Don't Stop Pedaling, Keep Turning Left

I may not have won many medals, but I certainly put in a lot of chamois time this weekend! It was Thursday before my legs finally felt recovered from the previous weekend's trip to the velodrome, so after an easy morning ride on Friday, Saturday's Giro Ride came up pretty quickly.  If I'd been more serious about the afternoon's LAMBRA Track Championships, I would have skipped the Giro, but I felt that I needed the miles, especially since I wouldn't be riding the road bike on Sunday at all.  The Giro turned out to be fast, but I kept my nose out of the wind for the most part and arrived back at home with a couple of hours to spare before driving up to Baton Rouge to open up registration at 1 pm.  I brought both the newer Blue track bike and the trusty old Viner with me.  I'd swapped cranksets during the week because I wanted the 49 tooth chainring instead of the 48 on the Blue and the two chanksets had different bolt circle diameters.

I was the first to arrive at the velodrome, but by the time I'd hauled some most of the equipment down to the infield, other riders and volunteers started arriving.  Naturally, there was a big rainstorm heading our way, and of course it started raining a bit, but it didn't last long. Mike Lew was there with a couple of bikes for Mignon and Heather, neither of whom had ever been on the track.  They had both been tricked into coming on the premise that they could just ride around the track a few times to see what it was like.  Of course they both ended up registering for the race anyway. I led Heather around the apron for a couple of laps, told her "Don't stop pedaling and keep turning left," and then led her up onto the banking for a couple of laps right before the racing started.  She hadn't raced anything in a couple of years, but took to the track remarkable easily.  She ended up winning the omnium.  Mignon seemed a bit more tentative and was planning on riding only one of the three main sessions over the weekend, so she was mainly just putting in some track time to get used to it.

Track is always a humbling experience for me.  The repeated short maximum efforts with practically no warm-up always hurt.  Nonetheless, it's still a lot of fun and a nice change from the road. The 10-session schedule of events or Saturday was completely incomprehensible to me, so I was never quite sure what I'd be riding next.  The 4k pursuits were set up in the "official" way with qualifiers and finals, and so somehow I ended up riding at least three of them.  As usual, my time trial efforts were all pretty lame.  There were also the match sprints and I think I lost count of how many of those I ended up doing.  Despite all of the races, the results were predictable and I was 4th or 5th out of the 5 or 6 Cat. 1/2/3 riders.  I guess my placings might have been better if I'd ridden in the Masters race, but since I'd done the prior two track races in the 1/2/3s, I figured I'd at least be consistent.  Most of the mass-start races were done with combined Cat. 1/2/3 and Cat. 4/5 fields, and sometimes also the Masters, racing together, so that made things kind of fun for the mass-start races like the Scratch Race, Win-and-Out, Miss-and-Out, and Points Race.  As it turned out, I think I felt best for the Points Race (despite scoring points in only one sprint) and Miss-and-Out. In the Miss-and-Out I backed off when it was down to four or five riders to make sure Mark didn't get boxed in down in the sprinter's lane, so I was eliminated probably one sprint earlier than I would have been otherwise.  Right at 9:00 pm, about halfway through the Masters/Women Miss-and-Out, all the lights at the track suddenly went out plunging the whole race into darkness.  It was lucky that nobody crashed.  Someone at the park didn't get the word that there was a race going on and hit the "off" switch at the usual time.  During a couple of the races I noticed an odd noise coming from my bike, and shortly before the Kilometer, late in the night, I realized that my bottom bracket cup had started backing its way out and cartridge bottom bracket was wobbling enough that the crankarm spider was starting to hit the chainstay.  Luckily I had the Viner there, and Mignon, who had been using it, had gone home, so I hastily swapped the 14t cog for a 13t, which was probably not too wise in the first place, and rode the pursuit or kilo (I don't even remember which) without aerobars, which in my case didn't make much of a difference.

