So Much

Last Friday I headed off to Colorado Springs for the annual USAC Local Associations Summit.  For some reason my flight went through Denver this time instead of Dallas, which was something I probably should have thought about a little bit ahead of time.  The trip there went fine, but it was a long enough layover in Denver waiting for the 30-minute flight from there to COS that I had plenty of time to realize I probably could have just rented a car in Denver, driven to Colorado Springs, arrived earlier, and likely paid considerably less.  If I'd gotten together with a few other people going to the same meeting and we had shared a rental car it would have been even cheaper.  Oh well.

The "LA" conference is usually pretty packed with information flowing both ways, which is to say that the Local Association representatives usually have a lot to say about the topics that are covered, and the USAC staff have a lot to tell us about plans and changes in the world of competitive cycling.  So much information.  This year was no different, and although we didn't get our usual preview of proposed changes to the racing rules, we certainly filled that gap with discussion about the move to a single racing license, fee increases, discount programs, etc.  There were also the usual rather frightening sessions about insurance and risk management.  On the plus side, we get to meet all of those people we work with via email and telephone all year and have an opportunity to pick the brains of those in other Local Associations who are dealing with similar issues.  The only complication is the rather large difference in perspective and priority between the really big Local Associations and the smaller ones like ours.  The LAs like us all struggle to find enough officials and promoters to put together a reasonable racing season without everyone going too far into the red, largely depending on volunteers and never having quite enough of them or even riders themselves.  The large LAs have issues involving professional race timing companies and promoters with huge budgets and hundreds of participants per race. In that world there is always some friction between the promoters who are being told they have to hire a whole bunch of officials and the officials who actually compete with each other to get assigned to those big events for which they are paid in full.  In our world we have officials who routinely serve at discounted rates or as volunteers, judges who aren't actually officials, registrars who are volunteers from the local clubs, and promoters who are thrilled if there are over 100 entrants and the race breaks even.  Anyway, I am expecting some unhappiness about the jump in license fees from the riders who never cross disciplines, and from the promoters who have to collect an additional $5 from the one-day license riders.  As an example, if you are putting on a weekend event like a stage race or omnium you will be collecting from each 1-day license rider $30 in license fees plus $6 in insurance surcharges (neither of which you get to keep), which works out to $36.  Since the Cat. 5s cannot receive any prizes of value (i.e. cash), just how much of an entry fee over and above those $36 can you charge them without it looking totally out of line with the entry fees for the other classes.  Of course we'd love to see them all buy the $70 annual licenses, but if they don't think they will do more than five or six races some of them will just cut down on racing rather than get annuals.  The event permit fees are finally getting re-worked so that the big jump that used to happen when an even had one race with $2k or more in prizes will go away.  However that means that the smaller races that were getting away with relatively trivial permit fees of $25-50 are probably going to see their fees double.  Realistically it still won't be much more than a drop in the bucket compared to the other costs of putting on anything beyond a local parking lot criterium, but it will still seem like a money grab to some.

So for the first time in years I didn't have an overlapping conference in Washington D.C. and didn't need to rush off to the airport on Sunday morning before the LA Summit actually ended.  Even so, I did need a ride to the airport, so I was there about three hours before my little hop over to Denver.  Again, I was thinking, "I should have rented a car," especially after seeing five or six other people from the meeting who were also waiting for flights to Denver.  Anyway, I finally get on the little plane and am seated amidst an excitable group of high school synchronized swim team members (I could actually smell the chlorine when they sat down) and we make an uneventful flight at about 10,000 feet to Denver that wasn't really worth bothering to put the gear up on the airplane.  Now the excitement started because my arrival time in Denver was also my boarding time for my connecting flight.  Fortunately I knew they were both leaving from the same concourse, albeit about a mile apart, and we arrived a few minutes early.  I hustled down the long concourse and got to the gate a few minutes after the rest of the passengers had boarded, took my seat and kicked back for the long flight back to NOLA.  Or so I thought.  So we're sitting there and nothing's happening when finally the pilot comes on the speaker and says there's an electrical problem that they need to have checked out and it would probably just take five minutes or so.  An hour later we're still at the gate.  Finally it looks like the problem is solved so the pull back from the gate and then the pilot comes on again to tell us there is another problem and they need to run through some diagnostics with the mechanic to see if they can fix it without going back to the gate.  I knew we were in trouble when he said they were going to have to shut everything down and "reboot the plane."  That never works for my computer, so I wasn't giving it much hope.  Of course it didn't work and we had to get towed back to the gate where everybody had to exit the plane and hang around in the airport for another half hour or so.  Finally, three hours late, we took off.  That meant that rather than getting home at 9:30 or so, it was more like 1 am.  Long day.

This morning I went out for the long Tuesday levee ride and when I opened the door I knew the turnout would be slim.  There was a strong gusty wind blowing out of the southeast and the sky was overcast.  I think we started out with seven or eight riders with a pretty strong tailwind.  Somewhere out around Kenner, though, the group split when all but the front two had to slow down to work through some pedestrians in both lanes. I took a pull into what was at the time mostly a crosswind, and then Woody came past and ramped it up to close the gap.  Nobody was able to go with him under the circumstances, however, so the rest of us just formed up a nice little paceline and watched the three riders ahead slowly pull away.  Big Richard and I turned around at The Dip, knowing it would be a long slog into the wind all the way back, but most of the rest continued on.  We met up with Donald, so we had a nice 3-rider group to share the work, which was substantial.  The wind occasionally dropped our speed down to 16-17 mph despite a pretty significant effort.  We had averaged over 25 mph on the way out.