The Draft

NOBC Cat. 4 team awaits the start of the Feliciana Road Race

Sunday's Feliciana Road Race, up near St. Francisville, LA, was by all accounts a success.  It had been a pretty long time since we'd seen a regular old one-day road race around here.  Over the past seven or eight years promoters have been a little afraid to offer a single race rather than a slate of two or three races on a given weekend.  The prevailing belief was that riders wouldn't travel to a race unless they could justify the trip by having more than one race.  I think this philosophy still holds true for races that are depending on pulling riders in from neighboring states.  In this case, however, the race location was a reasonably short drive of 2-3 hours from four of five of the larger bike racing centers in Louisiana and Mississippi.  When the Cat. 5 race hit its 50-rider field limit on the Friday before the Sunday race, I knew the turnout would be good.

I drove up that morning with Mignon, arriving with a hot cup of coffee and lots of time before the 9:20 am start of the Master 40+ race.  I'd logged a lot of miles the week before with little in the way of recovery time, and when I got on the bike for a little warmup I immediately noticed that my legs felt a little sore on the climbs.  As much as I would have liked to race this race from the front, I decided instead to shift gears and resort to full-on sprinter mode, which is to say I was going to have to roll the dice that someone else would chase down any breakaways and instead spend as much time in The Draft as possible.  The last couple of miles of the 21-mile loop (we would be doing three of them) had a couple of good climbs that finally levelled out maybe 250 meters before the finish. I liked that.  Basically, there were two significant climbs on the loop, and then a lot of rolling stuff that probably wouldn't be much of an issue with the 34-rider master's field.  In other words, there would be lots of wheels to draft and also lots of riders to chase down breaks. 

Teammates Mark and Keith filled out the NOBC's 3-rider team for this one. Like me, Mark was in sprinter mode, while Keith was busy keeping track of things closer to the front.  After a fairly slow start, things got pretty fast for the second half of the first lap, and as I'd expected there were some attacks on the hills toward the end of that lap and well into the second lap.  It shelled a few riders, but I was actually surprised how many were still around when the pace finally slowed down a bit.  There was really only one breakaway that got significant time on the group, but it was a solo rider and he was eventually reeled back in without a particularly severe chase.  I was fully expecting fireworks on the big hills on the second lap, but for some reason there was never a really hard attack there, so we went into the last lap all together with the pace fluctuating between embarrassingly slow to rather fast.

As we came into the final five or six miles, all three of us started maintaining positions closer to the front, and since the pace would occasionally slacken significantly, things got kind of crowded every now and then.  The last kilometer got pretty tight up near the front where I found myself sitting on Mark's wheel over on the right side of the road.  We were probably a good 300 meters from the finish, and still on a slight uphill, when Mark sensed opportunity and jumped hard.  I hesitated and let Glenn Richard, I think, fill the gap as the sprint started rather early.  Following wheels, I ended up over toward the left at about 150 meters when the riders in front of me seemed to stop accelerating.  I shifted up another cog and jumped hard, coming around a number of riders on the left and crossing the line in a photo-finish with Glenn Richard, who narrowly got 2nd place.  Meanwhile, Mark had somehow held out all the way to the finish to take 1st place.  Keith was just a few spots behind, finishing 9th.  The promoters had free jambalaya and beer after the race, so we hung around quite a while so I could get a copy of the final results from the Chief Ref. to post on the website.  By late afternoon I was back home.

So today was Memorial Day.  Earlier in the week Mignon had sent out an email suggesting a group ride, and that quickly evolved into kind of a Memorial Day theme ride through the city with plans to visit Metairie cemetery, the World War II museum, Lee Circle, and Chalmette Battlefield.  It was all qute patriotic for this escapee from the 1974 draft.  I was basically among the first group of potential draftees who were not called, which was probably a good thing since my "lottery" number had been 25.  

Anyway, the weather was good and by the time we rolled out from Lakeview we had a group of over 25 riders, many sporting little US flags.  The ride was a lot of fun and just what I needed, even though some of us ended up having to chase back up to the group at one point.  I was kind of riding herd on this ride, keeping track of the back of the group and trying to keep everything together.  Unfortunately, when things were kind of strung out at one point, a bus cut the last few riders off and that opened up a huge gap that didn't get closed for a long time.  We were happy to have Pensacola's Donald Davis, who had raced the day before but had stayed in Baton Rouge that night, along for the ride.  I headed straight home down Marconi after the ride since we had a few people coming over to the house for a late lunch that of course included hamburgers, hot dogs, beer and margaritas -- not necessarily in that order.