Just Officiating

With Mark D. out of town for the weekend, I decided early in the week to forgo riding the LAMBRA TT championship.  I usually pull double duty for that race, helping with registration and results officiating, but then also jumping onto the bike, often with virtually no warmup, to suffer through the 40 km out-and-back course north of Laplace, LA.  This year, however, I had ample excuse to avoid the pain and just officiate.  Actually, it felt kind of strange.  The weather forecast had been very sketchy and as I headed out to the course around 6:15 am I was fully expecting rain.  I would not be disappointed in that regard.  The Daughter, who is back in town to work on a degree in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, was in tow to help out this year.  I arrived a little later than usual this year, which is to say I wasn't the first to arrive, but the promoting club, Peake Racing, had lots of volunteers on hand, and since they have been putting on this race for quite a few years now things went very smoothly.  Since pre-registration is required for this race, there wasn't really all that much for me to do.  I printed out a start list as riders began lining up to pick up their numbers.  At 7:50 we started all of the stopwatches, sent the turnaround monitors, and start line volunteers off to their posts, and got the first rider off the line promptly at 8 am.  I wandered over to the finish line to meet Robin, who had been marking the course, and we waited for the first riders to return.  There were only five or six who weren't doing the full 40 km, so once they finished we had a long wait for the others.  By then the turnaround monitors for the 10k and 20k riders were back at the finish line to help with timing. I ran back to the registration tent, which was about a quarter mile away, and grabbed my laptop, picking up the start sheet from the starter so I could begin entering results. 

I was planning on going back to the registration area after the Cat. 5s finished, but by then it had started pouring down rain.  I sat under the tent at the finish line, with my back to the rain and my rain jacket draped over both my computer and my head, plugging in finish times.  It was a little uncomfortable, and I wasn't able to post results of the earlier groups until after everyone had finished, but overall it went pretty smoothly.  Looking over the results, I am pleasantly amazed at how many riders posted times in the sub-56 minute range despite the rain and wind.  I think we are really in the middle of a shift in LAMBRA demographics that is resulting in a number of very fast younger riders who are finally, finally nudging aside the angry old men who seem to have been dominating the time trials for well over a decade.  It is very encouraging.  My only disappointment was that I had really been hoping that one of the women would go sub-hour this year.  She was only 40 seconds away from that goal.  For the fast riders, of the 7 Cat. 1/2 entries, the slowest time was a 56:29 and the fastest a 53:15.  While the fastest time wasn't quite a record, the impressive thing was the depth of the field this year.  What used to be the gold standard of 40k time trials, the 1-hour time, would have gotten you only 28th place overall this year.  In other words, fully 38% of the entire 40k field went under an hour on a rainy, windy day.  I am impressed. I first did a sub-hour time trial in 1981, but I don't think I ever got much better than a 57-something.  So the NOBC tent and flag are still drying out in my basement and we have only one Louisiana road race still on the calendar for this year, plus one LCCS race in east Texas and another in Pensacola.  Next weekend is our first separate age-graded LAMBRA championship road race, and although a number of age groups were added compared to prior years, it has been interesting and unexpected to hear from those few riders who don't have a race (30-39 Cat. 1-3) that they feel excluded.  Perhaps they can be added next year if this all works out. The original idea was to just do the regular master and junior groups (10-14, 15-18, 40+, 55+, 60+) but the promoter wanted to add some others to boost registrations.

I stepped out the basement door around 5:30 this morning, determined to get in some decent mileage despite the early meeting that was on my calendar.  The sky was till dark, and looking up toward the northeast I could easily make out Orion.  I hadn't been on the bike so early in a rather long time, and I was hoping that my little CatEye headlight's battery would be up to the task of keeping the other levee riders from running in to me in the dark. The air was unusually cool for a late-August morning, and the wind was fairly light.  Up on the levee I was surprised by how many riders were up there, most with vastly superior lighting to mine, evidence no doubt that they ride in the dark routinely.  Along the way I passed two small groups that were heading downriver, but between the blinding headlights and the darkness I couldn't even guess who was in them.  I made it all the way out past the Dip to the first grain elevator before I finally had to turn back, holding a steady 19-21 mph for most of the ride.  The regular Tuesday group flew past on its way out somewhere around the parish line as I continued my solo ride, the second in two days.  I arrived back home just a few minutes past my 7:30 am target.