The Tour

The humidity this morning was positively off the charts, but then again, it's sum, sum, summertime in New Orleans so whatcha gonna do? This morning I was trying out a new handlebar. I've been using the 40 cm TTT Ergonova (no, not the expensive carbon one) for close to a year now and never could quite get used to the extremely short reach. Otherwise, I liked the shallow drop and even the unusual shape where the drops flared out just a little bit so that when your hands were on top of the brake levers they were a little closer together. Even so, when the going would get hard I always felt like I was digging my hands into the hooks a little too hard. I think it's just that I've always been most comfortable with my arms more or less straight rather than bent when I'm riding. So anyway, I put on the 40 cm TTT Ergosum bar last night. It still has a relatively shallow drop, but offers a bit more reach than the Ergonova did. I don't guess I'll really be able to tell much of a difference until I spend some quality time with them, so we'll see how it goes. Removing the old handlebar tape is always kind of disgusting process in the summer. Underneath even the most nicely anodized aluminum will host a nice crop of white oxidation and salt that seems to have its own peculiar smell. So a nice new bar and nice clean handlebar tape (I'm trying out some grey Fizik tape this time) at least freshens up the front end of the bike.

In spite of the heat and stupidity, or humidity as the case may be, there was a nice crowd on hand for the Wednesday ride. When I looked back to see who all had arrived I was shocked to see an old Herring jersey with Brad Hecker's head on top of it. Brad's in town visiting from NC (or SC, I can never remember which) where he's been working since moving away from New Orleans back around 2002. I don't know if it was just because he was there or not, but the ride was definitely faster than our usual Wednesday ride, and my legs are still definitely not fully recovered.

Last-minute preparations for the 39th annual Tour de Louisiane are in their customary state of chaos. Our nice LAMBRA race clock that we use for all three stages is currently being repaired in California after having been slammed to the ground by a sudden gust of wind during the brief but intense rainstorm at the West Feliciana Classic criterium. We've been hustling around for one to borrow Robin found an old one that requires a separate car battery, but I think we'll be able to use the one that Kona Cafe' has, which is one of the newer models with an integrated battery. Robin stopped by the house after the ride today so I could print out the Race Bible, which I finished up last night around midnight, and make the 200 copies that we'll need for Friday. I don't know what the problem was, but although the preview looked fine and the pdf file looked fine, when I sent it to the printer one of the big map images got moved on top of the sponsors page. I tried a couple of things and re-printed it, but to no avail, and then after trying to cancel the job the printer got all confused and started printing out code, so I decided to try printing the pdf version on my other printer. That went fine until it ran out of black ink halfway through the document. Luckily I had picked up a new ink cartridge yesterday. Anyway, it must have taken half an hour to finally get those ten pages printed out.

Then this morning there was some confusion about hotel rooms that we were supposed to have reserved for our motorefs. It sounds like the hotel had already booked everything except rooms with single king size beds. They're telling us that they may be able to switch them over to double beds but won't know for another day or so. So anyway, some motorefs may end up at a different hotel. On the plus side, enough riders booked rooms at the Hampton Inn that we should get at least one free room, which will definitely help if we end up having to book extra rooms somewhere in order to keep our motorefs from having to sleep together. They're good friends, but not that good. Next on my own agenda is to make sure the results workbook is fully functional and able to produce our TT start list, calculate times for riders pulled or lapped in the criterium, pull rider data from the USAC database, deal with the new time bonuses for finish and hot spot placings, etc. Then I'll go through our race equipment to see which stopwatches and tape recorders and megaphones need new batteries, charge up the radios, sort out the number sequences for the various groups, print out a bunch of entry/release forms, etc. It's amazing that we do this stuff for free, and even more amazing that, despite having attracted a significant amount of sponsorship cash and having a relatively small prizelist, we will undoubtedly miss breaking even, and probably by a very large amount. Of course some of that is entirely because of the cost of putting the criterium in City Park. That one stage is costing us in excess of $3,500 in fees and police. I mean, are five police officers really necessary to close off a course in a park on a Sunday morning? And then there's the $2,500 fee for using the streets in the first place. Damn, I sure wish Covington would re-pave their streets so we could get back there sooner!

Tonight I'm going to have to miss the Arena training criterium once again, this time in order to attend a meeting of the Complete Streets Advisory Committee. That should be interesting. I'm just going to consider it to be a good networking opportunity for a possible future French Quarter criterium.