Weekends Past and Present

Division II Team Conference Champions

The past couple of weekends have been pretty busy, and although those are really the times when it would be best to keep up with the blog, they are also the most difficult times to do so. The weekend before last was the Green Wave Classic collegiate race, which also served as the Conference Championships for the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SCCCC for short). Planning for the event had been pretty good, but of course there were still a lot of loose ends to tie up the week before. Those relatively minor things, like corner monitors and putting up course signage and finding follow car drivers, quickly started to pale in comparison to the elephant in the room, namely the consistently dire weather forecast. It wasn't a question of whether or not it would rain.  It was a question of whether or not the races would need to be cancelled because of hazardous road conditions. I didn't sleep much on Friday night worrying about that.

So Sunday morning it was wet but not actually raining when we drove out to Enon to get the course set up. We had free PJ's coffee out there, which helped, and the Tulane club was out in force helping get registration and everything going, so everything went fairly smoothly.

As we began to stage the various groups for the start of the road races, right on cue, it started to rain. Luckily, most of the heavy rain missed us, so although most of the road races were conducted in a light to moderate rain on wet roads, it never got really windy of particularly hazardous, and as the last races were finishing up there was even some sunshine.

Results went smoothly despite all of the complications caused by the "permanent" numbers they keep trying to use to identify the riders. I had already set up my results spreadsheets to use license numbers rather than bib numbers to link riders to their season-long points totals (45% of the riders had different numbers than they'd started the season with).

The evening TT again featured some light rain, but nothing to worry about. All-in-all the day's racing went exceptionally smoothly thanks to a lot of hard work over a couple of months getting everything organized and recruiting volunteers.

By Sunday morning the bad weather had passed and we had clear skies and warm temperatures for the day's criteriums at Lakeshore High School. We had gotten permission to use the school grounds for the races and had laid out a nice challenging course. We'd picked up the keys to the main gate as well, so when we arrived early that morning to find the gate already open I started to worry. The first thing I did was drive around the course in the rented cargo van to drop off traffic cones at the corners and intersections.

You can imagine my shock and dismay when I found that something was going on at the softball field at the back of campus.  The only access to that location was right through the criterium course. I sent Kenny to find out what was going on and he reported that there was a softball tournament that morning.  Great. Fortunately it didn't seem to be a particularly big tournament, and once everyone had arrived there was not too much traffic to deal with, so we stationed traffic monitors at both ends of the road leading to and from the field and they did a tremendous job of shuttling cars across without interfering with the races.

As far as the actual racing went, the Tulane riders were doing great and by the end of the road races I was pretty sure they had the Division II conference team championship in the bag. The racing was pretty good all morning, spiced up by one spectacular crash in one of the early races that landed the rider square in a water-filled ditch, and then later when Ben Spain went down on a corner during a solo attack and landed on his face, breaking a couple of teeth. So in the end, Tulane did great, winning the DII championship, scoring the second  highest team points regardless of division, winning the individual omnium for Cat. A men and Cat. B men, along with a slew of other top-five omnium placings. I was very proud of them, and especially my daughter who served a team president and race director.

So the next week I basically started back to a reasonably regular training schedule. I had to officiate the Harbor Master Criterium last weekend, which was a fun event with spectacularly nice weather.

I brought my bike and ended up entering the Cat. 1/2 race where I knew I'd get slaughtered, but it was the race for which I was least needed at the finish line and it was way past time for me to get back into racing mode. I went in with a plan for this one.  The plan was to get dropped early, wait to be lapped, jump into whichever group lapped me, hang on for a few laps, and repeat.  I think I was lapped four times by the lead group (lap times were maybe 1:30 or so) but at least I got in some riding and missed the big crash on the final corner that took out a few people and a couple of bikes.

This was the same course we'd used last year.  It's pretty technical and tight in a couple of places, and I never have quite gotten it figured out.  The 123 race started out with a couple of relatively smooth laps, but then the attacks started and I quickly found myself at the back with Mark and Kenny. It was, of course, the worst possible place to be on a course like this, but I did not want my own lack of fitness to screw up someone else's race, so I was intentionally leaving room for people to come around me when even the smallest gap would open. The not unexpected result was that I got popped off the back after a few fast laps. Luckily the officials didn't seen a need to pull me, so I basically used the race to do four or five 3-5 minute intervals with full recovery in-between.

At the end of the race Stephen Mire went down, presumably hit a pedal and/or rolled a tire, taking a few riders with him. There had been a similar crash on the last lap of the Cat. 4 race that took two of the Tulane riders out.

This week I've been back to a regular training routine, finally, although it's been marred by numerous unrelated flats. In a few hours I'll be on the road to Brookhaven to help officiate the Mississippi Grand Prix Cat. 1/2/3 criterium this evening and then to race the Masters race the rest of the weekend.  I fully expect to get my lunch eaten since I do not feel like I am anywhere close to race shape, but I guess I've got to start somewhere.