Brakeless in BR

Up around dawn for the drive up to Baton Rouge, I knew Saturday was going to be a long day.  It was the grand re-opening of the Perkins Road Park, home of the Baton Rouge Velodrome.  Friday morning I had dusted off (literally) the old Viner track bike and tried to pump up the tires to make sure they were still OK.  Unfortunately the short valve stems on the old Vittoria Corsa tubulars didn't leave quite enough room in the more modern rims for the pump to grab, so after work I rode over to GNO Cyclery and picked up a valve extender. So by Friday night the track bike was ready to go.  The "event" was a track clinic conducted by a couple of the guys from the Dick Lane Velodrome over in East Point, GA (south Atlanta).  I didn't really know what to expect, but since I'd agreed to bring a lap counter and bell and stopwatches, I figured I may as well see what it was all about.



Track riding always seems to involve
a lot of this.

The clinic turned out to be fairly well-structured and fun.  Starting at 8 am, riders who needed them were fitted to loaner bikes and introduced to the track. After going over the basics of track safety, and a review of the significance of the blue band, black line, red line, finish line, pursuit lines, and the missing stayer's line, they started out with some introductory laps, followed by a series of drills designed to make new riders comfortable with riding in mass-start races, matched sprints, and flying 200 meter time trials.  After a late lunch, there was a series of A and B practice races that included scratch races, points races, a miss-and-out, and matched sprints.  All of this made for a pretty long day, and I guess it was nearly 5 pm before I got back into the car to head home.  The entire Perkins Park, by the way, looked pretty impressive.  Although not too much about the Velodrome had changed, there is now a huge skate park, with a rock wall in the middle,  immediately adjacent to the track and an improved BMX track adjacent to that.  It was interesting, and maybe a little frightening, that there was apparently no helmet requirement for the skate park.  The high fence that had always encircled the velodrome is now gone and, as far as I can tell, it is open to the public and unsupervised from dawn to dusk.  That is obviously going to present a safety problem.  While we were there, lots of people with BMX bikes or skateboards came through the tunnel and wanted to ride on the track. I talked with someone who works at the park, and she seemed to be very interested in making it work, so I'm optimistic.  Anyway, I think the riders who attended, especially those who were new to the track, got a lot out of the clinic.  I decided to take a pass on the sprints at the end of the day, both because I needed to get back to New Orleans, and because I didn't want to completely trash my legs.



Sunday morning found me once again in the car before sunrise.  I swung over to Starbucks first, waiting for a few minutes as they finished brewing the first batch of Anniversary Blend and chatting with Billy (of GNO Cyclery).  Then I headed over to Puccino's to see if anybody else was going over to do the northshore ride, but at 7 am the parking lot was still empty, so I cranked up the radio and hit the Causeway just as the sun started to peek over the horizon.  It was going to be another spectacular day, with a morning temperature in Covington around 60F and not a single cloud in the sky.




Coming over the watchtower climb
on the way out to Enon

The group at the Lee Road Junior High was a little smaller than usual.  I guess we had nine or ten riders at the start. I guess there's a lot of competition this time of year with festivals and school sports and those sorts of things.  I was kind of relieved to find that my legs didn't feel sore, although as usual my neck was kind of stiff.  Whenever I spend any significant amount of time on the track, my neck ends up rather sore.  Riding around the bankings you have to cock your neck up quite a bit just to see what's ahead of you, since, essentially, it's actually above you.  The training ride group was, the most part, remarkably restrained today.  Of course there were a few fast sections and sprints, but in general the pace remained pretty steady.  We came over the watchtower hill in a nice smooth paceline.  A few miles later, just north of Enon, the traditional "nature break" allowed time for some wardrobe adjustments as the temperature was already on its way up to the 80s.



The road from Plainview back to Lee Road



Beautiful double paceline!

After the turn at Highway 10 things started to pick up a bit. This stretch includes three significant climbs.  The first one is the longest, but it's not too steep.  I think everyone came over that one together since there was no real attack there.  The other two climbs are shorter but steeper climbs, each coming immediately after crossing small streams.  Sometimes I really like these climbs and other times I really hate them.  This day, with my legs feeling fairly fresh because of the moderate pace, the climbs were my friends.  My only problem was that I'd forgotten to bring along anything to eat, so in general I was being a little careful to conserve some energy since I knew that little vanilla bean scone I'd picked up with my coffee at 6:30 am might not get me all the way through the 65 mile ride.  As it turned out, though, I was never in danger of bonking, and after we finished Jason was there with a cold beer and a cold Coke.  Nice.