Long One

It's been a long day! The Wednesday morning training ride got going pretty fast, and since I'm currently mired in the summer doldrums, when the pace got up around 25 I chose not to play and dropped to the back of the paceline. We had a good training ride and I did eventually take some pulls, but in general I was feeling lazy and preoccupied. The whole time I could hear an irritating light rattle coming from my front wheel. It was the extra long stem on the tube that I put in there yesterday. When you put those long-stemmed tubes into a regular rim, they tend to rattle against the edge of the valve hole. I'll have to put a little tape around it tonight before it drives me crazy. It really ruins the nice quiet early-morning ride through the neighborhood on the way to the levee!

So this afternoon I had to attend a long seminar and training session for a new online personnel system that we're implementing soon. Everyone was in one of the computer labs on the uptown campus doing this interactive training thing. It was so interesting that I opened a new window and checked my email and read the news on CNN while it was going on.

I think I must have spend half the rest of the day dealing with bike racing stuff. First, I resubmitted all of the Tour de La results so that everyone who raced in each stage was included. When I had originally submitted them, I had only included those who had placings on GC, omitting anyone who didn't finish any one of the three stages. I think it's better this way. Of course it took me a couple of hours to make those corrections, and a most of the Cat. 4s and Cat. 5s got "DNP" for their placings in the Crit. because the judges couldn't pick all the places and there was a problem with the videotape.

In the meantime, I got a call from Realdo who noticed that he wasn't listed on the USCF results and rankings system for any of his results from the Biloxi races, so I sent an e-mail out asking about that. Then the issue of how to score (for the LCCS series) this weekend's races in Baton Rouge came up. I got a pretty quick response on that one from the LAMBRA officers, though, so it's settled and will be scored as separate races. Why was there a question, you ask? Well the event is called a stage race on the flyer, and indeed it has a GC prizelist determined on total elapsed time plus bonuses. However, there is only a TT and a RR, both on the same day, and riders are not required to finish (or enter) the TT in order to ride the Road Race. So technically, it isn't really a Stage Race at all.