Track races always seem to take longer than expected, and this one was no exception.  Between the pursuit qualifiers and the sprint qualifiers, things were dragging on quite a bit.  It was probably around 10:30 or so by the time we decided to postpone the points race until the next morning and call it a day.  A few of us stopped at Waffle House, which was one of the few places still open, and I headed back to New Orleans with Graeme.  It was well after 1 am by the time I got home and unloaded the car, and then I had to fix the bottom bracket. Total chamois time:  11 hours.

I guess I ended up getting about three hours of sleep before I was on the Road back to Baton Rouge for the Sunday morning sessions which went until around 2 pm.  Afterwards we handed out something like 60 championship medals along with the very first LAMBRA district championship jerseys for the omnium winners.  Mark McMurry ended up 3rd in the championship omnium by just four points, but won the month-long series. Next time the team events need to be excluded from the individual omnium scoring.  Perhaps we can do a team trophy for the team events. Overall, it was a good weekend and probably the best track meet we've had in a few years, thanks largely to Dustin Flint who somehow kept track of the complicated sprint and pursuit qualifying brackets.  Even so, there were a number of riders who I know have track bikes and didn't show up.  Too bad.

Midsummer Rides

No prizes, but a podium!

The midsummer heat and humidity has been in full force lately, and so I'm going to blame that for the fact that I haven't felt good on the bike all week. I had skipped riding on Monday since I was clearly, obviously, dramatically in need of some recovery time, and I guess it helped somewhat.  Still, I've been feeling generally sluggish all week.  I missed Kenny's bandit time trial, which seems to get bigger and bigger every week, on Tuesday evening because we were going out to Mosca's with my father.  It had been quite a few years since I'd ventured into the wilds of the westbank for dinner at Mosca's.  The place was renovated a bit after Katrina, but they were successful in retaining the 1960's roadside restaurant atmosphere and I don't think the menu has changed since at least the Nixon administration.  We had a big family table and just ordered the huge shared plates of Oysters Mosca, Italian Crab Salad, Chicken à La Grande, and Shrimp Mosca.  It was good, messy, as always a bit overpriced.  James Carville and company had the table next to us. It's always amazing who you see at that place because if you didn't know better you'd drive right past it, which is probably what they're hoping the IRS does since they accept only cold, hard cash there.

Wednesday morning on the levee Scott said he'd just had his bike worked on and now the chain was skipping on one of the cogs.  I asked him the obvious questions about new chains on old cassettes, but that didn't seem to be the likely cause, so I took a closer look.  It was pretty obvious that they'd somehow mixed up the spacers in his Campi 10-speed cassette.  That's often what happens shortly after a mechanic says "oops" and the cassette parts scatter across the floor.  Anyway, he brought it back that morning and they straightened it out.  You kind of need the charts to do it right because the spacers aren't all the same width and the setup is different for practically every version (record, chorus, etc.).  I'd been planning on riding out to the lakefront in the evening for the training race, but by the time I got home and walked the dogs it was already nearly 6 pm and the streets were still a little damp from an earlier shower, which provided enough of an excuse.  I'd ridden back from work down Pine Street and by the time I was halfway there I started noticing an unusual amount of traffic. A few blocks later I was riding past a solid line of cars inching their way down the street.  As it turned out, the POTUS was at a little fundraiser thing a few blocks over on Audubon Blvd. and so a bunch of streets were temporarily closed down, forcing people to meander through the neighborhood searching for a way out.  Anyway, I wonder if that $25,000 per person snack time included some discussion about the Tulane football stadium, since it was being held at one of those houses. 

