The Wednesday Protocol

The morning shadows are getting longer and longer on the levee rides lately

So late last night or early this morning the Pensacola Cycling Classic posted the still-preliminary results of the stage race that was about ten days ago.  They're giving people until midnight to protest those results, after which they will finally be laid to rest.  It won't be over for me, however, because I will still need to get the spreadsheet with license numbers and GC times so I can use that to essentially build a whole new workbook that pulls in the actual correct rider names, club names, ages and categories that I need in order to re-score the combined races to award points for our LCCS rankings. Since I'll be leaving Saturday morning for 6-Gap up in Dahlonega, I'm guessing I might not be able to do that until next week.  I could probably do it the hard way using the pdf files that they have posted, some of which lack license numbers that I would have to look up, but at this point I may as well wait.  It looks like many of the club names they posted came from BikeReg, so they are not consistent with the official USAC club names that I need for the team points ranking.  Some riders, like Tim Reagan and Mark McMurry, are for some reason listed as unattached.  Anyway, it will be at least a couple of hours' work to get the final LCCS rankings out.

I guess I'll call the shop (Bicycle World in this case) some time today to get an update on the Bianchi's bottom bracket.  Hopefully they will be able to get the necessary parts in time so I can ride it this weekend.

There was a pretty good sized group on hand for the Wednesday levee ride this morning.  This ride has evolved to be a good ride for the riders who aren't up to the 25-28 mph pace of the Tuesday and Thursday rides, but are more comfortable with a 20-23 mph pace. Some time ago, this ride would stay right around 20 mph but it seems that the consensus pace has started to creep upward in recent months.  The Wednesday protocol nowadays calls for smooth paceline, long pulls, and a reasonably steady speed of 22 mph plus or minus one mph.  Of course there are always a couple of people who violate the protocol and push it a little higher, but in general it has been pretty consistent.  As a result, we see a number of the Tulane riders on this ride.

So the annual pilgrimage up to Dahlonega is coming up next weekend for the Six Gap Century.  I'll be going with the Tulane group this year, staying down the road in Dawsonville and driving up in a couple of rental extended cab pickup trucks, which is a bit of an experiment I guess.  Yesterday I talked the folks at Enterprise car rental into letting me pick up the trucks on Friday evening instead of Saturday morning because they don't open until 9 am on Saturday.  That would make it nearly impossible for us to get to Dahlonega in time to pick up packets that evening (they close at 6:00 and we lose an hour to the eastern time zone), so being able to pickup the trucks early will allow us to leave earlier, around 7:30 or 8:00 rather than 9:30 or 10:00.  It depends a little bit on whether the car rental folks can get the trucks to their Carrollton location on Friday evening, but I'm sure we can work something out there.  Assuming my Bianchi will be back in action by then, I'll be riding with a low gear of 39x25 this year since I never got around to getting a new cassette with a 27 for the 11-speed group, mainly because they cost a lot and I'll be paying for the bottom bracket work already.  That means I'll probably be standing up a lot more on the steeper climbs, most of which are in the 7-10% range.  I've done it with a 25 before, so I should survive.  Right now it looks like it's going to be pretty chilly in the morning up there.  It looks like the low will be in the mid-50s and the high in the mid-70s.  That's two-jersey weather with arm-warmers for me normally, although knowing how much it will warm up on the climbs starting about ten miles in, I might just decide to be cold for the first hour or two.  At least the chance of rain seems to be minimal. I didn't finish last year because of the freak crash and resulting broken collarbone, but even when I'm moderately motivated, a 6-hour finish time is about the best I can hope for.  Who knows, maybe I'll just decide to enjoy the views and gorge myself on free food at the rest stops this year!

Still Waiting

Yes, we're still waiting for the final results from the Pensacola Cycling Classic that was held the weekend before last.  I don't know what to say.  After seeing the results, or lack thereof, from the Saturday races I had made a point to video the finishes of the 35+, Cat. 3 and Cat. 1/2 criteriums on Sunday.  I ended up sending the official and chip timing company the placings from those videos.  I can't imagine what could take this long, but I can only surmise that they are piecing together results based on rider feedback because they just don't actually have good results themselves.

