Rain Games

The forecast wasn't looking too good last night, so the first thing I did when I awoke today was check the radar. Surprisingly, it looked completely clear, so off I went to the levee to meet the Wednesday group. The first thing I noticed was that it was *really* windy. The other thing was that the turnout was smaller than usual. It seems that the weather forecast has a pretty strong influence on how people let their alarm clocks. We had a pretty decent ride, under the circumstances. Woody was there, and toward the end he kind of put the hammer down and the group dwindled down to just a few of us.

So the front stalled out and the rain got pushed back until, so they said, the afternoon. It was around 1:30 when I emerged from my office and noticed that it was raining. "Oh well," I thought, "no evening ride at the Lakefront today." Well, it turned out that the rain was just playing games with me. It was after 5:30 when I looked out the window again, only to discover that the roads were essentially dry and the sky didn't look all that threatening. Damn. I guess the moral of the story is to look out the window now and then instead of trusting the weatherman so much. Anyway, I guess tomorrow morning's ride is pretty much up in the air right now.

In the last couple of days I've discovered a couple of problems with the USAC Results and Rankings system. The other day when I tried to upload the 2-Person Time Trial results something on their end was broken and the system just hung with a blank screen where the confirmation notification should have been. I reported it to Andrea and they got that fixed the next day and uploaded my results for me. So then I thought I'd check the new Rankings and see what they looked like. The first thing I discovered was that my "my USA Cycling" page was showing only my 2009 track results. The Rouge-Roubaix and 2-Person TT results weren't showing up. So I called Andrea and told her about it. She went to my page, saw that the results were missing, and said something to the effect of "That's weird." Since my track results were showing up, and since I'd raced that race as a Cat. 2 rather than as a Master, I thought that maybe the problem was that when I upload Masters race results I always put "master" in the "category" column (as I was instructed to do many years ago with the old system). So as an experiment I deleted the Rouge-Roubaix results from the USAC website, changed my results spreadsheet so that it showed "Cat 1/2/3/4/5" instead of "master" and uploaded that version. Sure enough, those results showed up immediately on my My USA Cycling page. So I did the same for the TCC time trial and criterium results, and then tried to do it for the 2-Person TT results, only to find that it wouldn't give me permission, presumably because Andrea had uploaded those results rather than me. Hopefully I'll get that straightened out tomorrow. I still have to update the LCCS rankings for the 2-Person TT. Maybe tomorrow. It's late and I just finished addressing the mailers for the awards plaques that I have to send to the Master 45+, Junior, and Cat. 5 riders because they weren't ready for the race last Sunday.

So I signed up for the Tour de Tuscaloosa. Hopefully most of the rain will be gone by the time the criteriums start on Saturday afternoon. I booked a couple of rooms at the Ramada. Looks like we'll have about six riders up there so far, but there's always room for more!