Relentless in New Orleans

It was suddenly springtime, bordering on summer, last Saturday. With Rouge-Roubaix behind us, and a race-free weekend ahead of us, combined with warm temperatures and the impending spring road season, I knew we were in for trouble. Hanging out at Starbucks as the sun came up I watched as a steady stream of riders filtered in from all directions. By the time we were on Lakeshore Drive, there were about fifty riders, including essentially all of the fastest local ones, some of whom were on their time trial bikes. Aside from the Giro Ride that morning, there were at least two other groups doing the same route, so it would be safe to say there were a hundred road and TT bikes out on the Giro course that morning.

I was feeling OK, but still a little heavy and sluggish from nearly a month of low-mileage weeks. Even so, I wasn't really expecting what happened. As soon as we hit Hayne Blvd. the pace ramped quickly up in to the 26-30 mph range, but with such a large group and no significant crosswind issues, it was not too hard to stay in the draft as I gradually got warmed up, a process that seems to take longer and longer every year. Looking back, I note that the average speed on the Hayne Blvd. section was a brisk 26.4 mph. We made the right turn onto Paris Road and the pace didn't really ease at all, so we came over the I-10 overpass and rolled down the other side at around 30 mph.

Although I knew better, I was way back toward the tail end of the long strung-out group at that point.  It looked like we would have a clear shot crossing over the two lanes of I-610, and indeed about 90% of the group did so, but then a pickup truck appeared coming around the curve and a few of us near the back had to slow way, way down until the driver finally waved us through.  Well, the front of the group was still going 30 mph at that point and so all I could do was stand up and sprint and hope to make it back into the draft before blowing up. Yeah, well that didn't happen. As my heart rate edged into the 95% bracket, Stephanie Smith came by and I jumped onto her wheel.  I thought, "Perfect! A triathlete to help bridge a long gap."  I damned sure wasn't going to be able to do it myself.  We chased at full power all the way down the exit ramp and then most of the way along the service road before finally making contact just before Chef Highway.  My average speed for that section was 27.1, and I was completely gassed as came to the Chef Highway intersection. Well of course the front of the group jumped across in front of a car and the rest, including me, had to wait, so immediately we were chasing at 27-29 mph again. I finally just sat up as the relentless pace was offering no chance for me to recover and get my breathing back under control.

Once again, Stephanie came up to me, so we started a nice controlled 2-person time trial at around 23 mph as the group started to disappear in the distance. A minute later we came up to Graham on the side of the road fixing his sticky rear brake, so he joined us for the rest of the way out to Venetian Isles fighting a moderate headwind.

Finally back in the pack after the turnaround, the relentless pace continued, and we were soon strung out in a long thin line once again. The average speed for most of that section to the Goodyear Sign sprint was 30.1 mph. After another 30 mph stretch along the service road, things finally settled down a bit on Bullard, where I later found out Steve had crashed when he hit one of the may cracks in the concrete. Once on Hayne the relentless pace continued, however, and after sprinting up the overpasses and finally coming back down onto Lakeshore Drive I was pretty well toasted. It was also only about 8:55 am. Usually, if the Giro gets back onto Lakeshore Drive by 9:10 it's a fast Giro. I rode around Lakeshore Drive for a little bit waiting for Danielle who had been doing intervals, but couldn't find her so I rode back to Starbucks and hung out with the NOBC group at NOLA Beans until she showed up.

So Sunday morning it was raining when I woke up at 5:45, so I went back to sleep. I'd had more than my fair share of wine the night before since my brother and family were in town for his 60th birthday. I eventually went out in the afternoon when the streets were dry. By then a stiff wind was blowing and it was hot. My legs felt really heavy from Saturday's thrashing, and now I had to fight a west wind all the way out to Kenner on the Lake Trail. I was going mostly 16 mph but the effort felt more like I should be going 24. I got back home three hours later tired, dehydrated and achy.  I guess it's time to start training again.

Springtime

It's 84° F right now in New Orleans. Most of the rain that had been predicted earlier in the week never materialized, and other than a day or two the next week is also looking pretty good. The weather gods even smiled on the annual Rouge-Roubaix race up in St. Francisville last Sunday, offering a nice dry day with warm temperatures after a week of rainy weather.

