Improvisation

One thing you generally don't want to have at a bike race is a lot of improvisation on the part of the organizers and officials.  Last weekend down in Houma, however, we had plenty.  I had expected the Independence Day Classic to be a fun event with a low to moderate turnout, and was happy to have an omnium only an hour's drive from home.  Pre-registrations for the event were pretty sparse, but for an omnium like this one with a smallish prizelist the weekend before a larger omnium in Lafayette I was neither surprised nor worried.  I figured a number of riders were planning to pick and chose which race or races to ride, and since the late fee was barely less than the online registration surcharge, there was little motivation for riders to pre-register.  Up until the evening before the race the weather forecast was looking pretty good -- a typical summer pattern with 10-30 percent chance of rain.  That all seemed to change Friday night when the 10:00 news was showing a line of storms heading down from the northwest.  Even so, it looked like it would all be over before morning, so when I left home around 6:30 am I didn't even check the radar. 

When I arrived, however, the first thing I was told was that there was some heavy rain coming our way.  Then I learned that instead of the eleven or twelve police and sherrif's officers who were supposed to be there, only four would be available.  The road races course that morning went down a fairly busy street in town and included various traffic signals and stop signs.  Then is started to rain pretty hard.  Between the police issues and the rain, the start was officially pushed back by at least thirty minutes.  There was a good enough Cat. 1/2/3 and Cat. 4 turnout on hand for the first wave of road races, and after being told that the course was secured they started those two races.  Shortly after the second group took off, the Cat. 1/2/3 field suddenly showed up at the finish line having decided amongst themselves (quite correctly it seems) that the course was too dangerous.  At one point they came to a traffic signal with a red light that was not monitored and the whole field had to slam on the brakes and stop.  The officials cancelled the race and stopped the Cat. 4s when they came through shortly thereafter.  Then they improvised a criterium in the big Civic Center parking lot where the road race had started.  By then most of the Cat. 1/2/3 riders had demanded refunds and gone home, so they held a Cat. 1/2/3/4 race and a Cat. 4/5 race.  Both were actually fairly good races and the ad hoc criterium course was a pretty nice 4-corner square that was maybe 0.8 km around.  I rode the Cat. 1/2/3/4 race where I got a good workout after Jaden went solo and eventually lapped the field.  I narrowly nipped Matt E. in the field sprint with a well-timed bike throw to take 2nd.  Hopefully I will eventually see a prize for that.  In the Cat. 4 race there was a crash in the final turn when a rider hit his brake and another rider was sent into the curb, resulting in an exploded carbon wheel, cracked helmet and some way over the top raised voices and finger-pointing.

The evening time trial had been planned for the same impossible course through town as the road race, so more improvisation was necessary in order to make that happen.  After the criterium the officials took a drive and found a nice community center parking lot for the start and a quite nice 7-mile out and back TT course a few miles farther down the road on which much of the TT had originally planned.  Now, I normally need a huge amount of motivation in order to do even a mediocre time trial, so as you can imagine in this case I went out at maybe 80% effort, getting caught by my 30-second man at the turnaround and then immediately by my one-minute man who went by so fast I didn't even recognize who it was.


On the plus side, I had gotten new multifocal contact lenses a couple of days before the race specifically for riding.  Having never used contact lenses before I was a little concerned about how they would work out for racing, especially after having to spend a good fifteen minutes putting the nearly invisible things on my eyes earlier that morning.  I may still need to make some adjustments in the prescription since my near and far vision is not a clear as I'd like it to be, but in general I was quite pleased that they were otherwise quite nice, didn't dry up and fall out, and worked fine with my trusty Oakley M-Frame sunglasses.

So Sunday morning there were more criteriums on the schedule, and once again there was some improvisation involved since the original course completely encircled a hotel, which was another extraordinarily bad idea.  I was hoping that a few riders would show up for the races, but after the debacle on Saturday I think a lot of them decided that the regular local group rides would be the more reliable option.  I was therefore not surprised that the fields were tiny.  I think that the Cat. 4 and Cat. 5 races at least had more than ten riders, but the Masters race had only four and there were no entrants at all for the Cat. 1/2/3 race.  It was too bad, really, because the course, which was the same on we'd used the previous day, was quite nice.  The Masters race had only four starters, two from Acadiana, Peter from Gulfport and me.  The handwriting was on the wall from the start, of course, as the two Acadiana riders took turns attacking. I was expecting it, so Peter and I didn't have too much trouble handling it. Early in the 45-minute race I was trying to leave one of them out there off the front as long as possible without letting the gap get too big to close.  That would at least minimize the number of attacks to which we'd have to respond.  Eventually, maybe ten laps from the end, Charles attacked taking me with him and splitting the group.  I figured I may as well go with it and started taking pulls.  Although Charles had to pull the whole last lap and a half, I kind of bungled the sprint when I panicked and tried to shift down one cog but got what felt like three in return. I should have attacked him before the last turn, obviously. So I came in second again, or in this case, mid-pack or third-to-last.  In the Cat. 4 race there was again controversy involving the same rider who had crashed the day before, so I'm not entirely sure what was going on there but it seems that his strong personality is rubbing some of the riders the wrong way and his reaction to that is getting out of line. 

As a result of all of the problems with this race I have resolved to write up a document containing some basic best practices that we can give to newer race promoters.  This race provided a number good examples of what not to do, including tiny free race numbers, gigantic safety pins, registration located too far from the start, courses with too much traffic and intersections, inadequate police to control the course, missing release forms, prizes "to be mailed out," etc.  Some of that could have been avoided if we at LAMBRA had taken the initiative to engage the promoter a little more and get some more detail about the planned courses and general organization.  What looked fine on paper turned out to be basically impossible in real life.