Too much of a good thing: compression tights.

I admit, I've slowly been building quite a tolerance for wearing my compression tights.

First, I wore them a few times at night before races or after hard workouts. It really felt like they helped.

Then I started wearing them in the morning before races and then afterward. Yep, the results were promising.

And then I would bike to work and wear them underneath my work clothes - no one the wiser unless they noticed the bright turquoise flat stitching near my ankles! I mean, isn't that where these tights originated - anti-embolism tights for people who sat all day, like on planes?

So tonight was the final frontier. I wore them in a race. Just the weekly training race at Portland International Raceway. They looked pretty normal underneath my bibs, although I've never had anything come between me and my chamois except for chamois cream. First I wore them on the bike ride home before the race, just to make sure it wasn't too weird. A tiny bit weird, but it seemed to feel pretty good. Good for recovery, maybe good for racing.

NO. NOT GOOD FOR RACING. Maybe it was due to something else, but I started cramping very early in the race. I found myself in a solid four-man break after a few laps - two guys from the same team, then me and one other guy. The teammates were riding hard. Pace was good - fast but not totally killing it. And then the soreness and cramping started after a lap of being away. I started skipping pulls. The teammates were my buddies, and there was no way I would sit on while these guys worked and then sprint them for the hot spot. Hot spots go three deep. Four of us. So rather than waste what few matches I seemed to have just hanging on, I drifted back to the pack. And it didn't get better as the race went on. I felt like I had done some hard weightlifting. As is my curse, I stayed near the front and held position for the rest of the race. But the big power was missing and at the end I just rode in behind the sprint. Too bad, I think it would have been a decent sprint for me based on how it played out.

Lesson learned - my legs need more blood flow during hard efforts than compression tights allow. I knew that was a possibility, but I figure you have to roll the dice now and again. I wasn't expecting Fabian Cancellara results all of a sudden because of some tight tights, but racing is all about the margins. One small improvement may not do much unless there is a lot of time for its benefits to accumulate. However, add up a bunch of marginal energy savings and it can be the difference between having the energy at the end of a race for 5th, 3rd or 1st in a sprint. Or making that breakaway last just long enough.

Things have been on an uptick, so I won't get too upset that this wasn't the ticket. Hope my legs recover for Wednesday, though. So what should I do? Wear the tights to recover from wearing the tights? Very tempting. Just a little bit should help, right?