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.