Like last year, I was helping officiate rather than riding.  I can't honestly say I was disappointed at not being able to ride it. If you aren't in pretty good shape for a hard 4.5 hours on the bike, the last thirty miles of Rouge-Roubaix can be torture. This year the gravel roads were apparently nicely packed down and very fast, which allowed a lot of people to avoid the walk of shame up Blockhouse hill. The Pro/1/2 race was won with a time of 4:10, which is to say those guys at the pointy end of the field rarely saw speeds below 26 mph. I made a Google Fusion map of the home towns of the participants since the race seems to be getting more and more people from farther and farther away. In the Pro/1/2 race there were only two riders in the top 25 from La/Ms. I guess that's good. One highlight this year was Ed Novak's impressive solo win in the Masters race. For once, Ed didn't have some sort of mechanical disaster, plus he had a couple of teammates with him in the final break who effectively thwarted the attempt to chase him down after the last gravel road.

On the other side of the coin, however, were a couple of notable crashes.  Kenny Bellau went down upon hitting a pothole following the first gravel segment when he looked over at just the wrong time. He hit hard on his head and shoulder, and the current diagnosis is a torn labrum.  He is still nursing that arm the same way you do when your collarbone is broken and it still seems to be very painful with little range of motion. Another rider in the Masters race, Howard Sklar, went down even harder, apparently around the end of one of the gravel segments, breaking some bones in his face, his sternum, a collarbone, and some ribs. He was still in the hospital awaiting surgery on Wednesday. Other that that, however, the race went fairly well from an officiating perspective, although since I was at the finish line all day I wouldn't know much about the on-the-road situation. There were only a couple of mistakes in the initial results that were quickly and easily corrected.

Even without riding, however, it was a long weekend for me.  I drove up around 1 pm on Saturday with Tim, one of the other officials, and we worked registration until 6:30 or so, I guess. We were out the door around 5:30 the next morning for another frantic round of registration and data entry. The first group rolled out promptly at 8 am and the last at 9 am. I went straight over to the finish line, about a mile away, and we spent a while setting that up. I had the new RapidCam camera, so we actually had two legit finish cameras on the line plus one regular camera, even though there are rarely any really close finishes in this race. Once the first riders finish, it's pretty much a steady stream for the next three hours, and toward the end you have riders from all of the races coming in all mixed together. It is difficult to sort them all out. We set up a mobile hotspot and emailed pdf files of the inital results to the after-party where the award presentations are made, which worked out OK, I think.

Heading back with the group on Thursday morning.

So after skipping riding on Monday because I had been up until midnight posting results catching up with email, I made it out Tuesday morning for the group ride. It was a fast one, probably because of the warmer weather.  On Wednesday I met Chris Cleeland from St. Louis who had ridden the Rouge and was still in town. We rode out to meet the WeMoRi and stopped for coffee afterward with Brian. Chris was the one who had been behind Kenny when he crashed, and although he had landed much more gently, he stayed around to make sure Kenny was OK before continuing on. Anyway, it was a pretty fast little lap around City Park. Thursday we had a big group for the morning ride, but it never got quite as fast as it had been on Tuesday, which was fine with me because I was feeling a little tired.

At least during the week I did manage to get the Tulane loaner bike we'd gotten from Brian all put together and functional so one of the medical students can use it for an upcoming race. The left Shimano shifter is all messed up and missing a little spring and I couldn't get it fixed, so Bicycle World gave me an older model left shifter they had lying around, the kind with the exposed cable. I think it will work fine, however. Then Mignon decided to give Tulane her old Specialized Tarmac. It had a broken right shift cable, the remnants of which were all jammed up inside the shifter so you couldn't shift it around into the position where removing it was possible. I ended up drilling a hole in the top of the shift lever in order to get the the cable end, so once we get some wheels, that bike should be good to go too.  That will give us three functional race-ready loaner bikes.

Arkansas

It had been a very long time since I'd ridden in Arkansas - like maybe 35 years. I'd driven up there on a hot mid-summer Friday with a friend in my Triumph GT-6 with my arm hanging out the window and hot air blowing through the numerous gaps in the firewall. It was a stage race in Little Rock and it was a lot of fun, but that was then and this was now. This time I left in a rented minivan with 4 bikes, 4 people, 12 wheels, 4 bags and the various other stuff for two days of collegiate racing.

