Age of the Dinosaurs, Rocky Mount and the TT Championships

The Saturday Giro

Things are busy around here lately. The LAMBRA race calendar for August is pretty full, mostly with championship races. The students started returning to the neighborhood around Tulane a couple of weeks ago, and Danielle arrived from Olympia last week. Most classes started today. I like this time of year when things are busy around the university area and there are lots of students and other folks out and about. It's been busy at work as well, so between work and LAMBRA and Tulane Cycling and racing and training there hasn't been a whole lot of spare energy.

So two weekends ago I headed up to Shreveport, or to be exact Bossier City, early on a Friday afternoon. It's a 5+ hour drive and I wanted to get to the bike shop in time to pick up race numbers so I wouldn't have to do that in the morning. Rocky Mount is one of my favorite races and this year they switched it from Omnium format to Stage Race format, but it wasn't quite that simple. You see, we were using the first stage, the road race, as the LAMBRA Road Championship. We had done that last year when it was an omnium. on the face of it, since the RR was the first stage, it shouldn't have presented a problem. As it turned out, however, there was some dissension in the ranks concerning the awarding of LCCS points. I had planned to just score the category races as omniums rather than stage races since some riders were planning on riding only the first stage because that was the road championship for the skill-based races/categories. After I scored the whole event that way and put it up on the web I got some feedback from riders who had decided to skip the event on the assumption that it would be scored as a stage race. Since only the top two stage races count toward the annual LCCS rankings, that was not an unreasonable decision for riders who had already had high placings in two stage races. So I ended up re-scoring the whole thing as a stage race and then also awarding road race points to those riders who had registered only for the road race.

Anyway, to get back to the racing, I was signed up for the 55+ race along with teammate Mark McMurry. Mark was getting dangerously close to the top of the 55+ LCCS ranking so although he often rides Cat. 1/2/3 or 40+, he had decided to race with the dinosaurs instead. The field was pretty small, which was not unexpected, and the road race started out pretty slow. The long 30 mile course has a couple of significant hills on it and so I wasn't too surprised when Shreveport rider and TT specialist Tim P attacked the first big one. I was right there on his wheel all the way up the hill and then, thinking the pack was right behind me, I made the crucial mistake of easing up over the top. By the time I realized  how big the gap was it was too late and he was gone and I was stuck in the middle. The unresponsive pack turned out to be the theme for the weekend. There was virtually no attempt to chase him down and soon he was out of sight with the pack meandering along at a slow speed with only an occasional and brief acceleration. With about ten miles left to go Mark put a little pressure on going up one of the hills, glanced back to see that he had a gap, and decided to go for it. I was sitting at the front and just tooled along at like 20 mph, amazed that nobody was attacking. There were a few little surges, but basically they were content to let me sit on the front at 20 mph while Mark rode off into the distance. So of course Tim won, Mark came second, and then the pack finally arrived 3+ minutes later. The generally uphill sprint was fun and I should have won it, but I inexplicably eased up just before the finish line, not realizing there was someone coming up fast on my left. I'm still kicking myself for that one.

Tulane Cycling Friday Coffee Ride

The 5 mi. TT was held a few hours later from the same location and featured a fast (40-45 mph - some hit 49) downhill followed by a hairpin turn, a mile or so of light fast tailwind, and then a rather brutal mile of climbing back up to the finish. I kind of screwed up by coming around a right-hand turn in a huge gear and deciding not to shift for the steep little uphill right after it. I totally bogged down coming over the top and had to ease up a bit to recover. Even so I wasn't too displeased with my effort, which of course dropped me down to like 5th on GC as usual. The next morning was the criterium which is on a pretty nice parking lot course around a small community college. I was prepared for a hard ride but it didn't really turn out that way. Tim, who had won both the road race and time trial, had dropped out - he doesn't like criteriums with a passion - so Mark was now in the lead on GC with a pretty decent gap. From the start I led out a moderately fast lap, after which Mark came through, saw an unexpected gap with me still sitting on the front, and took off. Again, there was virtually no chase as I sat on the front going slow and watching Mark ride away from us. At the rate we were going I knew he would lap us, and when I heard the motorcycle coming up from behind wondered what would happen next. Well, Mark just kind of blew past the group through the technical section of the course and so I jumped hard to catch his wheel along with a couple others. I was hoping to split the pack here, but half a lap later I glanced back and it was all back together so I just let Mark ride off the front again, not that he needed to. Again, they just let him go, and again I didn't win the pack sprint. Somehow, however, thanks to Tim dropping out and some time bonuses I ended up in 3rd place, so between the two of us we easily covered our hotel room, which constitutes a successful weekend any way you look at it.

