After the Tour

I'd rather be riding.

The 42nd annual Tour de Louisiane went pretty well.  Turnout was a little low, as I had expected, maybe 35 entries short of what I'd call a very good field.  The races, however, were all very competitive and generally had big enough fields to make for good racing.  A couple of days before the race, the weather forecast was looking great with nothing higher than a 30% chance of rain.  That all changed the day before the race when the Sunday forecast went up to about 80% depending on whose forecast you checked.  I was confident that the road races on Saturday morning, and probably the evening time trial, would be dry, but I was worried about the criterium.

The Road Races were pretty good.  That course can be pretty deceptive and usually is just enough to make a selection in many of the categories.  At then end of the first lap we were surprised to find that the Cat. 5 race turned in the fastest lap by about a minute.  Of course, that shelled a number of riders from that group.  After the races Ricky and I sat there under the tent and got all of the results and times entered, then we stopped at a McDonald's on the way back to Covington where I uploaded the preliminary results to the website.  We hung around there for a while, but when I saw the sky starting to darken I told Mark we'd better get over to the TT course early so we could get the tent set up.  When we arrived there we pulled it out of the trailer right away and got it set up just before a big thunderstorm came through.  There was enough lightning and thunder that if it had happened an hour later the time trial would definitely have been in jeopardy.  Fortunately it passed over and cleared up nicely by the time the first riders took off at 5:30.  We started plugging in the results on-site, but decided to finish up at Jason's house when the insect repellent started to wear off and we were attacked by deer flies.

So Sunday morning started out looking pretty bad.  I had just gotten up around 6 am when the phone rang.  It was the Covington police captain calling to see if we were going to cancel. Once again, we arrived just in time to get the tent set up before the sky opened up above us.  It was still about 45 minutes before the first race.  Unfortunately the big race clock got wet enough that it later freaked out, so we didn't have it for the races.  Even worse, the generator suddenly stopped and we couldn't get it started again. Clearly water had gotten into it somehow. The rain had eased up a bit and it was looking like we'd be able to have the races, but without power we would not have the finish line camera which was definitely going to present a bit of a problem.  Luckily there was an electrical outlet in front of a nearby building so we pulled out the 100' extension cord and were back in action.  The first couple of races were held in a light drizzle on very wet streets, resulting in a couple of crashes.  Things were just beginning to dry up a bit when the Masters race got underway, and by the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race started it was mostly dry.  I had been worried about the possibility of cars getting onto the course, since we were in the middle of downtown Covington and there would certainly be some cars that were trapped inside the course.  Sure enough, at one point the Cat. 1/2/3s came flying around the fastest corner on the course at around 30 mph to meet face-to-face with the front grill of a pickup truck.  Luckily they are all very experienced riders and although a couple of riders flatted when they had to hop the curb, they all handled it well.  They neutralized themselves and we stopped the race until the course was cleared.  Since it was still pretty early in their 60-minute criterium, it didn't cause a big problem. We got the final results done quickly, stopped for lunch at Buster's on the course, and headed home to unload the trailer and get the results up on the website.

So all-in-all it was a successful race unless you measure success in dollars because we lost over $4,000 on the event since we were lacking our usual stage sponsors this year.  On the plus side, the Covington folks were very happy and we are already on their calendar for last year with plans to do some expanded pre-race publicity and better course contol planning.  After the race a number of videos showed up on Facebook from riders in a few of the races.  I posted most of them to the LAMBRA Facebook page. 

On Monday the streets were wet so I decided to spend my usual riding time doing online post-event paperwork.  At this point I have the results up on the website, they have been uploaded to the USAC database, all of the post-event reports have been submitted, all of the wet race equipment has been dried out and stored (the clock seems to have survived after I disassembled it and left it in front of a fan overnight).  No word yet on the generator.  I still have to update the LAMBRA LCCS rankings.

So after four days of the bike I jumped back into the Tuesday levee ride, following that up with a Wednesday morning ride and the Wednesday evening training race at the lakefront.  By this morning I was feeling pretty dragged out.  The air was thick and humid, and I really had to force myself onto the bike where I struggled through the long Thursday ride. Unfortunately, it looks like my trusty Nikon Coolpix camera has died, so photos will probably be in short supply for a while.