Multitasking

It was around 5:15 am when I got up, pulled on my "blue shirt" and shuffled to the kitchen to boil a couple of eggs while I loaded up the car.  It was going to be one of those multitasking days where I officiate, race, and then officiate some more.  The term "Jack of all trades, master of none" comes to mind......   The Volvo was pretty well packed with two big bins full of clipboards, paper, stopwatches, radios, etc, another bin full of signs, the big finish line flag, the race clock and stand, the surprisingly heavy PA system, the big pop-up shelter, a folding table and chair, a couple of coolers full of water, the generator, and of course my own race bag, computer, printer, etc.  The bike went on the roof and I ended up squeezing my front wheel into the passenger seat alongside my race bag. There was some patchy dense fog for the 30-minute drive to LaPlace, and along the way I saw the police setting out flares along I-10 in Metairie where there must have been a serious accident.  Later, at the gas station just off the interstate at LaPlace, there was a big cluster of state police cars and wreckers loaded with wrecked cars.  There must have been a big pile-up in the fog somewhere nearby and as I filled the generator with gas I hoped nobody had been seriously injured.

We were missing a couple of our regular race volunteers this year and since this was a 2-person time trial there were a lot of race-day registrations.  Naturally most of them showed up about fifteen minutes before registration was scheduled to close, so there was a longer line than I like to see, but we somehow managed to get everybody into the computer, print out and post the start lists, and get the first team on the road on time for the 9 am start.  That left me about fifteen minutes to squeeze into my skinsuit and find my 55+ teammate Dennis.  Shortly before we were scheduled to start I stopped to redirect riders who were warming up in an area that the local police didn't want riders, and so I ended up sprinting from there to the start line with zero seconds to spare before we started.

Dennis is just starting to get back into shape after a very long time, maybe ten or fifteen years, away from racing.  Since I didn't really want to do a team time trial without warmup that would rip my legs off, and then have to compile the results, this seemed like a good match. Dennis started out with practically a full-out sprint from the line and right away we were up to about 28 mph, which I knew was entirely unsustainable, even despite the moderate tailwind we had.  Eventually we settled down to something in the 25 mph range, but I could tell Dennis was suffering right away.  Being the big guy in a 2-man time trial with me means scrapping around for relatively little draft.  So my pulls started getting longer and longer as we neared the turnaround and I dropped the pace a few times to keep us together.  On the way out we were doing a pretty good job of holding the gap to our minute-man, or minute-team, until the last few miles.  After the turnaround when we started into the headwind we really had to slow down a lot to keep it together and I spent a lot of time on the front at 22-23 mph which was a whole lot slower than the teams that flew past us were going! Needless to say our time was nothing to write home about. I think the surprise of the day was the team of Ben Bradley and Stephen Noya, both riding for the Tulane team, that posed the second fastest time of the day (54:39). On the plus side, after the finish I was still able to focus, there wasn't a thick layer of salt caked on my face, and my legs felt fine.  So I jumped into my car, changed back into my officiating clothes, and got started on the results within five minutes.  That all went quite smoothly and we had everything posted and awarded on schedule. Then we packed everything back into the car, unloaded it into my basement, and I went upstairs to clean up the results and post them and some podium photos to the website.  It was probably about 4 pm before I finally took a badly needed shower.