So last week was fairly routine rides except that Danielle came along on a couple of them. The LAMBRA TT championship was on Sunday and I was officiating. Given my usual TT performances I wasn't too disappointed about not being able to ride this one, and was able to enjoy the Saturday Giro Ride without worrying about having tired legs for Sunday. The TT went pretty smoothly, and despite the hot and humid conditions Jaden set a new course/LAMBRA 40km record of 52:17, while Stephanie set a new women's record of 59:28. It must have been ten years since we've had a woman go significantly under an hour, so I was really happy to see that.

Reflecting on the TT results afterward, and looking at the times of some of the younger riders compared to those of the old guys who have been dominating many of the time trials for a long, long time, I thought to myself, "The age of the dinosaurs is drawing to a close."  It has been a long time coming, but I am truly glad to see these younger riders kicking ass. We had one casualty in the TT when Tim Doiron failed to notice some random recumbent rider who I guess had gotten on the TT course around the boat launch halfway back from the turnaround. He tried to swerve around at the last minute but caught the left side of the trike and went down hard putting a deep gash in his jaw and upper lip that required stitches. Later, after the TT championships, we had the Louisiana Senior Olympic Games time trial on the same course. I was a little worried about the older guys being out there for 40km on such a hot day. Two of them apparently turned around early, thinking they had gotten to the turnaround that was actually about five miles farther down the road. I have no idea how they got that wrong since over eighty riders ahead of them had gotten it right.

View from the Back

Me, Mark, Paul, and Mike

The LAMBRA Team Time Trial and Alan Kelly Criterium this weekend jolted the mid-summer road season back into action after its July hiatus. Teammate Mark McMurry had assembled a 55+ team composed of riders who might just as easily have ridden a TTT back in 1984. Mike Lew was on hand with an ancient and unique time trial bike that had been built by John Dias' father back when John was a Junor.  I figure it weighed in at around 24 pounds.  Rounding out the team was Paul Kerst from Baton Rouge who has raced only occasionally for the past few years but has always been a formidable time trialist. I knew it was going to be a hard and hot 30 miles. There was a light but increasing quartering headwind and my only consolation was knowing I was the smallest rider of the four. As we had discussed, our start was smooth and controlled. I suppose that among the four of us there must have been at least 100 years of racing experience, so the paceline was incredibly smooth.  I has doing my best taking short pulls and thanks to the headwind I was recovering relatively well until my next pull came around. Mike and I were pulling a little shorter and more slowly than Paul and Mark but it was working pretty well all the way out to the turnaround and we could see that we were slowly catching the team that had started two minutes ahead of us. Our turnaround was pretty sloppy and it took us a little while to get re-organized. There was now a bit of a tailwind and Paul and Mark were showing no signs of slowing down. We'd averaged a bit over 26 mph on the way out and it was looking like the consensus speed for the way back was going to be more like 28. I took a couple of pulls and quickly realized I was slowing them down about 1 mph every time I'd come to the front, so I decided to sit on the back to minimize the accelerations and wait until closer to the end where I could maintain speed and afford to gut it out for a couple of miles without risking getting dropped. So we ended up with a 1:06:53, which was good for 6th overall. Not that I can take much credit for it, but it was a pretty respectable showing for a bunch of old dogs.

