Ready as We'll Be

I guess we're about as ready as we'll be for this weekend's Tour de Louisiane.  The road race course has been painted and marked and Robin was out there today patching some of the little holes in the asphalt.  Jason went out and marked the TT course with mile markers, and the police and Mayor are all lined up for Sunday's criterium.  In general I think we're in pretty good shape.  The only thing that is worrying me is the relatively lackluster pre-registration list.  I mean, where are the Cat. 5s and Masters?  A couple of years ago we were filling up the 50-rider Cat. 5 fields and the Masters had one of the largest fields.  This year the Cat. 1/2/3 field is looking pretty good, and the Cat. 4 field is looking OK, but overall, registrations are down quite a bit.  We're not alone, of course.  Most of the other races seem to be seeing the same thing. I can't really explain it, but it is certainly frustrating.  Every year it gets more and more expensive to put on a race with adequate police, volunteers, and challenging courses, so entry fees become more and more important.  For this race we absorb the online registration surcharge, which for a $65 entry fee is $3.60 (over 5%).  Some of the more vocal riders are always pushing for separate fields for various categories and/or age groups, but the field sizes we're getting aren't doing anything to encourage promoters to move in that direction.  Anyway, it's the same amount of work to put on a stage race with 100 riders as it is to put on a stage race with 300, and I'm gearing up for that weekend of work, at least psychologically.  On the plus side, the weather forecast looks fine with only a slight chance of rain for the weekend.  Not having to deal with huge summer thunderstorms makes this whole process go a lot more smoothly.  Anyway, I'll be officiating along with Ricky and we'll have a number of moto-refs for the Road Race since there will be five groups out on the course at once.

Front of the WeMoRi group on the Wisner overpass  - the easy lap

Wednesday morning I was up a little early so I left home around 5:45, which is about when the WeMoRi starts out by the lake.  That ride does a lap of Lakeshore Drive, around 10 miles, before turning off onto Marconi to ride two laps around the park.  It's about eight miles from my house to Lakeshore Drive.  I've figured out that if I leave around 5:45 I can easily catch the group at the lake near Marconi.  This works out pretty well.  I was almost to Lakeshore Drive on Marconi when I saw Woody, Jaden and a couple others come flying around the corner.  I knew they must be off the front of the group, and maybe twenty seconds later I saw the group so I turned around and merged into it.  They weren't going particularly hard, which was fine since I wasn't really fully warmed up anyway.  The WeMoRi group likes to hammer down Wisner, sprint for some random spot on City Park Avenue, hammer down Marconi, and then do a slightly modified second lap at a conversational pace.

TUCA Cycling Center

Actually, for this group, I would have to call it a gossip pace. Anyway, I was glad to get in a few fast miles and still be back home relatively early since I had some Tour de La stuff to attend to before work.  This morning I drove out to the Thursday levee ride at 6:15.  The Corps of Engineers is beginning to put up the fencing upriver of the Jefferson Playground in preparation for the next section of levee they will be tearing up.  Once that happens, riding on the river levee is going to become impractical for me.  Big Richard called the Levee District and said, "the contractor will pave the first 10k ft section (the stables) once completed. It appears about 2k ft needs to be raised before they reach the stables."  That's about the best we can expect, I guess.  At any rate, it looks like I will be riding out to the lakefront pretty much every day in a week or two.  Hopefully they will get the Jefferson Davis bridge work finished by then so I can avoid Carrollton and add a couple of miles.

Bike Storage Room

Meanwhile, it's been a frustrating week at work, mostly waiting for other people to get back to me so I can move ahead on a couple of things.  One little bright spot, however, was when Facilities Management showed up the other day to start working on the Tulane cycling club's space.  The bike storage room and little locker room are now ready to go, the WattBikes are on order (I hope), and I'm awaiting a call from Facilities on delivering the surplus furniture that we have on 'hold' over in storage.  The big video screen is supposed to be installed by a subcontractor and I haven't heard anything about when that will happen, but I assume it will be pretty soon.  I never got a reply to my most recent email to Card Services about the card-swipe system that we need to install, but The Daughter has written up a draft risk management/safety policy that I probably won't look at until next week.  At least things are moving along.  Once I can get the locksmith in here to make us some real keys I can move a bunch of stuff out of my basement into the storage room of what I am calling the Tulane Cycling Center.  We still need to get a number of things, like workstands, tools, etc., but that will be relatively easy.  I think.