So on Thursday I brought the Bianchi over to the shop so they could track down and install the correct bottom bracket bearings (it's a BB30 bottom bracket) and hopefully get it going again in time for next weekend's excursion to Dahlonega for the annual Six Gap Century. I had noticed a noise coming from the BB on the Wednesday ride and when I spun it without the chain it felt really bad.  When I pulled it that night, the bottom bracket looked like something that had been salvaged from an old shipwreck.  It was full of rusty, gritty gunk.  I cleaned it out the best I could and forced some fresh grease in there hoping I could make it serviceable for another few weeks, but it was too far gone.  Since I was scheduled to drive to Florida on Friday, I knew I'd never be able to get the parts and do the replacement myself in time for six gap.  Thus, for the second time in my entire life, I brought a bike to a bike shop.  One thing that surprised me was that the only way water could have gotten into the bottom bracket shell was right through the bearings.  There is no opening into any of the frame tubes.  Man, the compromises they make in the name of lightness. I guess I'm going to have to pull this thing every few months and make sure there is a lot of grease on everything unless going through bottom bracket bearings once a year is the new standard.  It was, actually, a very wet racing season this year, so I'm sure that had something to do with it, but these new bikes are really not designed to handle some of the things that the old bikes handled easily.

Anyway, the weekend in SanDestin was pretty much a washout.  The Daughter and I did get out on Sunday morning for 25 miles or so before heading home, but otherwise it was a pretty wet weekend and the bikes spent a fair amount of time on the car roof going 70 mph in the rain. 

Waiting on GC

Last weekend was the 4th annual Pensacola Cycling Classic.  Although the road season was already beginning to wind down, I just couldn't help but register once again for this race.  Like last year, they had a separate 50+/60+ class, and since it was the end of the season I went ahead and registered in my age-appropriate group despite the fact that the prizelist there was meager and my chances of winning back any significant portion of my travel expenses slim.  To trim the cost down a bit I took Donald Davis up on his offer to bunk at his house in Pensacola, and to make the drive less boring I picked up Graeme on Friday afternoon en route to Interstate 10 East.

Mark had a very good race in the 40+ group

We arrived with plenty of time to pick up packets down in Pensacola Beach and then backtrack a bit to Donald's house where there was pasta and sauce waiting.  Donald's daughter arrived shortly thereafter, straight from the hospital after having a new baby.  That's around when Donald mentioned that they weren't awarding any bonus points for the stage race.  I hadn't read the entire race bible yet, but that kind of surprised me.  It certainly handed the good time trialists a big advantage while kind of slapping the sprinters in the face. There were, at least, stage prizes, but for my antique age group they were pretty small, so I went into the 50-mile road race with its long flat drag race to the finish line with even less optimism than usual.  The 2-lap race had some low rolling hills and one particularly long one, but did not present enough difficulty to split things up unless the racing got very aggressive, which it didn't.  The first lap featured a rather embarrassing amount of wheel-sucking aside from a handful of riders, myself included, who tried to keep the pace up.  At one point I had rolled off the front when I heard a rider yelling "Go, go, go!" behind me.  He had obviously just attacked the field and was hoping to take me along.  Without looking around I jumped to my feet and caught his wheel nicely as he came past.  We worked together for a while at what I thought was a pretty good pace but somebody back there eventually put the hammer down and towed the whole field up to us. 

Graeme went solo for a few laps

It wasn't until halfway through the second lap before it started to feel like a race, and by then I was feeling the effects of all my time at the front.  A totally expected attack on the long climb almost put me out of the race as a gap opened toward the top and I struggled to get going on the long false flat that followed.  Fortunately a couple of other riders came by and we worked together for about a mile, finally catching the rest of the field that had inexplicably eased up.  By then I was starting to feel a couple of leg muscles starting to cramp.  With three or four miles to go one of the stronger riders planted himself on the front and basically towed the whole field nonstop.  I was sitting right on his wheel expecting an attack that never really came, but with a couple of kilometers to go I dropped back because I was fully expecting my leg to cramp up if I tried to sprint.  It was probably a mistake.  Anyway, the sprint started really early and everything got strung out, with me still afraid to stand up and sprint.  Then I found Stanley's wheel and tucked in behind him as he just motored along, passing a bunch of rider who had blown up because of the early sprint.  I think I was around 6th. Apparently I was also the 2nd 60+ rider.

