Bayou Country

The LAMBRA Team Time Trial championship near Vacherie, LA and a nearby criterium in Thibodaux found me doing a lot of driving and riding through the sugarcane fields down in Bayou Country.  The aptly named Bayou Country Cyclists put a lot of effort into their events, so I figured things would go fairly smoothly.  I was scheduled to do the team TT with Steve, Pat and Chuck, and was expecting that we would be able to post at least a respectable time for the 36 mile out-and-back effort.  Things got off to kind of a bad start at registration as the older of the LAMBRA computers choked on the Excel workbook that had been put together with the newest version of Excel.  I had brought my own laptop as an emergency backup, so I converted the workbook to an earlier version and put it on a flashdrive.  Somewhere along the way the program crashed yielding a 'recovered' version of the file and more problems. In the end, I moved the whole thing over to my laptop but by then it was missing an unknown number of registrations and we were already out of time.  Fortunately the actual number of teams was relatively small, so we made up a hand-written start list and they got things going about half an hour late.

My team got in a very brief little warmup and before I knew it we were heading down the road with sugarcane on both sides, pushed along by a nice little quartering tailwind.  We settled in fairly quickly at around 27 mph, which considering the tailwind was rather slow, but we knew the ride back would be a whole lot harder.  After nearly getting blown off the road when an oncoming wide-load of pre-fab house pieces came by, we finally made it to the turnaround with a nice round 27.0 mph average speed just as we caught the team that had started ahead of us. Unfortunately, we were also about to be caught by the team that had started behind us.  Even more unfortunately, we lost Chuck at the turnaround when he had some sort of flare-up of knee tendinitis, compliments of a couple of weeks of riding in Colorado.  So now we were down to just three with 18 miles of mostly headwind left to go.  I was feeling less than spectacular, but while we had all four in the rotation I was able to recover well in-between pulls.  As usually happens in a TTT when you get down to just three riders, the next weakest rider, Pat, got into difficulty immediately.  Chuck had been the only rider big enough to provide much draft for Pat, and now he was trying to eek out shelter behind Steve and I.  I could read the handwriting on the wall.  For the next five miles or so our speed was all over the place as we tried to figure out what we could reasonably sustain for the rest of the ride. After a few rotations Pat was really starting to suffer, and when he'd come to the front our speed would drop.  The next guy would ramp it back up, which no doubt just twisted the knife.  Pat then wisely decided to sit on and try to recover, so for most of the rest of the way back it was just Steve and I pulling.  Of course that dropped us down into the 22-23 mph range at which point any hope for a good time went out the window.  On the plus side, Pat was able to hang on and even recover enough to start pulling again over the last few miles.  The return trip average speed was a rather dismal 22.4 mph.  We were second in the Master 40+ category, thanks to the fact that there were only two teams entered.

Sunday morning I was back on the road to Thibodaux for the criterium.  The forecast was showing a steadily increasing chance of rain all day and the radar was just basically an unpredictable mess of green and yellow.  When I arrived at the course I realized it was on the same streets where we'd had a criterium back around the mid-80s.  It had rained for that race and I remembered that the streets had become so slick that they were not safe and some of the races had to be cancelled. As I set up the finish line camera I mentioned to Lane, the Chief Referee, that if it started to rain it was going to turn into the Ice Capades.  At the time, though, things looked pretty promising.  The Masters race had a small field, which seems to be the status quo this year, but they were all good riders so I was expecting a decent race anyway.  The course was very tight and technical with eight turns, some of which were very close together.  That made it rather swoopy and fun, even though it took me a few laps to get comfortable.  As usual, the Acadiana guys started taking turns attacking, but between Donald, Ed and even myself, they were getting covered fairly quickly.  The course was technical enough, and the straights short enough, that the speeds were staying relatively low, getting up to 27-29 on the straights but dropping down into the low 20s through the turns.  I was really starting to enjoy the course when, about ten minutes into the 40-minute race, my rear tire started going soft.  I backed out of the group and stopped at the pit for a wheel change.  Unfortunately, the next lap was a prime lap and when I went back in the group came flying past me a little too fast for me to catch the draft.  I got up to one of the Acadiana guys who was dropping back, but then he just sat up.  I was badly in need of some recovery time and couldn't mount the sprint it would have taken to make the bridge so the front three or four riders started pulling away.  I was thinking my race was over, but then Peter Stevens showed up from behind and started taking pulls with me. There's no way we would have had a chance of catching if Steven hadn't started pulling like that.  We were holding our own with maybe a fifteen second gap up to the rest of the race and after a few more laps it seemed that the front group eased up a bit.  Suddenly it looked like there was hope again.  I took one long pull and we somehow made the bridge.  I saw Ed glance back and I could swear I heard him say something like, "Damn!"  Luckily, nobody attacked right away because if one of them had I don't know if I could have hung on.  After another surge or two it was done to just four of us, although I was thinking more about how lucky I was than about how I could win the sprint.  On the last lap I saw Donald starting to move up on the right and started to follow, but Charles got the wheel first.  I went left but there was no protection there so I ended up behind Ed at the end of the line. With the finish line maybe 100 meters past three tight turns in a row, I knew I'd be lucky to move  up even a single place.  Coming around the last turn I was ready to give it a shot when Charles dug a pedal and Ed and I had to hesitate as we contemplated our off-road options.  Somehow he didn't go down, but that moment of hesitation had opened too big of a gap and it was all over.

So maybe an hour later I lined up for the Cat. 1/2/3 race which had the best turnout of the day.  I figured I would sit in near the back for the first half of the hour-long race and then see if there were any scraps I might be able to pick up in the second half.  Well, I never got that far.  The race started out pretty well.  The pace was not much faster than the Masters race had been and I was pretty comfortable hanging out near the back.  A small break went off the front, but it wasn't really clear that it was going to stick and the pace remained about the same, hitting 29-30 on the straights but dropping to the low 20s through the turns.  We were about ten miles in when there was a crash a few riders ahead of me when one of the Herring guys tangled with a crack in the road.  I had to hit the brakes, along with a few others, and take the long way around the next turn, but after a couple of laps of chasing we got ourselves back in the draft.  Unfortunately, that was when we started to feel the first raindrops from the ominous black cloud that had been steadily approaching the course.  Frank immediately said he was out, as was Woody who was still sporting stitches below his eye from his training ride crash.  The turns, as I'd expected, turned to ice, making it impossible to race through them.  Even at 15 mph you could feel your tires squirming and slipping on the ancient concrete, which had been worn down so that just the tops of the click gravel rocks were showing.  We rode a few more laps really slowly before the referee stopped the race.  The radar didn't offer much hope for the rest of the afternoon, so the race was cancelled and the promoter returned everyone's entry fees. It was fun while it lasted!

The forecast for the rest of this week looks very wet around here.  I felt really lucky to get out this morning for a ride before the rain started.  I'm planning on making the Rocky Mount omnium up in Shreveport this weekend, although I haven't made any arrangements and funds are rather lacking.  Situation normal.