Sunday's criterium in Thibodaux was on a nice short technical course with old concrete pavement that was unrideable when wet. The master's race had a reasonable turnout of 16, which was good, but 5 Palmer riders and 4 Acadiana riders, which was not so good. I was still trying to squeeze in a little warmup after having officiated the prior race when they started lining up, so I ended up in the back, which I new was risky. I figured there was a 90% chance that Kenny was going to attack from the gun, which of course he did. Kevin Landry was right there and went with him, so halfway through the first lap we had one Palmer and one Acadiana rider off the front, which was not good for me since that meant about half the field and 80% of the remaining horsepower was not going to chase. Going around one of the corners on the first lap I looked up and there were four Palmer riders lined up on the front and we were going like 22 mph while the break was probably going more like 27. The two riders just rode away from the pack without hardly a challenge. On such a tight course it's hard to move up, and since I wasn't feeling particularly motivated anyway, I found myself stuck near the back dealing with some rather unorthodox cornering and a lot of gap-closing. I immediately started thinking about just easing off the back and latching onto the break which I knew was going to lap the field on the short 0.5 mile circuit.

Pretty soon, though, I heard the motorcycle right behind us and knew we were already being lapped. There were a few short attacks that shed a few more riders but we came into the bell lap with a group of around eight. Kevin attacked early on the back side and strung everything out, but somehow Kenny managed to get to the line first by about half a tire width. As it turned out that particular tire was nearly flat, too. They had to go to the finish camera to figure out who won. Kenny posted some good video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1GTXX12wOo .

So after the master's race I had a little break while the Cat. 4s raced before the Cat. 1/2/3 race. After they finished we had a good fifteen minutes before our race was scheduled to start, and it looked like a big thunderstorm was heading our way. As I was warming up I could feel a light mist starting to fall, and then there were some very impressive and close bolts of lightning. Everyone gathered near the start line hoping for the best but fearing the worst. Sure enough it started raining right on schedule and with the road surface so slick the race was cancelled. I sat under the NOBC tent with Mark for at least half an hour as it poured down rain until it eased enough to venture out to start packing up the car. I had been kind of looking forward to the Cat. 1/2/3 race which would have been the biggest field of the day, so it was a disappointment to have the race cancelled, but having tried to ride on that road in the rain last year I knew there was really no choice. After loading up the car with soaking wet tent, flag, etc., I headed home through more thunderstorms.  On the plus side, I was back home by 2 pm.

Sunrise Season

The northern hemisphere keeps tilting away from the sun, but my ride time remains the same. This is the time of year when we start seeing lots of photos of sunrise from the local cycling community. I had made it out to the 5:45 am meeting spot on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday had headed out around the same time to meet the WeMoRi, but when the alarm went off on Thursday morning I hit the snooze button and promptly fell fast asleep. I finally did get out of the house, around fifteen minutes late. Fortunately, the Thursday group, after meeting at the west end of Lakeshore Drive around 6:10 am, heads east to do an out-and-back lap of Lakeshore Drive before continuing west along the Lake Trail in Jefferson. I knew that if I would be able to find them on Lakeshore Drive. In fact, I was a little surprised that I had to ride a few miles east along the lake into the huge rising sun before I saw them somewhere around Franklin Avenue. Thursday's ride was good, but not particularly fast. On the plus side, however, the group is for this "new" ride is growing as people figure out where and when they can meet it.

This morning I met Ben for the Friday coffee ride, picking up Scott at the end of Nashville and Brian B somewhere out on the lakefront. Ben was out on his Cervelo set up for tomorrow's Team Time Trial. I had promised myself I'd put my aero bars on the bike, but of course I never quite got around to that. I'll be heading down to Vacherie very early tomorrow morning for an hour or so of TTT torture, my only consolation being that I'll be the smallest rider on the 4-man team of 55+ riders.  So how hard could that be?

In the 'best-laid plans' department, the Rocky Mount stage race had to find a new road race course at the last minute after a group went to pre-ride the original course and found a big section of the road had been completely washed out. The road stage of that race serves as our skill-based, aka 'category,' championship. Then the upcoming criterium in Baton Rouge had to change their course because the state is tearing up the road in front of the capitol building in order to make it into a pedestrian-only space. The alternate route that goes around and behind the capitol building is fine except that there are two "caution" pylon things bolted to the middle of the road where the crosswalks are. We'll have the whole road so riders should be able to negotiate those as long as they are aware and paying attention. Should be interesting anyway. Then today the fall Track series dates got changed from Fridays to Saturdays, which is probably a good thing except that one of those Saturdays I'll be on the road to Six Gap.

