Ridin' and Railin'

This morning I tried to sneak in a few extra minutes of much-needed sleep and ended up leaving the house a few minutes late. Just as I hit River Road, I saw John climbing the levee and followed him up the access road maybe 30 seconds back. We were about two minutes late and the group was already out of sight down the road, so we rode a little 2-man Time Trial together at a moderate pace. Along the way we picked up a recumbent that tagged along behind in our draft as we took our long pulls at 22-24 mph, and when we slowed to meet the group on its return trip the lowrider guy thanked us for the ride. Throughout the ride there was a huge black line of clouds hanging low around the city, but somehow we avoided the rain.

As we got back to the pumping station I split off and started down the access road to River Road and then realized that there was a train at the railroad crossing heading the same direction I was. I shifted into my lowest gear and climbed back up the levee in the foot-high grass, but never quite caught the group again. Both they and I were racing the train, trying to make it to the next crossing first. As it turned out, the train slowed down considerably and I had plenty of time to cross ahead of it at the Corps of Engineers facility. The weather was still looking sketchy, and in fact I ended up riding to work in a light drizzle; an extra pair of pants in my bag just in case.

As usual, there's been some controversy about the LCCS points. The Tiger Cycling club in Baton Rouge had three junior women and one master 55+ rider at the district road races and one of them can't understand why they don't get LCCS points for that, despite the fact that there's no such class in the series. I wrote a long dissertation about how the LCCS worked, but I'm sure it went in one ear and out the other. The problem is that the LCCS just has a "junior" category that is not broken down by gender, but the USCF district championships are supposed to have separate races. Anyway, the bottom line is that under the current LCCS rules there are no points for junior women unless they decide to ride with the junior men. There are only three of them, all sisters, who as far as I know have never raced before. I think someone told them that if they all went out and bought USCF licenses and rode their races (basically all by themselves) then they would get a lot of points for their club. Somehow that doesn't seem quite right to me.

So the weather is looking like typical Summer around here. There are lots of big cumulus clouds scattered about and it's anybody's guess where, when and if it will rain. The weather forecasters are clueless when it's like this so they just rubber-stamp every day with a 30% chance of rain. I'd love to make it out to the lakefront for the training race this afternoon, so I hope the weather cooperates.