Officiating Hats

It's the Thursday after the Tour de Louisiane and I think I have everything more or less wrapped up.  The post-event reports are on my desk at home awaiting the 4-digit check for USAC, results have been uploaded, the LCCS points standings have, finally, been updated, and the big stack of release forms is ready to be filed away for the recommended ten years (really?). This year's Tour was, by all accounts, a pretty successful one, unless of course you measure success by whether or not the event turned a profit.  We had a total of 187 riders, didn't need to call 911 a single time, there were no big problems or delays with the results, and it didn't rain.  The races themselves were pretty interesting and competitive, and although the Lakeshore Drive criterium course may not be the most technically challenging, it proved to be plenty hard enough and was great for the spectators. Erich Mattei once again served as official announcer/DJ for the criterium, keeping the crowd entertained throughout.  The Cat. 1/2/3 road race got splintered by a couple of successful breaks that yielded big time gaps.  The Masters race also saw a successful break, that included Jorge and Mike, that took a good six minutes out of most of the field.  Of course, from my perspective, it was a long hot weekend of squinting at sun-drenched laptop screens, calling numbers and times into tape recorders, and hauling equipment around from venue to venue.  Much of it is still scattered about in my basement until I have a chance to clean and reorganize it.  I guess it's been at least twenty years that I've worn my now-traditional and entirely un-official officiating hat for the road race, although in recent years I've switched to a regular officials cap for the criterium.  There are links to some great photos by Malcolm Schuler and David L'hoste on the results page. 

So after spending last weekend mostly standing still and sweating, I was finally back on the bike on Monday feeling like I hadn't ridden in a week. By Tuesday morning, two LAMBRA races, Meridian-Cuba and Mt. Driskill had been cancelled, and the next day they cancelled Sugar Land over in TX which was supposed to be a LCCS points race.  Wow!  It sounds like Mt. Driskill might be resurrected for the weekend that Meridian-Cuba originally had, but it's too early to say for sure yet.  Anyway, the closest race next weekend is in Tennessee, I think, but I couldn't go anyway because The Daughter is coming to town on Saturday with her gymnastics camp girls.

At least I got in some good training yesterday.  After a nice moderate morning levee ride, I rushed off after work, jumped onto the old Orbea, and rode out to the lakefront to catch the 24-mile Wednesday training race.  It was somewhere in the mid-90s when I left, and I was feeling kind of dragged out, but the training race is not to be missed.  I think we had 25-30 riders for the start yesterday, and so the early attacks got chased down as you'd expect.  By the third lap, though, we'd lost a number of people and you could tell that riders were getting tired.  I found myself kind of stuck near the back without the energy to go out into the wind and move up where I knew I should be. About halfway through the race we got a little rain shower -- just enough to make a complete mess of the bike and clothes, and not enough to wash away all of the grit.  With just about one 6-mile lap to go a small break rolled away.  I looked around nervously, wondering why the group's pace hadn't changed. A couple of riders attacked down the left side to bridge, and then Tim went flying past in overdrive.  The front of the group didn't respond at all.  A few more riders went after Tim and eventually most or all of them made it up to the front group.  The rest of the pack was completely dysfunctional.  With a gap of around 45 seconds, there was no way a solo rider was going to make the bridge, but rather than organize a paceline, individual riders kept attacking the group.  Needless to say, the gap continued to grow.  Oh well, at least it was a good workout, and besides, I shouldn't complain too much because I myself spent most of the race sucking wheels.