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.