TrackStanding

End of the Saturday Giro Ride

I spent much of the weekend standing around at the Baton Rouge Velodrome helping to officiate the LAMBRA track championships.  Fortunately, I had time on Saturday morning to make it out to the Giro Ride. 

Despite the August heat, Saturday's Giro was a fast one.  After the usual conversational warmup along Lakeshore Drive, it didn't take long for the pace to get up into the upper 20s where it stayed for most of the day.  We did the 17 mile outbound section, which included a couple of slowdowns for turns, at an average speed of 28 mph.  Knowing that I probably wouldn't be doing any riding on Sunday, I wasn't holding back as much as usual and found myself on Daniel's wheel when he started an insanely long sprint for the turnaround out at Venetian Isles.  When we crossed the 200 meter mark at about 33 mph I dropped off.  It was enough.  The return trip was more up and down speed-wise, although of course there was the obligatory 33 mph sprint for the Goodyear sign and then the sprints to the tops of the overpasses.

When I got home I had about an hour and a half to refuel and get the car loaded up for the trip to Baton Rouge.  I knew it was going to be a hot weekend at the track.  Turnout for the races was on the light side this year.  I think the heat had something to do with it, but then again we also had three of the local track riders up at MTV for Masters Track Nationals. One of the 4D Fitness guys, whose sponsor was sponsoring the track races, organized a group training ride that probably pulled away a few more riders.  Anyway, there was still some good racing going on, and I was glad to have the finish line camera to break a particularly close tie in one of the Cat. 4/5 races.  I definitely would have called it the other way without the camera, probably because one rider was out of the saddle and leaning way forward, while the other, whose tire actually crossed first, was sitting much farther back. 

In the women's races there was one particularly strong woman who had very little track experience.  In the 200 I commented about how much she was fighting the banking in the turns.  When she would put in a big effort she would look down at the ground and get pretty squirrely around the turns, which is not uncommon for new riders.  (I can remember ending up on the wrong side of the blue band during a flying 200 a number of times myself.)  She ended up in the match sprint for first and second and was leading when the other girl got really close right on the sprinter's line (the girl in front was in the lane) when the sprint started around the 200m line, touched wheels, and went down hard on her head and shoulder.  She had a pretty good concussion and, as it turned out, a probable AC joint separation, but at the time we were more worried about her neck since she said it hurt.  She never really moved at all until the ambulance arrived.  Of course we had people holding her head to make sure she didn't move.  It was quite a few minutes before she was coherent enough to respond well to questions.  Fortunately she checked out OK for the stuff I was most worried about and they send her home around 2 am that morning from the ER.  She called the next morning to make sure someone would pick up the medals she had already won.


I spent the night down the street at Chris L's house and we were back at the track before 8 am on Sunday setting up for the morning races.  Those all went well and I was back on the road for home shortly after noon.  It was so  hot that I just couldn't make myself go out for a ride that afternoon.  So this morning I went out to the levee and did a nice moderate ride and was pleased to see that the construction zone was not blocked off.  Later in the day I got an email saying that it would probably be mostly open for the next couple of months before the really heavy construction started.