Rapides Recap

I've been pretty busy lately, and not in that Jered Gruber flying around the country from one international race to another with my euro-chic fiance interviewing cycling superheroes kind of way. (Where do I send my resume for that job?) In fact, the farthest away I got was Alexandria, Louisiana, a three-hour drive from New Orleans. The impetus for that particular drive was the Racing Rapides weekend. This event had previously been an omnium, but the USAC schedule of fees kind of got in the way of the prizelist, or vice-versa, and it was considerably cheaper for the organizers to run three separate races than an omnium. So Friday evening saw me heading west on I-10 with an ETA at Ed's house in Pineville of around 10:15 pm. Following me was Mignon, who was planning on driving back after the road race on Saturday. The drive was fairly uneventful until somewhere around the notorious town of Bunkie where we paused to make an unplanned donation to the local sheriff's office. We arrived at Ed's house right about the same time as Ed himself who had been out in his canoe all day catching crabs, so dinner consisted of freshly boiled blue crabs and cold beer. Kids, this is not exactly recommended pre-race dining.

Saturday morning started with a 5km time trial on a nice curvy course. I was feeling particularly unmotivated about this time trial, since the odds of my getting within range of the prizelist weren't particularly good. I did a nice warmup, rolled up to the line, and started out fairly easy, completing the course at about 90% effort. This of course resulted in a less than stellar time and a placing of 9th in the small field of thirteen 40+ masters riders. We had a couple of hours to kill between the TT and the RR, but we chose to hang out in the shade for the duration. Although the temperature was rising into the 90s, there was a nice breeze blowing and lots of shade, so this was rather pleasant. A few more people who had skipped the time trial started filtering in, one of which was Lenny K. who hadn't raced in about a decade. I led him over to say hello to Mike Lew, one of the other local dinosaurs, but when Lenny reached down to tap Mike on the shoulder, Mike's somewhat overprotective dog clamped onto his hand, drawing blood.

So after the women, juniors and Cat. 5s finished their road races, the 40+ masters finally got underway. We had a somewhat larger field of 22 or so for this race that would take us three times around the circuit. Things got pretty quick pretty quickly in this race. The course had two rather long climbs on it, but otherwise the terrain wasn't too difficult. At one point, after the group had closed down yet another attack, I rolled through and found myself off the front, so I figured, "what the hell, I'll keep it rolling for a while and see if anyone gets nervous enough to do some work to chase." It would at least give Dave a chance to sit in for a while. Well, although I had a pretty significant gap, my threat level is apparently pretty low. By the time I was caught I'd probably done more damage to myself than anybody else. The attacks and surges continued on the second lap, and when we hit the long climb on the back side of the course there was a pretty serious attack that shattered the group right away. I found myself way too far back when it happened, and all the alarm bells started going off. When I came up to Mitch I told him we had to close quick before they got organized, so he put his head down and ramped it up to 32 mph. I think we were about the last ones who made it across. The group was now down to about a dozen.

The first half of the last lap had a few more attacks, but nothing stuck and everyone started thinking about the finish and getting defensive, which is to say the pace finally slowed down a bit. I was feeling rather beat and spend most of the last half of the last lap near the back scrounging around for a draft in the crosswind. Dave wasn't feeling too chipper either. The early taste of mid-summer heat was really taking the starch out of everyone. So it came down to a long 300 meter sprint in the end, with me taking a disappointing 7th and Dave 8th.

Sunday was the criterium in the old downtown area of Alexandria. This is a nice course with lots of turns and a long, long finish straight. I decided to play the sprinter for this one, staying out of the action at the front and rolling the dice that a break wouldn't get away. There were lots of attempts to make that happen. Jerry had Jay and Jason working the front, and Donald Davis and a couple others were also keeping things interesting. The pace was actually pretty fast for most of the race, but nobody was able to get away and although we lost a number of riders, it came down to a sprint. With a couple of laps to go I made my way up closer to the front and was in a fairly good position halfway through the last lap as Jay and Jayson tried to keep the speed up for Jerry, but then people started pulling off a little faster than I'd expected and I found myself in danger of having to lead out the sprint, which is never a good thing for me. Luckily, someone attacked prior to the last two turns and I was able to latch onto his wheel, coming around the last turn second wheel. Now, if the finish line had been 150 meters from there, I'd have been gold, but it was probably over twice that far, so I hung back for a little while. It was likely a little while too long because I heard riders starting to come around on both sides and had to go. I clicked down a couple of cogs and stood on it, but not before three guys passed us. I ended up 4th and Dave 5th, which I was fairly happy about.

Today was a long day in Baton Rouge at the capitol building for "Tulane Day." At least I finally got the Racing Rapides results uploaded to the USAC database, and I got some of the Tour de La web pages updated, but I still need to do the LCCS rankings for both this race and the prior one, neither of which will be easy.