Preparations

The Club is putting on the 5th annual NOBC 2-Person Time Trial on Sunday, and so of course there have been a lot of loose ends in need of tying this week. The race is actually a continuation of a 2-man time trial that Jon Anderson put on for a few years up in St. Francisville, going back to 2000. It's a fun early-season race - fairly low-key and not too heavy of a lift. I must say, though, that the lifting seems to be getting heavier and heavier every year. On Friday I spent quite a while working on an every-evolving results workbook in Excel. Not only will it look up all of the rider information in the USAC database based on a rider's license number, it will also plug in the TT start times, flowing through from one spreadsheet to the next, so that one needs to enter only the start time of the first rider. It's not as easy to do, at least with some acceptable level of elegance, as one might think. Of course, it also works out the placings automatically as finish times are entered. As usual, the race will serve as the beta test site.

Since I didn't know if the course markings from last year were still there (the road was underwater for a while last year for Hurricane Gustav), I decided to skip the Saturday Giro and instead ride the course with a can of spray paint in my pocket. Luckily a few of the club riders offered to accompany me. The night before I set my computer to show kilometers instead of miles, but didn't bother to double-check the wheel circumference setting. Pat showed up with his Garmin, so that would make for a good second opinion on the distance. When I arrived, I was relieved to find that the old markings were still readily visible, so I freshened up the offset start and finish markings. We zeroed our computers and headed off for a nice 40k ride. At the end my computer hit 40 km maybe 100 yards before the finish line, but Pat's GPS was right on the money, showing 24.85 miles. During my drive back home I picked up the phone to touch base with Robin who was supposed to be bringing all of the set up stuff like shelters, tables, generator, etc., and who was also the one making arrangements with the police (we use four of them on this course). Shortly after he answered, he asked me if the police were taken care of. Oh shit! He was supposed to have done that but was thinking that either he'd already done it or someone else was doing it. Bottom line: the police knew nothing about our plans. Robin said, "I'll call them right now." So I sweated it out for a couple of hours waiting to hear back from him. Luckily, he somehow managed to get it all lined up. Whew!

After I got home I had a lot of preparations to take care of. Batteries for the race clock and radios needed charging, water jugs needed filling, release forms needed printing (naturally the final few of those sucked the very last drops of black ink out of my printer) . I dug through the two big bins of race stuff that hadn't been touched since they'd come back from Rocktoberfest last October -- stopwatches, bullhorns, clipboards, paper tablets, extension cords, printer, paper, pens, safety pins, tape, radios, etc., etc. Then I went through the big stack of "caution bike race" signs and picked out a bunch of those along with a dozen or so traffic cones and some Gatorade concentrate. The I filled a few of the big coolers with water, probably straining my back in the process. Hope I can get all that stuff into the car tomorrow morning ... at 6 am ... in the dark. Robin called a few minutes ago to say he'd ordered 20 pizzas to be delivered to the finish line at 10:00.

Did I mention that I was racing this one too? I guess I won't be getting much of a warmup, since I'll be doing registration too. Jorge M. and I will go off as the first team of the Master 45+ group, which should get us back to the finish line before most other riders. That way I will be able to get started on the results right away, or at least as soon as my vision clears. The forecast looks like it will be nice, except for a double-digit wind.