I can't say I was feeling any better this morning for the long Thursday levee ride.  After taking a pull and drifting back to the end of the line, the pace started to ramp up.  Tim, who had just set a new course record for the Tuesday night time trial (10.6 mi. @ 23:16 = 27.3 mph avg.), was up there, along with a few others who were planning on turning around early, and that kept the speeds up in the 25-28 mph range pretty much all the way out to Ormond.  I didn't see much of the front until we were past St. Rose, by which time the size of the group had dwindled a bit.  It wasn't terribly fast, but down around the tail end of the paceline it was erratic enough to make it difficult.  After the turnaround it took a little while for everyone to get back together. We finally got rolling at 25 mph or so near St. Rose, rode through The Dip, and then a little while later VJ, who had been on the front on his TT bike, started having some kind of shifting problem and finally sat up. As I rolled past him I asked what happened, but he had his earphones in and probably didn't hear me.  Steve and I soft-pedaled along for the next couple of miles thinking he'd flatted or something, but soon we couldn't even see anyone behind us and figured it had been something mechanical.  A little while later the paceline came streaming past and I asked Richard what had happened.  It turned out that VJ's cassette lockring had backed itself out, eventually hitting the inside of the dropout and stripping the first few threads on the cassette body.  He ended up having to pull off one cog in order to get enough good threads to screw the lockring back on, so he was able to continue.  Toward the end of the ride the group split and I don't know if he had to stop again to re-tighten the lockring, since I assume it was only hand-tight to begin with.  Anyway, I was just a puddle of sweat by the time I got home thanks to the heat and humidity.

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in the track races coming up this weekend, so I'm looking forward to that and hoping I will be able to race a bit and not have to officiate too much.  At least the weather seems to have settled back into a more normal midsummer routine of random afternoon showers rather than all-day wash-outs.

Road and Track and Back

The weekend was a repeat of last weekend, only a bit more painful. Saturday morning Jon Tenney and a friend of his stopped by the house at 6 am to ride out to the Giro Ride with me.  The weather around here for the past week has been a series of random thunderstorms interspersed with humidity, so we just go out and ride and hope for the best. The turnout was a little on the low side, which wasn't too surprising considering the radar images. Fortunately, we were in-between the rain, so we headed out, picking up more and more riders as we went. We'd just started down Hayne Blvd., when Matt flatted.  I guess half of the group kept riding, the rest of turned back to help. On a group training ride, "helping" means standing around the rider with the flat tire and criticizing his tire-changing technique.  Matt had deep rims but his spare tube didn't have a long enough valve stem.  Luckily someone else had one that would work, so eventually we got back the road. Of course, we'd lost quite a big of time by then.  Even so, I was surprised to see the front of the group coming back as soon as I did.  We turned around and merged back in.  I was not feeling too sharp at all, but fortunately the fast sections were fairly short that day.  I got back home, took a shower, and promptly fell asleep.  A couple of hours later I was awakened by text messages and phone calls from a few people asking if the afternoon track races were still on.  They were.

So by 1:30 I was on the road to Baton Rouge with Graeme and a couple of track bikes for the second race of the LAMBRA Track Cup Omnium.  Checking the radar, I could see a huge rainstorm moving south toward Baton Rouge, but behind it there was no rain showing up.  I figured it would rain for sure, but would probably be over by about the time the racing was to start, which was 4 pm.  Graeme mentioned that he needed to replace his cleats because they were starting to get pretty worn down.  I cautioned him to do it soon because they usually break when you're out of the saddle sprinting.

As expected, it started raining lightly a few minutes after we arrived at the velodrome.  The severity of the rain, however, had diminished considerably, and the track was good to go by 4:30 or so.  Unfortunately the rain had scared most riders away and we had only seven on hand.  Of course, that didn't stop us from racing.  Graeme started warming up on the track and a few minutes later, right in the home stretch, we heard a crash and looked over to see him sliding across the pursuit finish line.  His cleat had broken!  Luckily there's a bike shop practically around the corner from the track, so he was back in action half an hour late.  We just grouped everyone together for the mass-start events.  I started out feeling really lousy.  Fortunately, all of the time trial events were first, and the difference between my time trials when I'm feeling great and when I'm feeling terrible is negligible.  The scratch race, points race, and even the win-and-out were a lot more fun, however.  I guess it was around 8:30 by the time we were done and heading back to New Orleans.  It was a fun day, but I could already tell I'd some some substantial damage to my legs.

