Official Weekend

Well it's time for me to dust off my old official's hat and spend the weekend in a hot and sweaty dead run as Chief Ref for the Tour de Louisiane. In my case, the term "official's hat" has special meaning because there actually is one that I've been wearing to officiate the Tour since the days when Banana Republic was a funky mail-order company that actually sold surplus military clothes - but that's a whole other story. I've spent all morning printing out release forms, organizing entries, replacing batteries and generally getting all of my stuff together for a weekend that will probably include everything from torrential rain to sizzling 98 degree heat. Why do I keep doing this?

Online registration ended last night with 140 riders registered and I'd be surprised if we didn't see another 50 or 60 for late registration, which will make it the biggest ever, I think. I've been fielding questions all day from riders trying to get early TT numbers and that sort of thing, and I'm not looking forward to having to turn away the Cat. 5s who will certainly turn up on Saturday not realizing that there's a field limit in Cat. 5 mass-start races. Mark's coming over to pick me and all my stuff up in about half an hour. We'll be handling the Friday night registration and spending the night at the hotel. Hopefully a lot of riders will come to pick up their numbers so I can get at least half of the field entered into the computer before race day because it's a real fire drill trying to get the TT results done en route to the Road Race while in the car. If we end up with 200+ riders, it will be very tight, time-wise, getting results posted an hour before the 1 p.m. Road Races.

Naturally, there is a big line of severe weather heading this way - complete with tornados. It should mostly blow through this evening and tonight, but they've got a 50% chance of rain in the forecast for tomorrow morning until around 9 a.m. That means it might be a little messy for the time trial, but if all goes as expected, the Road Races should be hot and dry, which means my socks will probably try out some time around 3 p.m.

I sure wish I was riding this race instead of standing on the sidelines with three stopwatches around my neck, two tape recorders in my pockets and a clipboard in my hand baking in the afternoon sun hoping that nobody does anything stupid out there on the road. Luckily we have a very experienced group of people in the club who have done this for quite a few years, so we will do the best we can managing this largely uncontrollable situation!

Sure am looking forward to that cold Turbodog on Sunday afternoon!