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.