Sunday morning there was a northshore training ride on tap, so I was up at 5:30 wondering how I was going to handle 65 miles in the hills when my quads were already feeling like blocks of wood.  Actually, I knew how I was going to handle it -- no well.  Luckily there was a big group waiting for us when we arrived at the Lee Road school.  Considering who was there, I knew it wouldn't be an easy ride.  It wasn't, at least for me.  We started out pretty fast and I wondered if the guys at the front realized we'd be riding back into a headwind.  I was feeling just a little bit better than awful.  For the whole ride I felt overheated and achy, and my legs were complaining on every climb.  Fortunately we were stopping at the intersections to regroup, so somehow I survived, but I can't say it was the most fun I've ever had on a bike.  Basically, all of the efforts on the track, combined with the fact I've been taking it kind of easy for past couple of weeks due to the ribs, which still hurt, had trashed my legs. That's often how I feel after a few hours at the track, so it was situation normal.  I think Monday is going to have to be a recovery day.

Keeping Up

So I've been trying to keep up the mileage, if not so much the intensity, over the past week and a half.  It's been going fairly well, actually.  The road rash is pretty much all healed up, and I know that the rib thing will just be lingering for another couple of weeks regardless of what I do or don't do.  Last weekend was full with two Giro Rides and a few track races in-between.  Saturday afternoon's weather was threatening, which scared away a few people, but as it turned out we didn't have a drop of rain at the velodrome in Baton Rouge.  The original plan had been to do two full omniums to make up for the rained-out one the prior weekend, but after the first one took over four hours, everyone agreed to just skipping the second one.  I split my time between officiating and riding, skipping most of the really hard stuff and just doing the scratch race, miss-and-out, and a kind of odd 2-rider team pursuit.  The start of the latter really hurt.  Pulling hard on the bars is one thing that really hurts the ribs, even now.  Anyway, it was fun and I think I was wise to skip the Kilo and Pursuit, under the circumstances. In fact, considering all of the rain we have been having around here, it was amazing that it didn't really interfere with the weekend riding.

I skipped riding on Monday.  Something in the back of my head keeps telling me to give the ribs an occasional chance to heal.  Monday night Jon, who is in town for a few days, came by so we could re-engineer the broken headset on a bike a friend of his from Denmark (I think) had borrowed.  So they were out on the levee for the Tuesday ride, which I thought turned out to be a little harder than I'd expected.  This morning I was worried about a grant proposal that's due on Friday and skipped riding so I could work on it a little bit before going to the office.  I really ended up mostly staring at it and wondering how on earth we were going to pull the thing together in time.  By 5:30 I was more than ready to ride out to the lakefront to see if I was ready to jump back into the training races.  Naturally, the first thing that happened was that I flatted.  Eventually we got started, but every time the pace stayed up above 31 mph or so for any length of time I was having trouble. Granted, I probably had only 50 psi in my rear tire, but regardless, it was a little disappointing.  On the plus side, I made it home before the rain started.

Patience

FINISHED THE GIRO RIDE BEFORE THE BAD WEATHER ROLLED IN ON SUNDAY

So I've been kind of laying low while waiting for things to heal up, which is not to say I haven't been riding.  Even so, it does require a certain measure of patience.  The road rash, other than the big hole over one of my knuckles, has mostly healed up uneventfully thanks to a box of Tegaderm.  By far the biggest issue has been the broken rib.  Now, nearly two weeks out, it has improved enough that I have been able to sleep reasonably well the last few nights, although sneezing is still to be avoided at all costs. 

