A Very Long Weekend - revised

First off, just a reminder to keep other riders' pedals out of your front wheel during a sprint at Nationals. Ouch. And contrats to Shontell for making the podium. The Texans will claim her, but we all know where her roots are. Likewise Gina V. got the job done for her Cheerwine teammates with Kelly taking a respectible 9th.

By Saturday afternoon the die had been cast and it is looking like the old Volvo will soon be replaced by a newer version of itself - white instead of grey and 7 years younger, but otherwise just like the one we have. This sort of thing is always kind of hard on me because I always seem to bond with mechanical devices, especially after they have exceeded their warranty periods and are needy, and so trading in a car is like sending an aging relative off to a nursing home. Anyway, this will be a strictly utilitarian purchase since I just can't get too excited about buying a used station wagon. Can anyone?

Shortly after that decision had been made, I was off with Robin to mark the TT course in LaPlace. Although I had carefully marked the 20k turnaround for the 40k 2-man TT earlier this year, we now needed to also mark the 5K and 10k turnarounds that we'd need for the Juniors and some of the Masters on Sunday. Since we had arranged the 40k course with offset start and finish lines (always a good idea), that meant we had to measure the distance between the start and finish, find the mid-point, and then measure 5k and 10k from that spot in order to come out with the correct final distances. So I set my bike's computer to kilometers and motorpaced behind Robin's van in order to make the marks. They were pretty close to the marks someone else had recently made (lack of communication rears its ugly head again), except that it looked like the other marks had been made from the start line and were therefore a bit short. Then I was up late cleaning up the results spreadsheet and adding the code so that it would populate the rider information from the current USCF rider database. That worked out pretty well, BTW.

Arrived at the TT start well before dawn on Sunday to set up and provide breakfast for a few thousand hungry mosquitoes. I can probably blame my lackluster TT performance later that morning on the resulting decrease in hematocrit! Fifteen minutes before my start I abandoned my USCF Official post, fought my way into a skinsuit inside my car, and headed out for a quick warmup. I would be the first masters rider to start, which means I would have no minute man other than a few of the faster women. Although there didn't seem to be much wind before the start, by the time I was three miles down the road my speed had sunken from 27 mph to 24-25 mph and I was already having motivational problems. The light headwind was taking its toll and combined with my lack of motivation I was clearly not on track for a very good time. So I trudged on more for the exercise than for the race, arriving at the turnaround with, I guess, an average speed of well under 25 mph. Heading back I could see that the rider behind me had already made up at least 30 seconds on me but at least there was a little bit of a tailwind now and if I really wanted to, which I apparently didn't, I could hold a speed in the 27 mph vicinity. As it was, my speed was fluctuating from 24-27 all the way back as my unfocused mind wandered around from car payments to thinking about how I'd be working on the TT results when I finished. About five miles from the finish my minute man passed me and at least that gave me something to focus on. I found that I was easily able to pick up my speed by the 1 mph necessary to hold the gap steady, and then with about a mile left to go was surprised when he rather suddenly slowed down and I passed him. As I did I told him it was only a mile to go and tried to get him to get back up to speed, but I guess he was about done. So I put in a big effort for the final kilo and crossed the line in 59:19, which was nothing to write home about but at least it was good enough to avoid major embarassment.

As soon as I got back I set up the computer and for the next hour and a half we typed in the start and finish times as they trickled in from the judges and eventually got all of the results sorted out and posted. It was kind of strange this year in that most of the Cat. 1 and 2 riders were away at other races (mainly in Memphis), but all-in-all things went as smoothly as can be expected. However, we are definitely thinking about having mandatory pre-registration next year so that start lists and times can be sent out and posted the day before the race. Back at home I spent another hour or two cleaning up the results, building the web page, and adding links on a few other web pages, finally posting everything around 4 p.m. Now I just have to reformat the results for upload to the USCF database, work out the LCCS points (which will be rather complicated in this case), and write up the post-event paperwork for the USCF.