Off-Track

Having survived at least the conversational part of the Saturday Giro Ride, along with the ride to and from, with my collarbone still intact, I set about gathering up the items needed for the weekend's volunteer officiating duties.  While this is normally a fairly quick process, doing so with a still-healing collarbone required a slower and more deliberate process.  The heavier items, like the PA system and tent, would have to await assistance from Mark and Graeme who would be going up with me to the Baton Rouge Velodrome for the QDS Systems Track Omnium. I filled a plastic bin with clipboards, paper, stopwatches, bell, megaphone, printer, table, chair, etc., and went upstairs to pack some warm clothes.  The races wouldn't be starting until around 5:30 and the temperature was going to be dropping rather dramatically, and since I would be spending a few hours standing in the wind on the wrong side of the Blue Band, I knew I'd best plan for Arctic conditions.  The night before I had been particularly proud of myself for discovering the "Large" function in Excel which would allow me to build the results spreadsheet for the omnium in such a way that it would automatically total only the top five scores for each rider.  I had also downloaded the "SloPro" application for my iPad.  I had heard of people using it for bike race finish judging and since the LAMBRA cameras were all up in Monroe I figured I'd give it a try.  Of course I knew it wouldn't work once it got dark unless we had some heavy duty lighting on the finish line, which we didn't, but the schedule called for races on Sunday morning too, so that looked like it might work. 

By 3 pm we had packed Mark's new car to the ceiling with equipment and the three of us headed west on I-10 for the drive up to Baton Rouge. By the time we arrived the sky was clear and sunny and there was a stiff north wind blowing.  I was glad I'd brought lots of warm clothes.  The turnout was fairly good by our standards, which is to say there were more than twenty riders on hand for the evening's events.  Everyone was grouped into Cat. 1/2/3, Cat. 4, Cat. 5, or Women since we didn't have enough Masters or Juniors, which is not uncommon.  The events went off pretty smoothly thanks to the LSU team which has hosted a number of track races over the last few years, and we wrapped things up for the evening around 8:30 pm or so, leaving us time to get something to eat before heading over to Dustin's place.  As we pulled up to the house, Dustin was just getting out of his car.  He shuffled over to me and said he had just come down with a bad migraine headache and would be heading immediately for a dark room.  He was in really bad shape and ended up emptying his stomach a few times that night.  The three of us crashed in the living room where I had a decent night's sleep zipped into my trusty old 1983 vintage Marmot sleeping bag.  Sunday morning it was probably in the upper 40s when we headed off to the track, and although I knew it would be warming up a bit, I still went pretty heavy on the clothes.  It's one thing to be racing, it's quite another to be standing around with a stopwatch and clipboard.  Anyway, the races went smoothly despite the usual last-minute rearrangements to accommodate the relatively small field sizes.  A miss-and-out with only three women is really just a very short scratch race, so we changed that to matched sprints.  We also combined some of the categories for the Miss-and-Out to save a little time and make it more interesting.  I was quite impressed with the little iPad and SloPro software which produced quite nice frame-by-frame finish line video.  It's not exactly FinishLynx, but with adequate lighting it was just about as good as our usual digital camera system, plus it was extremely convenient -- no wires, no files or flashdrives to transfer, etc.  Just aim at the finish line, shoot the video, and then view the video in real time or frame-by-frame by dragging a finger along the timeline. While the races were going on, they had someone cooking up a big pot of jambalaya - real jambalaya, not that red creole version you sometimes get here in New Orleans.

So by the time I got home and unloaded everything I could tell that my collarbone and shoulder in general had gotten a pretty good workout despite my efforts to avoid it.  It wasn't so bad as to keep me off the bike Monday morning for another easy solo ride.  This morning I went out and met the 6:15 am group on the levee.  The plan was to sit safely off the back and turn back early, which is almost what I did.  Almost.  Actually, since there were only three or four of us at the start, I went ahead and stayed in the paceline for a while (still keeping a bit of a gap between the guy ahead and myself).  Along the way we picked up a few more riders and by the time we got out to the country club the pace was getting faster.  Of course it was still over half an hour before sunrise.  Just after the country club curve there was a walker on our side of the path and also an oncoming rider or something, so we had to hit the brakes amid much loud verbalizing that practically scared the hell out of the lady who was walking (in the dark without so much as a reflective stripe on her shoes).  At that point I decided it would be prudent to revert to my original plan of hanging a bike length or so off the bike to allow for a little extra reaction time.  That's where I stayed until we go to the parish line where I eased up and rode a few more miles to the dip alone before turning around and heading home.  So I'm still gradually working my way back into a training routine as the collarbone continues to solidify, but I think it will be a couple of weeks yet before I'm ready to jump back in to the big group rides. I'll be heading to Colorado Springs on Friday for the annual Local Association conference at USA Cycling and from there to Washington DC for a research administration conference, so after those six days off the bike I figure I'll be ready to ease right into early Base Training mode for the rest of November and December.  It's a plan, anyway.