Rewarding ride into unknown for Nielsen
Shortly after 6pm last Friday night, Waikato cyclist Jaime Nielsen began a ride into the unknown.
There was an hour on the clock, and her job was to go as fast as she possibly could around the Avantidrome in Cambridge until it ran out.
A lap of the velodrome is 250m long, and to hit her stated target, Nielsen needed to complete 188 of them.
In her sights was the existing sea-level hour record, set by Australian Bridie O’Donnell in Adelaide in January last year, of 46.882km.
And if she could beat that, her next target was the overall women’s hour record, set by American Evelyn Stevens at altitude in Colorado Springs a month later, of 47.980km.
As it turned out, she beat O’Donnell’s mark easily, and fell agonisingly short of Stevens’, despite being at a disadvantage by racing at sea level.
From 6.13pm to 7.13pm, Nielsen rode slightly more than 191 laps, and covered 47.791km, 909m more than O’Donnell, and just 189m fewer than Stevens.
As is the case with most endurance events, the attempt was the first time the 31-year-old had set out to ride for that long at that pace.
‘‘There’s an unknown there, and I had to become comfortable with the unknown,’’ she said.
‘‘I came to terms with it, because it was something exciting. I didn’t know how my body was going to hold up in that position.’’
Though changes in Nielsen’s demeanour and positioning were barely perceptible across the hour, she said things got progressively harder as it went on.
‘‘I think I had little patches where I’d stay really steady, and the pain would build up from just being in that position, and the load in the legs, and I’d do a little shuffle and everything moved, and I’d realise how much it hurt at times, so I’d let out a little bit of noise.
‘‘It was crazy, but I just refreshed, got back into my rhythm, and got back on track.’’
Nielsen is the reigning national time trial champion on the road, and has won silver and bronze medals at the track world championships in the team pursuit, in 2009 and 2011 respectively.
Before she was a cyclist, she was a rower, and when she did that sport, one of her favourite things was the hour erg test, where she had to see how far she could cover in an hour on an indoor rowing machine.
Nielsen’s effort on Friday will stand as the New Zealand women’s record, but because she only decided to make the attempt in late May, it wasn’t able to be officially lodged with the sport’s governing body, the UCI.
That means she wouldn’t have set a new record had she passed Stevens’ time, but having come so close, she now knows it is within her reach, especially if she is able to put in more than two months of preparation.
‘‘You need to do an hour to learn what that’s like,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ll be reflecting on all those things I could probably do to prepare if I was to do it again.
‘‘There are just too many limitations that your body faces that you have to overcome.’’
An attempt at altitude, where conditions are more advantageous would appear an obvious next step but Nielsen said she hadn’t thought that far ahead.
‘‘I’d love to give it another shot, that’s all I can say at this stage.’’