Window Seat

I’m sitting here in a window seat on one of those commuter planes. It’s one of those with a single row down one side and a double one down the other, and I’m in the single row. I love it – the window, the isolated seat, the “feel” of the smaller airplane. It will be five hours yet before I’m back in New Orleans, and I’ve already finished reading the copy of Scientific American I brought with me, but all would be fine except for one nagging problem about which I can do nothing more than wait.

The USA Cycling Local Associations Summit finished up this afternoon in at the OTC. It was a friendly and well-organized event, and I’m coming home with lots of hastily scribbled notes. A confusing assortment of “great ideas,” culled from two days of discussions and presentations, are bouncing around inside my head like pinballs. It will probably take weeks for me to sort them out into manageable categories like “things that might work” and “things we can’t possibly accomplish.” The folks running the various Local Associations around the country make up an interesting group. Some are still very actively racing, some are “recovering bike racers,” and some are pretty much retired. All of them, though, share a strong dedication and passion for making U.S. bicycle racing better. Somewhere in all of it, though, I’m sure I’ll find a thing or two that might prove to be of lasting value to our racing community. First, though, I’ll have to catch up on almost two weeks of work piling up on my virtual desktop back at Tulane. Gotta pay the bills first, you know.

So I felt exceptionally stupid when, after having just retrieved my boarding passes from the self-service check-in machine, I realized that I didn’t have my jacket. You see, it was at least 70F in Colorado Springs this afternoon when I walked from the conference room back across the OTC to the Athlete Center where I would pick up my luggage and board the shuttle, conveniently arranged by the USAC’s Lisa Bergren (the USAC LA Coordinator), for the airport. It was so warm, though, that I was carrying my jacket rather than wearing it. Once I arrived, I retrieved my bag from the “luggage room” (which contained at least three bikes), and walked over to a table to transfer some stuff from my carry-on messenger bag, to the larger bag that I would be checking. Somehow I left my jacket hanging on the chair and didn’t even realize it until I was at the airport. At the time I didn’t realize that my camera was in the jacket’s pocket. What to do? I had only one cellphone number that might work. It was George Heagerty’s. George was our Regional Representative until very recently when USAC brought in an additional Rep., Stuart Lamp (yes, the Memphis Motor Werks guy) to whom our state was assigned. Anyway, I knew George had been there when I’d left early to make my flight, so I gave him a call and was really glad to hear him answer with “Hi Randy!” Being the great guy that he is, George ran over to the Athlete Center all the way on the other side of the OTC and found my jacket with the camera still in its pocket, and promised to mail it all to me when he gets back home to Texas. Whew! Still, I feel stupid for having left it, and I’m already missing the photos I took while I was there. For the time being, you’ll just have to imagine a photo at the top of this post. That would probably have been of the impressive sculpture in front of the Visitor Center depicting four athletes holding up a huge globe. I really liked that one.

This morning we got the early edition report on the Board of Trustees decisions regarding various proposals that had been made for rulebook changes. Of particular interest to me was the passage of a new rule regarding tie-breaking in Stage Races. Ties will now be broken by using tenths of a second in the time trial stage, which is how the UCI does it. Of course we’ve never even recorded the TT times to the tenth of a second since, with only one watch being used they would never be considered accurate enough for that, but I guess we’ll be doing it next year. It will certainly be easier to break ties than trying to add up the stage placings, and will eliminate problems caused by the rule that gives pack time (but the last placing) to riders who suffer mishaps or crashes in the last 3k of stage race stages. No change to the Junior gear limits this year, so that’s nice. The only other thing that was interesting was that they officially banned the use of radios for communication in Masters races (they had been allowed before if the race was open to Cat. 1 and 2 riders).