Robert in the Cat. 1/2/3 race

The 3-mile TT on the beach was scheduled for 3:30, which was probably less than an hour after the last of the women's road races would have finished about thirty miles away, so I was fully expecting a very late start list, if any.  It was after 3:00 when a couple of officials showed up, one of which had a clipboard with the start list.  He never posted it.  He just stood there near the start and every rider had to come up to him and ask when his start time was. I got in a little warmup and, as luck would have it, the rider ahead of me didn't show, so I would have even less motivation than usual, which isn't much.  The wind turned out to be mostly crosswind and didn't seem to matter much, so I rolled up to 25-26 mph and thought to myself, "This is good enough," and just cruised along at a pretty steady speed with a little kick at the end.  Very, very late that night some badly formatted results straight from some chip-timing software were posted and I saw that while it was good enough for 1st in the 60+ age group, it was nearly a minute slower than the best 50+ time.  Situation normal.  We were using disposable chips stuck to our helmets this year and they were having problems with the system, so there was a fair amount of confusion with missed riders and questionable times.  We never saw any posting of GC standings, and still haven't (it's Tuesday afternoon as I write this).  The chip timing company they used had never done a stage race and the officials seemed to be unable or unwilling to put together meaningful results postings.

So the old guys' criterium in downtown Pensacola started at 7 am.  Yes, 7 am.  I needed a nightlight in the portable toilet, but at least it was still fairly cool when we started.  There were still no GC results, and with no bonus points on the line and small stage prizes (I still don't know if we were all racing for the same stage prizes or if they were just giving those to the 50+ riders) the only strategy would be a break. However, a 30-minute criterium doesn't offer much opportunity for that.  On the second lap there was a strong attack that took us up to 30 mph, and a few laps later I found myself off the front with a couple of other riders.  I figured I may as well work with it and see what happened since we had a pretty good gap.  Eventually the US Military rider went to the front of the pack and towed everyone up to us, but the pace remained fairly fast with a few extremely fast laps here and there.  I was surprised we didn't drop more riders.  The US Military rider launched a hard attack with maybe five laps to go, but there were still too many fresh legs for him to stay away and it came back together.  Then the same rider who had stayed at the front at the end of the road race went to the front of the criterium where he stayed.  Nobody would come around him and, once again, I found myself on his wheel for the final laps. Just after the bell he jumped hard and I thought to myself, "This is perfect!"  It was essentially a final lap leadout with me second wheel.  What could go wrong?  That last lap averaged 29.5 mph.  Well, between the second-to-last corner and the last corner he suddenly eased up and looked back!  Yikes.  He looked back!  Immediately three riders jumped, two on the right and one on the left.  By the time I could get around him we were at the last turn and I was 4th, which is where I stayed to the finish.  Respectable, but a little disappointing under the circumstances.  Anyway, I won the 60+, which felt almost embarrassing.  It was the first time I have raced in such an ancient age group.  I would love to know where I placed overall in the combined 50+/60+ race, and eventually, assuming I finally get the actual results in the correct format, I will have to filter out the 50-54 riders and re-score the GC for the LAMBRA LCCS rankings.  That will no doubt drop me down to 2nd place for the year since Scott McManus would have had a better GC time than I thanks to my abysmal TT time, which is OK since he has been racing really well this year. 

In Town

Haven't left town for a whole week.  Maybe in a month or so I'll be able to do that again.  I decided long ago to skip the Chappell Hill weekend over in Texas.  It's actually part of the LCCS as kind of a "race exchange" thing that the promoter of the Vuelta d' Acadiana worked out.  That race counts toward the Texas Cup points, this one counts toward LCCS points.  The idea is to increase turnout, although I suspect that the Vuelta got the better part of that deal.  Anyway, a number of the local riders did make the trip, which meant that the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides were relatively civilized.  Of course they both had their fast sections, but with the horsepower level a bit lower than normal they didn't last quite as long as usual and didn't get quite as fast as usual.

The Daughter's U-Box finally arrived on Saturday, a month after it had been picked up in Olympia.  Inside was her scooter, two bikes, and about a hundred shoes as far as I can tell.  We had a Tulane city ride set up for 10:30 on Sunday, so after the Sunday Giro I had just enough time to eat something, change into a fresh jersey, and ride over to Tulane with The Daughter.  This was the "welcome ride" for the fall semester and I was pleased to find that we had around fifteen people show up for it.  It was a nice day - a little breezy and quite warm - but we were planning on riding neither long nor hard.  After all, there was a Saints game starting at noon at the Superdome.  That was one reason we didn't ride down to the Quarter like we usually do for these rides.  Instead we headed out to the lakefront and stopped at the Morning Call in City Park on the way back.

This morning I went out for a recovery ride with The Daughter, meeting up with Ben and David on the levee for an hour of steady 20 mph cruising.  My legs were feeling a little stiff, which I attributed to the prior week's mileage.  Although few of those miles were very hard, I had somehow accumulated over 300 of them.

