The Rest of the Weekend

I sat in the hotel room, laptop humming quietly on my lap, drifting in and out of sleep as I waited in vain for the Chief Ref. to send me the MSGP results from Saturday's races. I guess it was around 12:30 am when I finally gave up. It was not a good sign. So I was rather relieved when we arrived at Sunday's criterium to find the results posted. My 6:31 time trial time had been good for 9th among the old guys, which, under the circumstances, was about the best I could hope for. I figured I had at least a shot at moving up one place on GC if I could get a bonus, but there were a couple of things that would likely make that rather difficult. For one, there were a lot of good sprinters still in the hunt. For another, Donald Davis would be riding on the defensive in the crit., which would make it hard for a break to get away. Although I might have just decided to play it safe and just go for an easy pack finish, I just wasn't really in the mood for that. My legs had survived the prior day relatively unscathed, the weather was awesome, and basically I had little to lose. The best thing I could hope for was to get into a small break. Yeah, I knew it was a long shot, but at least the strategy gave me an excuse to stay near the front.

The final stage of the Mississippi Gran Prix could most accurately be described as a "Circuiterium." The course is a bit over a mile long and includes a short fast descent and an equally short and steep climb. It is, however, run under criterium rules in that the free lap rule is in effect. Anyway, there were no big fireworks at the start but the speed ramped up quickly and stayed pretty fast. The wind had already picked up, so I was focused on staying in the draft as much as possible on the headwind section. The mid-race hot spot bonus seemed to be keeping the aggressiveness level down just a bit, but even so we were regularly hitting 27-29 mph, even on the headwind stretch. I took my best shot at the 3-deep hot spot, but came up a couple of places short. For the next few laps there was some action, but as we got closer to the finish of the 1-hour race the pace became more and more erratic. With three to go things started to get interesting. Riders I hadn't seen the whole race started crowding the front and fighting for wheels. I was really wishing that one of the teams had saved a few guys to do a nice fast leadout so the group would string out, but no such luck really. In fact, the last lap included some pretty sketchy bike handling, complete with the usual dumb panic moves in the corners. Somehow we all remained upright, but as we flew through the fast downhill curves just before the climb up to the finish line I momentarily let common sense get the better of me and had to back off for a moment in the interest of survival. It was just a couple of soft pedal strokes, but I guess two or three guys went past as a result. Still, I felt pretty good sprinting up the hill and across to the finish line, even though I wasn't able to pass more than one or two. I came across the line in 6th, which was good for a nice stage prize but on GC, pack time is pack time, so I stayed in 8th overall.

So all in all it was a fun weekend -- slightly frustrating, but still fun. Jon was in the Cat. 1/2/3 race after ours. That one turned out to be kind of unusual. Typically the 123 race on this course is extremely animated with lots of breaks and chases and shuffling of the deck. This year it seemed plenty fast, and a number of riders came out of the back of the pack, but the only really successful break came from GC leader Matt Davis. Somewhere before the mid-point of the race he took off with Jered Gruber in tow and never looked back. I don't remember the numbers, but Kenny told me that Jered said that even in Matt's draft he was putting out the watts equivalent to a very long interval. That continued until they had lapped the pack about five laps before the finish. Matt went straight through the pack and off the front again, but this time I think the pack had already been embarrassed enough and they pulled him back.

We stayed around long enough to see the Masters results posted, but Jon, Ali and I took off for the two hour drive back home well before the Cat. 1/2/3 results were done. I was feeling reasonably satisfied with my weekend and as we got closer to New Orleans I was already dreading having to go back to reality. In this case, it meant a quick shower and a bike ride through the park to my mother's house for dinner. We rode through the park alongside a couple of guys on horses for a long time. Unfortunately there wasn't time for me to post the partial results I had copied to a flashdrive prior to leaving Brookhaven, so it was probably close to 10 pm before I got that up on the website and about ten minutes before I started getting emails from people who had left before their results were posted and had now found mistakes. We got a few of them straightened out during the course of the day and I think we just need to resolve one tie before carving the results in stone, which means uploading them to the USAC database. The results are here, mand there are a few photos from Sunday here.

So I was so tired Monday morning that I skipped riding. Then at work I got a surprise delivery of a Blue track frame from a friend in Texas, and then a call from Kenny who had flatted nearby and didn't have a pump. I met him, Tim and Woody in the courtyard so he could use the little pump I carry around in my messenger bag. As I walked back to the office I watched the ride off and thought how much I'd rather be riding.