True to Your School

It was Thursday by the time I felt more or less recovered from Sunday's excursion in the Felicianas.  As I discovered during the Thursday morning ride, however, I still wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders.  The morning ride seemed longer and harder than usual, but at least we didn't have any close calls with oncoming riders in the dark like we did on Tuesday. Anyway, by Thursday night I was trying to get my act together for a weekend of blue-shirting up on Baton Rouge.  The LSU collegiate team was hosting a weekend of SC⁴ races.  It was their first time organizing a collegiate race and it was, for all practical purposed, my first time officiating one.  Fortunately I'd convinced Ricky Dunn to come down from Monroe to act as Chief Judge and finish camera operator. So I ran out of the office early on Friday, loaded up the wagon, and hit the road around 4 pm, which should have given me plenty of time to get to the 7 pm pre-registration session at the LSU Union.  I soon realized how inadvertantly wise I'd been in leaving so early because it must have taken me half an hour to extricate myself from the I-10 gridlock.  Then, of course, as I approached Baton Rouge everything came to a stop again. The whole experience just reminded me why I usually prefer to drive to weekend races in the wee hours of the morning.

Anyway, I was glad that most of the teams showed up Friday night to register because getting the team time trial teams registered was pretty confusing and slow.  I also had to get most of the Criterium and Road Race riders registered too.  One complicating factor was that the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SC⁴) issues permanent numbers to the riders. 

Saturday morning I arrived at the Team TT site before dawn to start getting things set up.  Things went fairly smoothly except that one or two teams showed up quite late. Somehow, though, we got the first team off about on time and there weren't any problems with the timing or starts.  I'd brought the laptop down to the finish line, so we had most of the finish times in the computer by the time the last team came over the line and got the results done fairly quickly.  Apparently this was such a surprise to some of the riders that they didn't even consider looking for the results after the TTT.  So we had a few hours to run back to the hotel for a few minutes, grab a quick lunch, and head over to the criterium course on the LSU campus.  The course was pretty interesting, in a rather scary way, since it included a roundabout and a road with a big post in the middle of it.  The Cat. D race was first, and I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised when there was a big crash at the roundabout a few laps before the end that sent one rider to the hospital with a broken collarbone and two fractured wrists (from what I heard).  The guy later showed up for the start of the road race because he wanted to be listed as starting for upgrade purposes. Anyway, the criteriums went pretty well despite lots of riders getting lapped and some confusion about the D race results.  I was glad to see some good results from the new Tulane team.

Early Sunday morning I headed up to St. Francisville in a heavy fog for the road races.  Once the fog lifted and we started the races (about half an hour late) things went pretty smoothly.  As expected, the Midwestern State riders (they are the only team in the conference that has varsity status) swept the Category A race.  The other races seemed to be pretty competitive from what I could tell.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a Tulane rider solo in two minutes ahead of the Cat. B field, and then have his teammate win the sprint for second.  A little while later, another Tulane rider won the Cat. D race after riding the last seven miles on a flat front tires.  His teammate then finished 2nd.  The greenies weren't done yet, though, because ten minutes later one of their teammates won the Women's B race convincingly enough that she got upgraded to Cat. A the next day.  Results are on the LAMBRA website.

So although I didn't get to ride at all, it was a fun and interesting weekend.  Next weekend we are putting on the annual 2-Person Time Trial over in LaPlace, where I get to both officiate and race. This afternoon Mignon and I met with the French Market Corporation again to talk some more about putting on a little criterium as part of their Bastille Day celebration. It will probably be just a single 30 or 45-minute race on a super-short course, but it will certainly be a lot of fun anyway, assuming of course that we can raise enough money to cover the police costs. In the meantime, things are heating up at work, which I guess explains why I'm writing this at 11:30 pm.