Next weekend is the Pensacola stage race, for which I have not yet made any arrangements.  Then the next weekend will be a quick trip to Sandestin where The Wife has a conference.  The weekend after that will be Six Gap.  Following that there will be just a couple of weeks before the first cyclocross race.

I have been trying to follow the tweets from Dale Stetina's family, hoping he is able to recover from the terrible crash he suffered. Considering the fact that they had found a brain stem injury and had him in an induced coma for a few days, I guess he's doing OK.  Yesterday they said he had developed "Some fluid build up in lungs & GI infection."  On the plus side I surmise that he knows where he is, responds to commands, and is not paralyzed.  Dale and his brother Wayne are in that same set of USAC license numbers as mine - a block in alphabetical order in the middle of the larger database that resulted from some re-numbering that happened in the 80s.

Fast Week

Friday morning, heading west on the levee.

It's Friday afternoon and I'm realizing that I haven't put up a blog post in over a week.  Somehow this week just kind of flew by.  I shouldn't be too surprised.  There was a lot going on.  Last Sunday was our (LAMBRA's) first separate age-graded road championship race.  In order to ensure enough of a turnout for the promoting club to break even, we added a number of age groups that don't normally get their own championships.  For example, there was a 30+ Cat. 4/5 race, and a 19-29 race.  I went ahead and registered for my age-appropriate group, which sadly enough is now 60+.  Since we were racing together with the 55+ race, at least I knew there would be enough riders to make a race.  As a side note, I recently checked the pre-registration list for this weekend's Chappell Hill race in Texas.  They had over 100 riders pre-registered just from the city of Houston.  A one-day road race around here would be happy to have 100 riders from the entire states of Louisiana and Mississippi,  ...but I digress.

Definitely not the U-23 podium

So the 55+/60+ race near St. Francisville started with 13 riders, which was smaller than I'd hoped.  We were doing only 40-something miles and I can't say I was really up for the race (we had some people over to the house the night before for a birthday party, which resulted in a slight over-consumption of Merlot), but it's a nice and reasonably forgiving course and the Geaux Race guys usually put on a nice event with free food.  Besides, I had to bring the race clock. Our little race started out with Jorge cruising along on the front for what must have been the first three miles or so.  There were a few significant hills between there and the ten-mile point, and then a few more just after turning onto Jones Vaughn Creek road.  Otherwise it was flat to low rolling stuff, but mostly with a very nice road surface and a fair amount of shade.  Pretty soon Stanley Prutz started attacking the hills.  The first time caught me a little off-guard and I had kind of a hard time getting back up to him.  I decided that if he was going to start attacking every time I pulled off the front, then I was just going to have to make sure I was behind him whenever there was any significant climb coming up.  By the time we were half-way around the first 22-mile lap, the group was down to only five riders and I was afraid it was going to turn into a 20 mph scenic tour with a sprint at the end.  Fortunately, Jorge was willing to take on some of the pacemaking duties and as a result I think everyone decided it would be wise to work together.  Naturally, Stanley was still expected to attack every hill, which kept things interesting, but he was never able to shake the rest of the group until Butch dropped off just after we turned off of Hwy 10 about six or seven miles from the finish.  There were a couple more brief attacks along that stretch with Stanley making one particularly hard one shortly before the last turn, but everything came back together quickly.  After the last turn it was only a mile or so to the finish and Stanley attacked again on the first little uphill.  At that point, nobody was going to take the lead, so with I guess 800 meters to go he attacked again and just powered toward the finish line with me glued to his wheel.  Based on past experience, I knew I couldn't go until the 200 meter flag without blowing up, but as soon as we got there I jumped hard with Scott McManus on my wheel. I'm afraid I got kind of sloppy toward the end when I accidentally dumped it all the way down to the 11, but somehow I held Scott off.

This week my training rides have so far been kind of subdued.  There was a grant proposal due on Tuesday and various distractions on the home front, so I was more than happy to roll along in the group and enjoy the scenery.  Even so, there are a lot of things still on the calendar this year.  Next up is the Pensacola Classic, for which I have made no plans whatsoever and don't even know who else might be planning on going, then there's a conference in Destin the following weekend, and Six Gap at the end of the month.  In mid-October the first cyclocross race of the Delta States series is in New Orleans, for which I will probably be the default official (hopefully I can find another local official to help so I can ride too), followed by some local charity rides and more cyclocross.  In the midst of all of that will be the Tulane cycling team activities and rides and related logistics before the USA Cycling Local Associations conference the first weekend in November.