On the group rides there has been this little voice in the back of my head reminding me that riding with both a broken rib and broken helmet deserves a little extra measure of caution.  So basically I spend a week or so trying not to crash and not to breathe too hard.  Now that the rib is hurting a little less and I have a nice new helmet, I think I should be more or less back to normal by the weekend, although I'm sure the rib will continue to cause minor problems for a couple more weeks. Anyway things are improving.  Locally, we've had a lot of rain this week that hasn't affected my morning rides, except that it's been extremely humid, but has affected some the evening training races.  It killed off both the Tuesday time trial and the Wednesday training race on the Lakefront, in addition to last Saturday's track races up in Baton Rouge where we sat around under tents for about four hours hoping it would stop long enough to get in some racing, but no such luck.  Hopefully we will fare better next Saturday.  Otherwise, it's been really busy at work and there has been a lot of LAMBRA work (I still need to finish scoring the last race for LCCS points).  We've gotten a number of the August race permits processed, so things are going OK on that front.

Down and Out

Man, it's like we're in the middle of a Crashidemic around here lately.  Riders, including me, have been dropping like flies. Last weekend was the annual "la Vuelta d' Acadiana" over in Lafayette. This is usually a pretty good race, and although the Masters field was looking a little thin I had been looking forward to it.  It's an omnium format race, which isn't generally my favorite, but I was willing to tolerate the time trial and attendant points deficit it would likely cost me in order to do the criterium and road race. 

So when the alarm went off at 5 am Saturday I threw the bike and wheels into the car and hit I-10 for the two and a half hour drive to the time trial course.  Overall, turnout looked pretty good and after signing the (wrong) release form (they had printed out 1-day release forms for all of the pre-registered riders by mistake) I squeezed into my skinsuit and rode around in circles for a while until my start time came up.  The 4 mile TT course started out into a headwind, which wasn't really what I needed motivation-wise.  Within the first half-mile, looking down at the speedometer to see numbers in the 24 mph range, I knew I was wasting my time.  So I held it at about an 80% effort all the way to the turnaround and didn't really go full-bore until maybe the final kilometer.  The predictable result was a dismal placing quite far down on the list.  Fortunately, the criterium was next.

The afternoon criterium were held on a course I'd ridden a number of times in the past, although the last time was probably ten years ago.  There were a couple of notable things about it.  One was the U-turn a little bit past the start/finish, and the other was the final turn that featured a section of road that would put your rear wheel into the air if you hit it right.  Otherwise the course was pretty fast.  I lined up with about twenty Masters around 4 pm.  The race started out fairly conservatively, I thought, but soon a small break went off the front.  I watched it for a little while as the gap started to grow ever so slowly.  A few riders moved to the front and a disorganized chase started to take shape, but I was already getting worried.  With such a small field there wasn't a whole lot of horsepower available to chase down the break.  Finally I set out alone to bridge up to it, making contact just before the U-turn. The pack had responded when I'd gone, so half a lap later the break sat up and the pack caught. 

There had been a time bonus sprint that the break had all to itself, so after that I guess some of them may have been content to ease up.  Anyway, things stayed together for the rest of the race.  I was staying pretty active near or at the front since I was enjoying the more technical nature of most of the circuit.  With two laps to go it started getting pretty tight as riders started getting anxious about their positions. Just before the last turn a rider attacked hard and opened a good gap.  I saw Mark M. come past on the left and grabbed his wheel just before the turn.  From there to the finish it was basically a drag race that ended with Mark 4th and me 5th.  I was reasonably satisfied with it.  Not happy, of course, but considering how lousy I'd felt that morning, it was at least reassuring.  We hung around for a couple more hours to watch the Cat. 4 and Cat. 1/2/3 races before heading to dinner at a sushi place.

