After taking a couple weeks off over the holidays, the NCC team was back in action tonight for the first Thursday night Team Time Trial of the new year. Carson, Dusty, Melissa, Shawn and I lined up to tackle the Triple Flat Loops course in Watopia, which delivered what it said on the tin -- three loops that were very flat. It was also pretty long, at 22+ miles, the longest course we've done so far.

Knowing we'd be out there for close to an hour, I chose to start off fairly conservatively, with pulls at 3.6 W/kg spaced evenly across the group at one-minute intervals. Everyone seemed to be holding up fairly well in the early going, with some joking and chit-chat on the Discord channel, which I took as an invitation to ramp up the pace a little bit. At the halfway point we bumped it up to 3.8, and then notched it up further throughout the second half, until we were doing 4.2 on the last set of pulls before the final sprint to the line. I think everyone was hurting a bit by the end, although I don't think I achieved my goal of getting Dusty to regurgitate his dinner. Maybe next week.

We crossed the line with the whole team intact, in a time of 52:02, which currently has us in 28th place out of 160 teams in our division. Not our absolute best result, but pretty close, and I'm happy with the time and how well organized we were throughout the ride.

We'll be riding these TTT events through the winter on Thursday nights, and we're always looking for new team members, so keep an eye on the club calendar if you'd like to join us.