The flyer offered a chance for alumni to race, so I brought the Bianchi and the race wheels, mainly just to delay the inevitability of being dropped. We left in the morning, headed for Fayetteville, about ten hours away. The forecast looked a little scary. There had been a lot of snow and ice a couple of days before, and the forecast wasn't offering anything more than 32 degrees and clear skies for Saturday morning's time trial, which I had already decided to skip.

Well, as often happens at collegiate races the time trial started at least an hour late. It was a dual-conference race, and the first of the year for the Midwest, so despite the cold temperatures the turnout was higher than expected - around 180 - and since most of them had to get their "permanent" bib numbers, things took a lot longer than expected.  The morning TT was a 10 km uphill, and Kenny and I hung around the start line until all of the Tulane riders had started. The last rider was a little Junior on 24" wheels, wearing a jogging suit and running shoes. Kenny and I followed him most of the way up the hill offering encouragement and instruction on shifting. It turned out to be a lot more comfortable temperature-wise than I would have expected.

The afternoon road races were on a 20-mile loop preceded by a 7 mile out and back section. The course was mostly just rolling hills except for one section that featured a particularly steep 1.5 mile climb. So having talked myself into the Category B race, I started the 50-something mile Road Race along with the Cat. B Men and the Cat. A Women. After a brief neutral section, the Cat. A women, along with a couple of the men, rolled off the front.  I figured they must know something I didn't about the "big hill" but my objective was to get a good workout, not to win the race. It would be practically the first bit of hard riding I'd done in almost three weeks, so I didn't have anything to lose. After a while I decided to take off and see if I could bridge up to the lead group, which at that point had about a 30-40 second lead but didn't seem to be going very hard. After a couple of miles of moderate effort I made contact and took a couple of minutes to recover.

Soon enough the rest of the field came up from behind and a little while later, about 20 miles in to the race, we hit the hill. I immediately dropped it all the way into the 39x25, which was clearly insufficient, and when I started gasping for breath I backed off as the pack spun, apparently without much effort, up the hill. I came over the top figuring I'd be doing a long solo ride, but when I caught another dropped rider I decided to ride with him for a while. After a brief period of 2-man TT riding, a couple of riders came flying past on my left and I jumped to latch on to them. It turned out to be a couple of the women who I'd passed on the climb earlier and now they were flying, trying to bridge back up to the field. The guy I'd been with dropped off right away but the three of us started working together really well and after three miles or so we were back with the pack. Of course I got dropped on the hill again on the next lap, but after that I started feeling much better and had a really nice fast time trial of ten or twelve miles back to the finish. The team did pretty well with Ben missing out on the Cat. A win by a tire width after being in a 2-man break with a Cat. 1 semi pro rider from MSU.

Sunday's criteriums were on a nice course in an undeveloped little subdivision. The weather was significantly warmer, although it was overcast the whole day. I lined up with the Cat. B men for the 45 minute race with the idea of getting in a good workout. Well, they started out more slowly than I liked, so after a lap or two I launched a soft attack, rode a lap or so alone, and was then joined by a couple of others. We were caught a while later, and when the pace sagged again I attacked again, this time taking one rider with me. The two of us worked pretty well together, although I was struggling a bit on the headwind stretch. I think we got the gap out to about 40 seconds, but by then the pack had awakened. After a while a Nebraska rider bridged up to us, which would have been good except that he wouldn't work. That resulted in the other rider backing off too despite my reminders that we had only ten minutes left to go. So we got caught with I guess 5 laps remaining. On the last lap things started getting a little sketchy so I backed off since there was really no reason for me to be taking any chances.

After the race I was surprised to find out that along the way I'd won a prime consisting of a pair of tires.  Sweet! Danielle got 2nd in her race, but the big story was Ben, who ended up in a 2-man break with the same rider from the road race. Ben led the whole last lap as their pace slowed dramatically and I was thinking he was just going to get totally smoked when the other rider attacked, but instead Ben accelerated through the last turn and somehow made it all the way to the finish for the win.

The drive home was a long one thanks to non-stop rain for about six of the ten hours back to New Orleans. Fortunately it was mostly light rain so other than the stretch on state highways through Arkansas it wasn't too bad. We got back shortly before 2 am.

