Waiting it Out

The Wife plopped back into bed at 6am mumbling "it just started raining," and I drifted back to sleep thinking about whether I'd have a cranberry scone or danish on the way to work. As predicted, the weather today has been truly bleak, and so I'm just going to wait it out, looking forward to the clear skies that I know lurk somewhere behind the slow-moving cool front. Looking out the window, I see nothing but grey. The tops of the taller buildings are in the low-hanging clouds. As the wind shifts, rain periodically taps on my window, and in the distance I hear the low rumble of thunder. There is nothing to suggest the situation will change. In fact, the forecast on the radio today was for "100%" chance of rain. They practically never say "100%." There will be no cycling for me today.

I got a copy of some of the proposed USA Cycling legislation that the Board will consider at its upcoming meeting. (It has been sent to all of the LAMBRA club representatives, BTW.) As usual, there is a proposal to change the junior gear limit restriction, this time to go back to allowing them to ride regular gearing when they're not in Junior races. There are a few proposals to mess with Stage Race timing, one of which would break ties on GC based first on fractions of a second in the time trial stage(s). This one must have been authored by a time-trialist who can't sprint and doesn't have a clue how smaller events are handled. Just in case you are laboring under the delusion that your TT time in your favorite local stage race is accurate to within a tenth of a second, allow me to set you straight. In real life, there's one person at the finish line with a stopwatch and as you come flying past he or she just glances down and reads the minutes and seconds to another person with a clipboard. At the Tour de La, we have a backup person also recording times, but we rely on the times recorded by the first person in all cases except where there is a problem (usually caused by bad handwriting or human error). There are not three timers who average their times, for example, and when we have two different people timing the same person we often see differences of a tenth of a second, so unless there are a few thousand dollars available for some very fancy electronic timing, differences of a tenth of a second are not significant. I don't even want to get into what happens when, as often happens in a short TT, three people come across the line almost, but not quite, together. Of course, breaking a tie on GC in favor of a rider whose TT time was a tenth of a second faster seems unfair to me if, for example, he simply finished at the back of the pack in the non-TT races while the rider with whom he was tied had a slower time trial but placed, for example, first in every hot spot and first in every other stage.