What It's Like

Last night, in the middle of the night, something exciting happened. It rained! It wasn't even an inch, but at least it qualified as actual rain. Not only that, but some cooler and drier air blew in from the north making the morning temperature much nicer than it's been. When I arrived at the levee for the long Tuesday ride I guessed that I must have missed an email. You know - the one about riding your time trial bike today. There were a bunch of them today. I suspect they are all getting anxious about the 3-mile Stage 1 Time Trial for this weekend's Tour de Louisiane. Although we had most of the usual Tuesday crew on hand at the start, I didn't see much of them once things got rolling. There was a significant cross/tailwind on the way out and pretty soon the guys on TT bikes filtered up to the front and started playing "I can go faster than you can" with little regard for me and the other packfill. I was careful to stay near the front despite the effort required to do so, because as we all know, crosswinds on narrow roads lead to droppage. By the time we reached the "dip" the speeds had been in the upper 20s to low 30s for a while, and I think a few people decided it would be a good place to turn back. Once on the other side, though, the speeds dropped just a bit. I was trying to stay in the rotation whenever the pace would settle down to reality, but there was no way you were going to find me taking a long pull at 30 mph when I knew I'd have to make a huge effort just to stay in the wake of the TT bikes. I would just pull through and quickly pull over before the speed dropped too much.

The ride back from the turnaround was both slower and harder, thanks to the headwinds, and by the time we were approaching Kenner it was just Rob, Brooks and me. I was spending most of my time on the back, though, trying to make myself very tiny in order to salvage a bit of draft from Rob and his Banke TT bike. It was difficult work and it made me think about what it must be like for a bigger guy to be trying to draft off of me on a fast, windy day. I figured this must be what it's like. By the time I finally split off for home my back was aching from trying to stay so low.

What it was like was . . . hard!

Registrations for the upcoming Tour de La are up to 88 with a good representation from Texas, so I think we'll probably have about our normal field sizes for this weekend's stage race. It looks like we'll have a lot of the Woodlands (Houston area) guys here, along with contingents from West Florida, Simpson's, Colavita, Memphis, and of course Raising Cane's from B.R. and the other La and Ms teams.

As usual, I'd rather be riding it than officiating it but, hey, somebody's got to put on the races and it isn't like there are a bunch of race promoters chomping at the bit around here, so I'll be there in regular clothes with my officiating hat on once again. I guess I started working the Tour de La some time around 1976 or so. I remember being all excited because we were able to buy a mechanical "Rally" stopwatch that would register hours on one of the dials. We made all of the race numbers outselves out of vinyl and charged a $1 deposit for them. We would also use big poster boards to display the results and index cards to keep track of each rider's time and placings. Getting the final results done took way too long and always involved a number of revisions, which is one of the main reasons I went out and bought one of the original "portable" computers, an Osborne, and learned Basic so I could write software to do the results with. It only weighed 24 pounds and had 64k of RAM! My current office computer has about 15,000 times as much RAM (and didn't cost as much). There's a pic of me getting ready to start the women's race back around '80 in the NOBC archives. I didn't like getting haircuts back then either.