Winter Collegiate Races

Last weekend I made the long drive over to San Marcos, Texas for the Texas State Ultra collegiate races with the Tulane team. We had three mini-vans for this one, all packed to the gills with bikes, wheels, riders and pretty much every shred of cold-weather riding clothing available. My car left NOLA around 11:30 (the plan had been for 9 am but it took over an hour to actually pick up the minivans from Enterprise and then we had to squeeze 4 bikes, 4 people, and numerous wheels in there. It was like a game of Tetris. Since these were the "short" or standard-size minivans, only two bikes will fit with their rear wheels still on, and only by sticking the rear of the bike in-between the two rear seats. Both wheels had to be removed from the other two bikes, and then wheels get slotted in-between bikes. Anyway, the drive up there was pretty nice and we arrived in time to eat at the local Mexican place around the corner from the hotel. The other two minivans didn't leave NOLA until after 4 pm, so they didn't arrive until something like 2 am.

The morning temperature for the start of the road races was around 32F, so we stopped first at the local Starbucks and then headed across the Interstate to the back of a big shopping mall where registration was supposed to be. As I approached, however, I saw a long line of cars with bikes coming out of the parking lot, so I followed them until they turned into a dead-end street. Turned out the race didn't quite have permission to use the parking lot at the shopping  mall. There was a light rain falling as we found a place to park and learned that the start had been pushed back one hour. Registration was done with the official sitting in her car registering people through the car window. We hung out in our cars with the engines running for the next hour.

Early break in the Women B/C race

Kenny and I had planned on following the Cat. A race. To be more precise we planned on drafting off of the Cat. A race follow car. The Cat. A race started last, and as they lined up we realized that Ben's spare wheels had mistakenly been put into the Cat. B or C follow car. Kenny and I left on our bikes before the A race started, and started riding backwards around the course. Eventually we met the A race, but by the time we turned around and got going we were hopelessly off the back. We rode back around to the finish line and got to see the finish of the B Women (Danielle won) and then I got a ride so we could try and get Ben's wheels into the proper follow car. We drove backwards around the course and finally flagged down one follow car, pulled out the wheels, and then flagged down the A follow car, which was inexplicably three minutes behind the A pack because they thought they were supposed to follow the last rider.  We put the wheels in the car and told them to go follow the pack. I got in some more miles before going back to the finish to see the A race sprint (Ben got 3rd). The 2 pm time trial was supposed to be this awesome hill climb but they changed it because I guess they thought people would spin out their rear wheels, so it ended up being a little 2 mile slightly uphill TT that was pretty confusing. The start line consisted of one official, one stopwatch, and a start line. There was no start list so riders were starting more or less randomly whenever they showed up, since the change to the start location and time had everyone pretty confused. When Danielle got back she said she had thrown her sunglasses off to the side of the road because she couldn't see (it was still in the 30s and there was a cold mist falling), so once the start line cleared I borrowed a bike and rode along the course looking for them. I was shocked when a couple of A riders then came blasting past me ... on the right. Apparently they had just shown up at the start line and were started. Our rider had rushed to get to the start when he thought he was supposed to be starting quite a while earlier. Anyway, someone had turned in the sunglasses so we go them the at the Crit.

So on Sunday the conditions for the criterium were essentially the same.  Very cold and wet.  The B/C women started around 8 am on a very short technical course that was mostly in the parking lot of a high school. Danielle split the field early but the other two women in the break didn't want to work so it mostly came back together. Then she attacked the last lap and opened a huge gap. She had the race in the bag approaching the last turn when she came up on a lapped rider (wearing running shoes) and had to change her line at the last minute, and ended up crashing on a paint stripe, so I think she ended up around 5th as a result. The officials pretty much just sat in their car in the parking lot and scored the races through the windshield, so Kenny and I ended up handling the lap cards, bell, etc. Ben Spain won his race, which was great. The last race was the A race which was only 20 minutes (collegiate rules require 60). Ben B. attacked toward the end and opened a big gap, only to slide out on a wet off-camber turn. Luckily he could still get a free lap, so he was back in the race but with only a few laps left to go it really took the wind out of his sails.

The ride back home was rough. It was great that we were able to leave so early, which should have put us back in New Orleans by 9:30 or so, but then we rain into torrential rain all the way from Lafayette to almost LaPlace and so spent literally hours going 30-40 mph on the interstate. I had to unclench my hands from the steering wheel a few times. We didn't arrive back home until around 11:00, which by collegiate race standards was still rather early. Next weekend we're heading up to Arkansas where the forecast is calling for lows in the teens but at least no rain.