On Tuesday, I did my second Tuesday Night Time Trial (T'N'T) of the year. Leg still not fully healed. Some times there is some pain in the area of the stress fracture, but I cannot attribute it to any particular activity. Sometimes it just hurts. Also, there is pain in my knee (sometimes sharp), ankle, hamstring, and the muscle across my leg. Enough about the pain, on Monday morning I did my usual morning swim at Masters, about 2600 yards. Then I went home and did a workout that was stepping up and down on a chair 20 times, and then getting on the bike and doing a 30 sec sprint (not out of saddle) and 60 seconds of rest, repeat 5 times. Repeated the whole chair and bike thing 4 times.
After Monday, I was sore on Tuesday, so I did not have high hopes for the TT.
I warmed up a little and started to feel better. I was trying to get an aero helmet from the Gear West Test Team equipment pool and I didn't think I would get it. That is until a guy on the team, Wayne, showed up 15 minutes before the start with a Giro Advantage 2 helmet, see pictures. He showed up just to drop the helmet off. Since I am doing the Saint Paul Triathlon on Sunday, I also wore my Speedo FastSkin so I could try that out on the bike for the first time this year. As an aside, I am doing the tri as a relay, my girlfriend's cousin is going to run for me.
Anyway, I sucked wind in the TT, like last time It did not feel as bad, and the soreness went away pretty fast. I actually felt kind of good, but I didn't have a very good feeling about my time while I was riding. I had my watch with GPS going and noted that the speed going up hill was as low as 14 MPH and the down hill and flats were as fast as 31+ MPH. I didn't get a good start and stop on the watch, so I was not sure of my exact time and had to wait until the next day.
Low and behold, I was 77 seconds faster than two weeks ago. I averaged 21.93 MPH, two weeks ago I averaged 21.04 MPH.
Did I get faster because of the training, or the helmet? Wait. The helmet? I sent an email to Trent at Gear West letting him know I had the helmet and what my results were. In the email I mentioned the helmet helping me versus training, and Trent mentioned the improvement is within the known improvements a helmet can make. What?! I remember reading numbers, but I didn't have them off the top of my head. So I did a little searching and came across a number of different website with information. Here is one example: http://www.bikesportmichigan.com/features/aero_helmet.shtml
Basically, there are results that show anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes of benefit from an aero helmet over 40k, or about 25 miles. I did some quick rough math that shows a benefit of 13 to 53 seconds over 11 miles, the distance of the T'N'T, assuming the benefit is linear.
I had a 77 second improvement. How much of that is me and how much the helmet? I would like to think that me and the helmet can share some of the credit for the improvement, maybe a little more to me. I will be wearing the helmet at the Saint Paul Triathlon this weekend and the Team Ortho Duathlon TT the next weekend. Once I am done with my turn with the helmet I will write me review.
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