Paul Butler's TT training session

Hello everyone. This is my second try at this TT starts training. I think it is safe to say we all found this to be an extremely testing session. Stewie said it all when he asked PaulB why it was so hard. As Stewie said we do pacelines at speeds in the low 40s all the time but when we do is with PaulB most of us just fell apart. The one difference between our way of approaching this particular type of training is that we are all usually well warmed-up prior to putting in an effort and also we gradually increase speed up to the 40s from a 35kph base. On Wednesday we had a short warm-up and then did the standing starts. This was to have a huge impact on me and I suspect others as well. In my particular case we raced off straight up to 50kph which is something we never do from a standing start. Also because we focused on acceleration at the expense of quickly forming into a paceline the result was chaotic with riders all over the track. I am a slow thinker. I should have had my position in the paceline firmly in my head before the start instead of racing off and hoping to fall into the first open place in the line. Things did not sort themselves out until we had passed the first bridge and by that time, even though at PaulB's suggestion we slowed down to 43-44 I was pretty well smashed which ruined me for the remainder of the session. On the second or third effort I was behind Cameron when he dropped his chain. In the confusion I found myself with a 100m gap to get back on the paceline which I was able to do but did not want to push into the by then two-man (Paulb and Jon) paceline who were working so well together. Anyway, I've got to go to a funeral (Carmel's 99 plus 9months aunt) so will see you at the track tonight where we can have a more indepth post mortem. Great training. Got to do more of this.

Paul.