Faust Day 1.
I'm pretty surprised at how much more in tune with my fitness/training I feel like I am compared to back in the day. I can only attribute it to maturity and finally understanding that sometimes less is more. In the back of my head somehow I knew that the limited volume and super high intensity plan I was doing last season really doesn't work well for me but stuck to the plan, to my own fault, and was cooked by the end of the season. This year has been a lot more methodical and I'm staying super motivated, really having fun and feeling strong.
I knew that this was going to sting coming off a rest week where I really didn't cheat myself out of the rest, even though I had felt great the weekend before at Vlasis and was considering pushing on. The course was slow, power heavy, and had little to no flow. My goal was to go all out but was guessing that Devin was going to lay it down. It was hard. I made two mistakes on the first lap, one which sent me over the bars, and lost contact with Devin who was torching a 50 tooth (and had a NP of 360w). I can't say I ever really got close but was making a little time later in the race. My last lap was my fastest. I finished almost exactly a minute back but was sucking wind all race and my back was torched, definitely a sign of the rest week but even on a good day the result wouldn't have been much different on a course like that.
Faust Day 2
I was looking for a little bit of validation to confirm that Devin and I were riding at a higher level than I was last year, and was genuinely stoked to see Anthony show up. He beat me every race last year- the only race I won was at Faust when he wasn't there. He showed up for the second day and we went toe to toe the whole race but he outplayed me and I cracked close to the finish. By all metrics and and perceived effort, that was the high water mark of my season last year and I just wasn't strong enough to beat him.
Warming up I was commenting to everyone that the course was faster with more flow and far less power heavy. Most people felt it was about the same it definitely felt that way to me. I jumped out front and never looked back. Day 1 was just the primer I needed after the rest week and everything was clicking. I wasn't really looking back but with the wide open course it was easy to see that I was opening up the race on each lap. My lap times were within a few seconds. The race was short, which was a little bit of a bummer as I was really focused and wanted to see how long I could push it. I'm not really sure how much of a gap I had on Anthony, but by the end it was pretty healthy. I was totally stoked. The difference between 2022 and this year was about 10 watts AP and 5 watts NP.
Excited to have one more big week of training before a few weeks of tapering to see if I can time things right this year.
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