Weathering Winter

Those  barriers seem higher than they look

It really feels like winter around here today, and that can mean only one thing.  I'll be complaining regularly about the cold weather despite my incongruous compulsion to ride in it anyway.  Just to get things started, let me complain about this very morning. I awoke to a temperature in the upper 30s, with a north wind to match, and thought long and hard about whether it was worth going out on the road for what was probably not going to be much of a recovery ride. I did it anyway, of course, and as usual it wasn't quite as bad as I'd imagined. After all, the upper 30s doesn't quite qualify as arctic.  It's all relative, though, and relatively speaking I was pretty cold.  I was also a bit sore from yesterday.

Sunday morning I had made the drive up to Baton Rouge for the second day of their 2-day CX-Palooza cyclocross race with the idea of helping out with the officiating and jumping into the "A" race for a few laps.  As it turned out, the weather was pretty much ideal for this sort of thing.  Well, at least it was ideal for somebody with 30mm tires and a complete lack of cyclocross skills.  So after scoring the "B" race, I quickly changed into riding clothes and sped off for a couple of practice laps on the Highland Park course.  Luckily for me the entire course, except for the two sections of barriers, was rideable, even on my road bike masquerading as a cyclocross bike. It was a nice long course with lap times for the faster guys of around 5 minutes and for the slower guys like me, 6 minutes.  I lined up pretty much DFL and for the most part maintained that slot throughout the 45 minute race.  It was actually a lot of fun even at my mediocre pace.  After a nice long and flat finish straight there was a sharp right turn up a hill, around a tree and back down the hill, another U-turn around a tree, and then the first set of double barriers.  My first couple of tries over those things were really ugly, but I started getting the hang of it eventually.  Another few twists and turns and then the course went across a little bridge and straight up a very steep washout. I was glad that my low gear of 44x26 proved adequate to keep my feet off the ground on that one.  That was followed by a few tight and swoopy turns and then a fast downhill with an off-camber right and quick crossing of a soft muddy spot where I was sure my front wheel would eventually dig in and send me over the bars (it never did, though).  Then a right up a little hill and a second set of barriers that I had a lot more trouble with than the first. Coming over the barriers the route continued uphill for a little bit, so you had to run a few steps before you had enough momentum to leap back onto the saddle and try to clip in.  The clipping-in part seemed to be a big problem for me, as I'm really not used to those old-style shimano mountain bike pedals and cleats.  After that there were a number of curves and some easy rolling terrain that was fairly fast, including a trip through a sand trap underneath a park swing set.  Then there was a final downhill with a sharp right turn back onto the finish straight. I felt like I got a good workout despite getting lapped twice by all of the leaders.

On the officiating side, I discovered that in order to be able to pick up rider data for everyone who has a cyclocross license I need to download both the USCF and the NORBA databases, since both types of licenses include cyclocross.  Unfortunately, for riders with only NORBA licenses there are no club or team listings. Rather inconvenient. I spent a lot of time Sunday night getting the results ready for posting and uploading, especially considering that there were only 23 riders!  Then, after wasting all of that time, I discovered a little link way down at the bottom of the USAC promoters download page that said, "CROSS all riders."  Crap.