bend, the technical part of the crit course, where I made this mistake, I think on lap three. And I didn't do it again because the energy wastage that occurred in this section was massive. And it just goes to show the roll crosswinds can play when you have a lapse in concentration. And as you can see here, I'm not paying attention, letting the wheel go. And when you let the wheel go in strong crosswind conditions, obviously when the pressure is on, you can literally create a four to five bike length gap in the matter of a split second. And as you can see here, that is exactly what I've done. Having to lay down a 500 to 600 watt effort for about 15 seconds to get back on the wheel, which I dropped. So after stupidly wasting energy like that, I made it my goal, every single lap, to be right up the arse of the rider in front of me. And as you can see here in the next lap, while the tricky crosswind conditions mean, you still have to lay down the power in this section for a period of time. Two to three seconds at 600 to 700 watts is a lot less fatiguing than 15 seconds at 500 to 600 watts. So after that initial waste of energy, I ensured the concentration levels were higher all around, particularly paying attention to riding as close to the wheel as possible with safety in mind, of course, and almost ducking either side of the wheel as the wind angle changed through that S-bend section. Now, finally, before we get into the road race, you can see here a rider in white, just discreetly, right off the front at around the 10 minute mark. His name is Charles Van Wick, and would you believe he stayed away from that moment onwards? An unbelievable effort, really. And while his time on the bunch, yo-yo between, I'd say about 10 to 30 seconds for the last 30 minutes of this 40 minute plus three lap race, he most definitely deserved to take the win. So well done, Charles. And it essentially became a race for second and third for the remnants of the bunch. And to be honest, from a personal perspective, I was a bystander in this race. I really grappled with it. However, I still had a go at the end with this guy in white on the last lap. But as you can see, I struggled to even hold his wheel. By the time we got to the main straight, the bunch went past both of us. And I finished, I believe, 13th, but really irrelevant who cares. But as stated earlier, awesome job and impressive ride by Charles. So let's now move to the road race where you know the deal with the weather situation. And this race started with both men's masters one and two racing together in the same bunch, but not officially racing against each other, if that makes any sense. And we start off with roughly a group of 40 riders, which quickly disintegrated down to, I'd say about 12 riders after a solid hour on the pedals. And look, we'll jump around a little bit in terms of footage here because it's not possible with a GoPro to film 2.5 hours of racing. And for those of you who like the numbers, let's have a quick look at the time in zones using my training software today's plan. And as you can see, we have two major standouts that being zone one, my active recovery for almost 58 minutes. Seems like an easy race when you look at it like that. However, flip the coin and we have 35 minutes in my anaerobic zone six, which is a testament to the title of this video being leg ripping and tearing style racing. Now my TSS score, which is your training stress score, which is the amount of stress you put on your body was 235, but it was actually sitting at 110 after about 59 or 60 minutes of racing. My adjusted power or normalized power was 333 watts and my heart rate maxed above what I thought my max was at 182 beats. It's actually 185 beats in this race. So I guess I have a new max. So this was a fair old flogging and to be fair, I was actually happy given my prep and also how incredibly fit these competitors are with my ability to stay with these guys into lap 11 of 12. Somehow, Matthew Lambert in Masters One rode off on this bunch, a bunch that I was struggling to hang onto gaining over three minutes somehow, taking out the win, unbelievable effort mate. So well done on the Masters One victory and also well done to my mate Kyle for taking overall victory in Masters One. So let's take a look at a gnarly descent in the rain, which I was sure would nail a few, especially seeing some scenes from the previous day where riders just rode straight off the course. That was actually Jason Ford, by the way, who's a weapon for the North Coast Racing Team in the Sunshine Coast, who actually went on to win that race, Masters Six category, and he also won the entire age group. So well done, mate. But seeing scenes like this, I was preparing for the worst. Now, when you go down a 350 meter descent in the rain at an average of 9% gradient into a sharp left-hander, what happens? Well, the riders at the front are doing 500 watts, they're about at 45 kilometers per hour as they exit the corner. And if you're towards the back like I am here, after struggling to get up the hill that preceded it, which we'll get to shortly, you're still on the brakes. It's kind of like a hot dog crit. And as you can see on this corner, it gets strung out quite a fair bit, although I'm on the wheel pretty quickly here despite the large volume of watts required. And the other issue with being towards the back here is that you're needing to place down more watts before you hit another little climb on the circuit here, which proved to be a nice supplementary mini leg tearing climb to the big leg tearing climb we'll get to shortly. In fact, this course all up was quite a nasty course. Some of the roads were super harsh and it felt like there were no flat sections. It was either uphill or downhill. So let's quickly watch this corner two more times. This time round was my worst lapsing concentration. And as you can see, I pay the consequences with the watts rising and staying there for a longer period of time than really required. However, this time round, I'm up the front where I should have been more often in this section. And as a result, I'm not only able to take it a little easier when exiting the corner, when we hit the climb that precedes this section, I'm able to use my position to my advantage, slowly falling back into the bunch and therefore needing less watts to get my large frame up the hill. And while this hill proved to be fatiguing at times, it was this hill that caused the most fatigue and was the ripping that caused me ultimately to get popped on lap 11. And as you can see, there's lots of watts on this climb and the next, and the next, which is a solid depiction of what will happen when racing your bike more often than not. Now for me to give you some context here, I'd say my FTP would be around 350 watts at the moment. I haven't tested myself for a while, but given previous testings, which I've shared on the channel and a knowledge of my body, I think that's a fair guesstimate. So what you can see here is a large effort over the course of 12 efforts or 12 laps. And as we pull up the data from each lap here, so you can see for yourself, the first four laps are the biggest efforts, pushing deep into my VO2 max and anaerobic training zones. But by the time we get to lap five, the remnants of the bunch have settled a little and thus the power backed off a bit. And then on climb 11 and 12, I was off the back. But those numbers you can see, which you could multiply out in smaller increments, given the other little climbs throughout the course, it all adds up. And despite the fact, you spend a lot of time in zone one, if you can't handle that intensity repeatedly, you won't last long. So this example is such a good demonstration of why high intensity interval training is so important if you're gonna be racing like this. Most road racing courses or even many crit courses will have a short, sharp hill or at least sections where you'll be on the pedals hard and then off the pedals. Thus, the hill repeat session we've talked about on this channel many times would be a great session to do on a weekly basis in preparation for a race like this. Lactate in, lactate out and repeat. You see, you don't get that in bunch rides and social rides with friends and reflecting. If I had more prep time, I wish I could have spent some more time doing hill rep sessions in the lead up to this race because just maybe I might have been able to hang on until the end and if you hang on until the end, you just never know what may happen. But as you know, I got dropped and unfortunately I didn't have the GoPro on. At that point, I was too busy drawing all over myself but I did reflect fondly on this race. The rain and conditions added to the theater of racing at the Nationals and competing against guys like this. It makes you stronger and it makes me wanna get fitter and become a better athlete. So thanks to all those in the race that pushed me to my limits and well done to Andrew Freeby for taking out the Masters too and all the competitors at the Men's Masters Nationals Road Race and the Women's, of course. Lastly, if you've gotten value out of this video today, please make sure you give the video a thumbs up and if you're one of the 70% of people who watch my content and are yet to subscribe, we're heading towards that milestone number of 100,000 subscribers I'd appreciate. If you could subscribe below and I'll catch you all in the next video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No time's all mine, sir. Can you tell the difference? Something in the water fishy but what's the measure? We were so...