Midsummer Lull

With the 2007 edition of the Tour de LA wrapped up, we'll have a little midsummer lull until the next big race on June 22. The good news is that that race, the La/Ms state championship criterium, will be held right here in New Orleans. It's so rare to have a race in town nowadays, and I do miss the old days when you get in a decent racing season without ever driving more than a couple of hours. Steve put up a bunch of nice photos last night from the Road Race (he was in the following car, I think) and the Criterium. The one above is the Cat. 1,2,3 pack coming through the start/finish with one lap to go. It must have taken me four tries to get the results uploaded correctly to the USAC database last night. I sure with they would write some code so that when I upload an Excel file, which they say they can handle, it doesn't completely screw up the dates and times. As it stands, I have to convert all of the times to text, which is not as simple as you might think, and then if I go back and try to put in the leading zeros that get cut out, it converts the field back to time/date format. Very frustrating. So when you see a time like 6:7 that should read 6:07, now you'll know why.

This morning it was overcast out at the levee and I wondered if we might even get some rain, but as it turned out the only droplets that were falling were sweat. It was seriously humid and warm and if I don't wash my gloves soon the neighbors are going to start complaining about the stench. The group today was pretty big and the pace going out was fast. Tim and Reo, just back from the Tour of Ohio, were there for a little while but I never really got a chance to get the scoop on how the race went. Then Howard showed up on his TT bike and proceeded to take pulls at 30 mph. Of course, once he'd pull off, the pace would slow down to 24 while everyone recovered, so basically it had no effect whatsoever on average speed and a big effect on the general level of irritation. I must have heard the comment "Why does Howard do that?" a hundred times over the last few years. Anyway, after the turnaround it stayed slow for a long time, but eventually got rolling pretty fast again. At one point I thought I'd drop all the way to the back for a while and was surprised to discover that the "back" was long gone. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

So when people pre-register and then can't come and ask for a refund, should you do that? We usually do, minus the registration fee, but I can see where it might get out of hand.