Introduction

First, I have to say I'm astonished this url was available.

Second, a little bit about me:

I'm a Junior attending North Carolina State University, majoring in Mechanical Engineering and Political Science (the mascochistic trend begins).  I began racing with the cycling team last year, and had a fairly succesful (if abbreviated) season in D class.

The reason for that abbreviation was a broken collarbone recieved in a fairly spectacular mountain biking accident that involved about 25 feet of horizontal airborn travel.  I won't go into the nasty details here, but suffice to say I raced the first two weekends of the road season (NCSU and William & Mary), and then the very last, the conference at Wake Forest.  In between I did essentially zero riding, as you can imagine.  

Despite this I finished pretty well, taking 4th in our home road race, 3rd in the Crit, and 4th in the W&M TT (double flatted out of the W&M RR).  I placed 6th in the final road race of the season at Wake, which is not bad for being off the bike for several months.  

I admit I was kinda sandbagging D's, but given that I had never raced before I decided to start there instead of C, which was a good choice I think.  

My fitness last season was something like this: 25 mile rides were routine, and felt like a good workout.  I could go further, but not often and not as hard.  My average speeds solo for 25 mi were in the 18.5-19.0 mph range right before I trashed my collarbone.

So now we're kinda up to current times.  

This summer I did not ride as much as I wanted: I would commute to work a couple of days a week (18 mi round trip), and on Saturdays I would join a group ride from a LBS that was called a "B" ride, but we usually averaged 18.5-19.5, which is more like an "A" pace.  Distances for these rides were usually sub-40 with 12-17 people.

The result of this was my time trialing capability went down: at the beginning of the summer I averaged 20 mph, including warm up, over 25 miles.  At the end of the summer I was not as fast, but I could go a LOT further and still feel really good.  

Since getting back to school I've started riding a bit more, mostly around 20 mile jaunts with some intervals thrown in.  I can feel my power coming up, but I think I'm losing distance.  The problem is with the amount of schoolwork I have, I don't have time to spend all of Saturday pounding out 60+ miles, although that would be really nice.  

My main goal is to carry a pretty high level of base fitness through the winter.  Most roadies right now are either coasting coming off of summer, or starting into their "long slow distance" (LSD) base mileage.  Tonight I went out and did intervals until I had trouble staying upright.  I'm not sure if this is a good overall strategy to be doing intervals now, but it felt good.  

Alright I'm gonna stop here, it's getting kinda late.