Just a Monday in October

It was around 10 p.m. last night when my Outlook calendar popped up to remind me of an early Monday morning meeting. That might have been enough to convince me to skip my morning ride, but since I'd already missed riding on Sunday, that was just not an option compatible with stable mental health. So by 6 am I was already on the bike, blinky lights flashing, still doing the calculations in my head that would determine just how far I could ride without running up against the meeting. The good news was that the meeting was on the uptown campus, just a 10-minute ride from home. The bad news was that there was a particularly strong wind blowing, and I needed to iron a shirt. I ended up doing a moderate paced 20 mile time trial. That left me enough time to get myself to the meeting in presentable fashion and without undue haste. I even had time to stop off at PJ's for a fresh cup of coffee along the way. This particular meeting of the President's "cabinet" was centered around the annual research report, and I already knew that the news wasn't great. Even so, our total sponsored projects funding for FY'08 is still a bit above our pre-Katrina level. Could be worse.

So Sunday was the Rocktoberfest Criterium that our club puts on. This race is always around the very end of the season, and it's always been kind of an afterthought in that our preparation for and promotion of the event is definitely a notch or two below normal. I was really happy with the response from the club for volunteers, though. We really needed them, and then some. Although the course is in the only business park in the entire metro area that can accommodate an adequately sized circuit, it is not without its problems. Not only is there a hotel that needs one of the roads for access, there's also a fried chicken place that has an exit onto the course and a few businesses that need access on Sunday. So basically the course isn't 'quite' closed to traffic. This really had me stressed out, but I could have handled it except for one little thing. The freakin' video camera that I had carefully set up to capture video to the laptop was next to useless because for reasons still unknown, the images of the bikes crossing the finish line all looked kind of like double exposures, even at a shutter speed of 1/8000. None of us could figure out that the problem was, and of course there's no time for that on race day anyway. It was pretty frustrating. Luckily I had my handy little pocket Nikon camera that can record video, and so I handed it to Mark for the finishes while I yelled out bib numbers into the tape recorder. Somehow we got everyone placed, thanks to a strong headwind on the finish stretch and the small field sizes. Anyway, every year I think, "this race could be really big if we could just promote it better." Easy to say, but hard to do by the end of the season after the same handful of people have promoted two other races and assisted with a couple more, only to annually have our up and coming riders recruited away to the smaller invitation-only teams. Anyway, the races went off fairly well with no crashes or other drama. I had brought my bike just in case it looked like I could jump into one of the races, but I think we would have needed two or three more people at the finish line for me to have been comfortable with that.