Sunday morning was a fairly flat 50-mile road race just northeast of Lafayette.  I was feeling pretty good for this one.  It is kind of liberating to know that my teammate Mark is an accomplished sprinter because it means I can go ahead and take some chances or do some work early that I might otherwise avoid.  If I burn too many matches, I know that as long as Mark gets to the 200 meter mark in the front group he'll place well in the sprint.  Our race was three laps of a 15 mile loop plus a little segment from the start to the loop and then back from the loop to the start. Well, by the time we got onto the loop, maybe two miles after the start, there was already a 2-man break off the front.  The pack didn't seem too concerned about it, but I could see that the gap was growing really quickly.  To make matters worse, one of the riders was from the Acadiana team which had another four riders in the group.  Soon, they were all over the front going after anything and soft-pedaling to slow the group.  The break's gap must have gone out to about two minutes because for the most part we couldn't see it. 

Finally, about halfway around the first lap, I decided it was time to do some work and started working my way around the Acadian obstacles at the front to take some faster pulls. Initially I got some help from one of the Florida riders, and over the course of the next five miles or so some other riders started to lend a hand at overcoming the blockade.  As we started the last section of the first lap the pace finally got consistently high enough that I was comfortable we'd eventually catch the break.  Just before the end of the first lap was the feedzone, followed immediately by a right-hand turn.  I was at the front coming into that section, so I moved over a little to the right and held the 25-26 mph pace to make sure that the feed zone didn't turn into an excuse for the group to slow down for a couple of miles.  I mean, who the heck needs a feed 17 miles into a 50 mile road race?  Back in the day, it was actually illegal to feed for the first 50 miles of a road race.  Anyway, I rode smoothly through at the front, passing over four neon green turn arrows painted on the roadway.  Up ahead was a red arrow confirming the turn.  As I leaned into the turn I could hear a rider coming up on the right, but of course he would be turning too, so I made sure to leave room on the inside.  Suddenly he rammed into me, lifting my front wheel right off the ground.  He had not realized there was a turn there.  This little lack of situational awareness was about to end my race.  The last thing I remember before hitting the asphalt was being at an impossible angle relative to the ground and thinking, "Damnit, I'm going down."  I hit hard on my right side, whacked my head on the pavement, slid a little, rolled, and finally came to a stop.  I looked up to see the offending rider turning around and sprinting back onto the group.  He had somehow not fallen.  I was pissed.  Bob Monahan, who had been in the feedzone, came running over to see if I was OK, and we fumbled for a while with the chain which was wrapped into a couple of figure-eights. Someone told me my helmet was cracked.  I knew my race was over.  The road rash wasn't too bad, but the fall had probably broken a rib or at least caused a significant contusion, and since I'd hit my head I figured it would be best to stand in the shade for a little while until the adrenalin wore off and I could make a better assessment. 

Robert Maupin showed up after having crashed out of the Cat. 4 race, so after hanging around for a little while I convinced him to do one more easy lap with me.  We rode with a couple of stragglers from the Women's race for a while, during which time the two-man break off the front of the Cat. 4 race (Ben Bradley and Tim Dorion) came flying past.  Another small break from the Cat. 4s came by, and then, minutes later, the pack.  Mark and I sped up and hung off the back of the Cat. 4s for a while.  A little later we came upon one of our teammates who had flatted and rode with him for a little bit before heading back to the cars.  Later we found out that another teammate, Mario, had crashed and broken his collarbone in the Cat. 5 race.  Adrian had crashed in the Cat. 5 criterium the day before.  I can't really explain all of the crashes.  Perhaps the combination of heat and questionable riding skills?  I didn't see anything in particular about the courses that would have caused problems.  Anyway, the masters pack did indeed catch the break on the second lap and ultimately came into the finish together.  Mark finished 3rd, moving up to 6th on GC despite a time trial that was just as bad as mine had been.

It was a long drive home with road rash from shoulder to ankle.  It's Tuesday and it still hurts to take a deep breath, so I guess there's a good chance I damaged a rib in my upper back or under my arm.  Nothing to be done about that except to stock up on Advil, I guess.  After I got home I learned that Rick Aubry had crashed on the Saturday Giro.