(Giro)²

Audubon Park - it was still fairly dark, hence the blurriness

It was supposed to be a rainy weekend, but as sometimes happens around here, the rain fell mainly elsewhere leaving us with mostly dry weather, at least down here on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain.  I got up Saturday morning, looked out the window, and thought, "It sure is dark out there!"  I guess there were a few lingering clouds around, and together with the slow creep of shorter days it is starting to get noticeable. Leaving home at 6:04 am, it was a tough call whether to wear my regular sunglasses or opt of the clear lenses. Since I had my contacts in, I wanted my regular glasses because they have the stick-on reading lenses in them which make it easier to read the computer. I ended up wearing them, although I guess that in another couple of weeks that won't really be an option and they'll ride out to Starbucks adorning my helmet.  Anyway, the turnout for the Giro was good and the pace on the way out remained fast. We averaged around 25 mph, excluding the warm-up and cool-down along Lakeshore Drive, even though the return trip was considerably slower. The whole way out along Chef Highway we were pretty much strung out in a long single file going 26-28 mph for the most part.  It was such a long way to the front that I don't even know who was up there driving the train, and there was little chance I was going to ride up there to find out.

Later that day I considered trying to put together a northshore ride but never quite got around to it. I found out from Kenny that evening that Woody, Ed, VJ and I guess a few others were doing a northshore ride but by then it was late enough that I didn't want to track them down to find out when and where.  In the back of my mind I was already thinking of putting in a few extra miles after the Sunday Giro anyway.

The Sunday Giro always seems just a little bit easier than the Saturday Giro. In this case it worked out to about 1 mph slower overall, but similar to Saturday's ride the pace was fast on the way out to Venetian Isles.  This time, though, we had a nice smooth paceline going for a few miles until a couple of guys started to surge at the front which caused the whole lovely thing to collapse back into chaos. The ride back, however, was relatively tame aside from a fast stretch from Highway 11 to the Goodyear sign. When we got back to Lakeshore Drive I found that Steve and Pat had parked down at the end of Williams Blvd and would be riding back there along the Lake Trail, so I decided to join them and a few other riders who were also going that way. We stopped at the gas station on Harrison Avenue to refuel since it was getting pretty hot by then.  I bought a huge bottle of Powerade and still had quite a bit left to drink after filling my big water bottle.There was a light tailwind that made the ride along the water feel easy, but I knew it would be a long ride back once everyone else went home and I turned around into the headwind. By then I had around 70 miles on the odometer so I just settled into a nice long 18 mph pace for most of the way back along the lake, arriving back home with 80.7 miles. In a rather bizarre coincidence, that was exactly the same mileage that Steve ended up with that day. Back at home I spent a couple of hours refueling before venturing out into the heat again to trim hedges. We have had a fairly consistent pattern of rain showers around here for the past couple of weeks, so everything green is growing at full speed, as are the insects. It is feeling pretty subtropical, as it should.  Of course with that comes the annual hurricane season so we're all starting to pay a little more attention to the tropical weather.  Somehow I carried my camera around all weekend but never once took it out to take a photo, so I made a point of taking a few pictures as I rode around the park this morning.  It was darker than it looks in the photos, so the little camera was using too slow of shutter speed to accommodate my blazing speed of 15 mph.

This morning I felt like I needed a nice easy recovery spin. I've been pretty close to 300 miles per week for the past three weeks, and although it's been mostly group rides and has included a fair share of easy miles, it's a lot of saddle time nonetheless.  I rode up St. Charles Avenue early in the morning, returning down Prytania and Magazine to do a few easy laps around Audubon Park before heading home through Tulane's campus. Yesterday I broke down and signed up for the new AT&T internet and phone bundle since my current setup at home dates back to late 2005. Although I kind of hate giving up that direct phone line, the cost of the home phone was getting way out of line with how much we use it, and the internet connection was getting more and more flaky. The downside is that I guess I'll be spending Wednesday morning with some service person at home getting it all switched over which will likely involve moving furniture around to uncover long-hidden phone outlets. I'm still stuck with basic cable from Cox, but perhaps once the new AT&T becomes available, which will probably be pretty soon, they will offer another deal to get me to switch over. We'll see. I would probably be just as happy with an antenna and Hulu.