Blue-shirt Weekend, Screwed Again

It all started Friday afternoon.  I skipped out of work early, loaded the Volvo up to the ceiling, and headed up to Baton Rouge for a long weekend of officiating the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference road championships.  There was a Friday night registration that ran from 6 pm until around 10:30 pm, and then it was probably not until midnight that I was satisfied with the registration data and finally hit the sack.  Officiating collegiate racing is a bit of a different experience.  Since everything is done on a shoestring, the conference assigns "permanent" bib numbers to each rider.  They keep a less than perfect record of those numbers, and the riders keep less than perfect track of them. When riders upgrade they get different numbers, when they forget their numbers they get different numbers, and by the end of the road season a good 30% of the bib number data are wrong.  And then there's the whole category thing.  Despite the new USAC rule (7H1 if you are one of the few people who read the rulebook), collegiate riders below Category A tend to register in whatever category races they want, so the license categories in the USAC database can't really be trusted.  We had Cat. D riders in the Men's A race, and the majority of the Category B Women's race were actually Category D.  Go figure.  Anyway, despite those complications we got most of the riders registered Friday night and somehow managed to get the Saturday morning road races started on time, which is to say they were only ten minutes late. 

It was unseasonably cold on Saturday, and although it was ideal for racing, I spent most of the day wearing my Goretex rain jacket since I hadn't brought an appropriate wardrobe.  At least it was blue!  Maybe I should attach an official's patch to the front?  Shortly after the last group started, a guy in a clean starched shirt with a cellphone in his ear found us.  He was not happy.  Apparently the promoter hadn't actually gotten official permission to use the school parking lot (and rest rooms).  It was an election day and guess what?  Yep, the school was a polling location.  Little old ladies with handicap tags were confused.  We did our best to smooth things over since the promoter was somewhere out on the course racing in the A race.  Results went pretty well, there were not crashes, it didn't rain despite a 50% chance of thunderstorms, and we reconvened at the Team Time Trial course down on River Road late that afternoon.

Team TTs are always complicated.  Teams will wait until the last minute to decide who is riding on which team, categories get mixed, etc.  Somehow we once again got it all sorted out and started right on time.  Once I finished starting all of the teams I drove down to the finish, about half a mile away, and started plugging finish times into the computer, so ten minutes after the last team finished I had the results ready.  Unfortunately that's when the printer, or more likely the spooler, decided to go south on me.  I think it thought it was out of ink for some reason.  Anyway, that cost us about half an hour until we got the backup printer connected, rebooted, and printed out the TTT results.  After dinner I uploaded the results to the LAMBRA site and got things ready for Sunday's criterium around the Capitol building.

When we arrived at the criterium course I immediately noticed a rather big problem.  Right in the middle of the final 200 meters there were two crosswalk caution signs sticking up IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD.  The local capitol police had refused to allow the promoter to remove them.  I sent someone looking for a crescent wrench and at least got the one closest to the finish removed.  Amazingly this did not result in the complete breakdown of the state's pedestrian safety infrastructure.  Also amazingly, none of the riders hit the remaining one all morning.  The races went quite well, staying right on schedule.  Remarkably, there was not a single crash all weekend, at least as far as I know.  I particularly enjoyed the Men's Cat. B race.  Toward the end of the race a 2-rider break rolled off the front and gradually accumulated a 30 or 40-second lead on a fairly large pack.  Tulane wasn't represented in the break, but one of the Tulane riders, Ben Bradley, went to the front and held the gap steady for a few laps.  Then, with four or five laps to go they launched their teammate Stephen Noya off the front of the pack.  He put his head down and within two laps had caught the break as his teammates controlled the pack.  The three-rider break came through on the bell lap together and we anxiously watched the final corner for the sprint.  Somewhere on that last lap, though, Noya had attacked and he ended up coasting across the finish line with ten seconds to spare.  One of the other Tulane sprinters then took the pack sprint.  Nicely done.  They won the division II conference championship.

So the rest of this week was quite busy all-around and by Wednesday afternoon I was looking forward to the Wednesday Night Worlds training race out at the lakefront.  For a change, I actually got home and then out the door on the bike with enough time to make the start, or so I thought.  Somewhere on Carrollton Avenue, about halfway between home and the lakefront, I managed to put a screw neatly through the center of my rear tire and nearly through the rim as well.  I actually had to pull out the little Swiss Army Knife on my keychain in order to unscrew it from the tire.  The whole process set me back about ten minutes and about 50 psi (my little mini pump is subject to diminishing returns past about 60 psi), so I missed about a lap and a half.  A 3-man break was already off the front, so I latched onto it for a little while to get warmed up.  I watched from the back as Tim and Stephen reacted to Mike's rather erratic riding (he was riding a disc wheel in a strong crosswind, probably on a TT bike.....).  Eventually, Stephen attacked in order to drop him.  We were absorbed into the pack a little while later, and the break was caught.  I was feeling OK except that the low rear tire was not inspiring a lot of confidence, so I stayed off the front and followed wheels.  There was a lot of attrition as the pace would ramp up to 28-30 mph in the crosswind, so staying on the back was by no means an easy task.  The finish stretch was the worst of the crosswind, so when the leaders jumped everyone beyond about 5th wheel, including me, was pretty much screwed.  "Live by the draft, die by the draft."

Rob's back after having twins
a few weeks ago

Today's long Thursday ride started out pretty easy, but eventually things got animated at the front and together with the strong wind it turned out to be a pretty hard ride both coming and going.  I was not feeling particularly strong, but did a lot of work on the way out, so by the time we were half-way back I was content to ride wheels while certain other riders pretended to be racing.  Now I'm just plain tired.....