Waco Road Trip

Last weekend was the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SC⁴) road championships, hosted by Baylor over in Waco.  In the morning I picked up a big rental SUV from Enterprise that was brand new with only 15 miles on the odometer and enough room in the back, after removing those seats, for six bikes with rear wheels still on.  It also had a hitch receiver so we put the old 4-bike hitch rack onto it for the other two bikes. 

After leaving rather late on Friday afternoon, due to a Tulane van that suddenly decided it wouldn't start, we had a long but uneventful eight-hour drive to a Magnuson hotel on the Interstate.  A few hours of sleep and we were up and on our way to the road race course about half an hour away.  It was pretty chilly as we got ready for the first wave of races that included the Men and Women's Category A races and the Men's Cat. B race.  Kenny and I decided to follow the Women in order to get in a couple of laps on their 28-mile course.  The course turned out to be somewhat more hilly than I expected, and a whole lot more complicated than anyone would have expected.  There were actually two different courses, a long one (35 mi.) and a short one (28 mi.), marked only by painted arrows on the road at intersections.  There was no other signage, and as it turned out the lead vehicles were pretty unsure about the course themselves.  So within a few miles we had already followed the lead car the wrong way once and had to turn back to get onto the correct course. When that happened, a couple of the women took advantage of the confusion and it ended up splitting up the group rather badly leaving our one Tulane rider out on her own with five or six riders ahead of her. This happened a number of times with all of the groups, as we later discovered.  Anyway, there we were happily following the women's B race, when suddenly a lead vehicle comes by followed by a breakaway from the Men's B race.  The problem was that the Men's B race had started ten minutes ahead of the Women.  They had apparently gotten way off course and by the time they got back on the right road they were behind the women.  When the men's pack came past Kenny and I followed it.  A few miles later we came over a rise to see a steep downhill with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  I figured it might be a little sketchy for our Tulane rider who had attacked the hill and was flying down the road pretty fast.  Well, he got most of the way through the turn and suddenly washed out in what turned out to be a couple of inches of loose gravel covering half of the road.  We caught up to him a moment later and although he was scraped up from head to toe, nothing appeared to be broken so we encouraged him to get back on the bike since the pack was still going pretty slowly.  He did and caught back up easily. 

A little while later we came to another similar downhill, also with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  Up ahead we saw one of the women who had crashed climbing up out of the ditch. The turn was so sketchy that the entire Men's B race stopped for a few minutes to make sure she was OK before continuing on at an easy pace until the road conditions got better.  At one point both the men and the women who were still very close together took yet another wrong turn.  We saw the mistake and yelled, and the result was that the people who had been off the back were suddenly off the front.  Anyway, we did part of the second lap before turning around so we could be back at the finish for the end of the B race.  Later that morning our other woman, who was racing in the B/C race, crashed in a turn and hurt her wrist badly enough that she couldn't race the rest of the weekend.  In-between I drove to the nearest drug store and picked about $80 worth of Tegaderm, saline, tape and gauze to stock the first-aid kit.

The afternoon's team time trials didn't go as planned for us, or for the organizers. We didn't have enough women left to make a TTT team, and it was only after some begging that I convinced David to ride the men's TTT so we could get a few points.  There were only five teams in that category so they could ride easy and still get some points.  Baylor was nipping at our heels on points and since we were down to only four healthy riders we didn't want to take any chances.  The TTT started late and in a slightly different location because of some local redneck who was threatening the riders.

Sunday morning's criteriums were on a nice course on Baylor's campus and went pretty smoothly.  Although we didn't get any individual podiums, we managed to extend our points lead and won the Conference team title for Division II.  Considering how many of our best riders were unable to make the conference championships because of injury or school, we were pretty happy with that.

The drive home didn't get underway until around 3:30 or so, which meant that we didn't arrive back in town until around 1 am.  It was a long drive but the traffic was light, so it wasn't too bad.  Even so, I was completely worthless at work on Monday and was asleep by 9 pm that night.