Wheelspray Weekend

It wasn't raining, but the radar looked ominous at 6 am Sunday morning.  I had just finished loading the car up with race equipment for the NOBC 2-Person Time Trial, and as I started the half-hour drive out to LaPlace I wondered just how much of a wash-out the race would be.  As usual, I was planning on switching from race official mode to rider mode and back during the course of the morning, and might even have been somewhat excited to be teamed up with Mark McMurry for the 40 km race since (a) we were likely to be fairly evenly matched, and (b) he is bigger than I and would provide some much-needed recover shelter between pulls.

Over at the starting location we set up the big pop-up shelter, which only "pops up" with the assistance of about four people, and got things set up to open registration at 7:30.  It wasn't raining and for a while the sky looked fairly good.  Even so, I was careful to position all of the electronics in such a way as to keep them dry in the event of rain because I knew darn good and well it was going to rain.  Registration got off to a slow start, as we were running a little low on experienced volunteers this year.  Meanwhile, Mark was trying to round up other volunteers for things like turnaround duty.  With the first rider scheduled to start at 9:00 am, it wasn't until about 8:55 that we actually started the stopwatches, and I think it was about 9:05 or so by the time we started the first team. My start time was only ten minutes after the first team's, so I jumped into the car, squeezed into my skinsuit, and emerged into a light rain.  The rain had started precisely at the start of the race.  Given the relative darkness I decided to wear my regular progressive glasses underneath the face shield built into my Giro TT helmet.  That actually worked fairly well, even though I was mostly looking right over the tops of them when I wasn't looking at the computer.

Our plan for the TT was to hold back for the first couple of miles since I hadn't had any warmup at all, and so we started out very smoothly.  Mark has been riding for along time and is as steady a wheel as you could ever hope for. A little tailwind made it easy to hold 25-26 for the first mile, and by mile 3 we were cruising along steadily at 27-28 mph.  We were about eight miles out when the wind started to shift.  Up ahead and to the west the sky was getting darker and darker, and then around mile 11 it suddenly got very gusty, the temperature dropped, and the rain picked up a bit. At that point my face shield and glasses both suddenly fogged up.  I could barely make out the numbers on my computer and was a little worried about misjudging Mark's rear wheel. Our speed dropped down to 25-26 mph.  As we started around the long curve in the road at about 12 miles I looked up ahead for the turnaround pylon and was surprised to see nothing at all.  I thought maybe I'd misjudged where we were.  Then, as I was riding behind Mark I saw a flash of green on the road to the right.  I looked back and saw the green "40k Turnaround" marker on the road that I had personally re-painted the day before.  It was deserted. I yelled something to Mark but he didn't hear me (he likes to ride TTs wearing earplugs -- very old-school trick).  I pulled up alongside him and tapped him on the shoulder and yelled that we had passed the turnaround.  I was confused.  I knew Mark had sent a volunteer down to the turnaround.  By then we could see Bob, a traffic cone, and the Manchac bridge (which you can't see if you turn around at the correct spot) up ahead.  I was flabbergasted.  We slowed down a bit as I yelled to Bob that the turnaround was half a mile behind us, but it was too late to do anything about it.  He had gotten down there in the pouring rain and missed the big green paint markings on the road (I would have thought they would be visible from space), and had then seen the police car blocking the road and set the turnaround at some random other paint marking near there (the police always block the road beyond the curve so the cars can see it coming from the bridge).  All I could hope was that everyone would ride all the way to the traffic cone.  As it turned out, some teams saw the green turnaround marker on the road, figured that for some reason the turnaround was not manned, and turned there.  Most others went all the way to the traffic cone.  As a result, some teams did a 40km time trial and most others did more like 41.5 km.  The results would be tainted for sure!

After we turned around we got back up to speed just as the rain got really heavy.  The helmet face shield was doing a fantastic job of keeping Mark's wheelspray out of my eyes, nose, ears, etc.  Unfortunately it was also so fogged up that I couldn't see very well at all.  At one point I squeezed my hand under there to clear it a bit.  It was looking like we would be about 1 mph slower for the return trip, but it was also looking like I was starting to hurt.  At around 16 miles the road turns slightly to the west and we picked up a little more headwind component.  That dropped our speed down dramatically for a while (I saw it drop to 24 mph).  Mark was going much better than I by that point, and so our speed would drop when I'd be on the front, then I'd have to dig to get onto Mark's wheel when he would go by about 1 mph faster.  This is the downward spiral of Team Time Trials with which I am quite familiar.  After a couple of rotations like that I started taking shorter pulls and Mark started taking longer ones.  For most of the rest of the ride our speed would fluctuate from 25 to 27 mph.  We finished with a time of 59:04 and a total distance on my computer of 25.8 miles. I guess we would have been just under 57 minutes for 40k.  Anyway, we placed 8th in the 40+ race but at least a couple of the teams ahead of us turned early.  Since there was nobody there, and the official at the (longer) turnaround wasn't recording the teams as they made the u-turn, it was impossible to know who had done which distance.

After finishing I changed into some dry clothes and go to work on the results.  By then it had mostly stopped raining, of course, but as you can see from the "podium" pictures, nobody was waiting around in soaking wet lycra just for the photo opp. It took quite a while to get the results finished.  There had been some strange things.  Adrian had for some reason started a lot of teams at one second past the minute, some of the finish times weren't on the first set of result sheets I got, and one or two teams had been given restarts because of flats that happened as they were lining up.  Anyway, we finally got everything sorted out, and right now there's a lot of wet  banners, tent tops, and miscellaneous other damp equipment draped all over my basement where I have a big fan blowing on them.  This morning I went out for a ride and the fact that my legs felt fine told me I could have gone harder yesterday.  Somehow I think the rain, fogged-up glasses, wheelspray and results duties kind of took their toll on my motivation.  Fortunately Mark pretty much dragged me in to the finish line for the last three miles or I might have just sat up and looked at the scenery.