Masters and Young Grasshoppers and the Internet

Last Sunday was the LAMBRA Age-Graded Championship road race, just a couple of hours away near St. Francisville. This is on a popular course that we've been racing on for at least three decades, and although it is not what you'd call an "easy" 22-mile loop, it strikes a nice balance between dead-flat and intimidating. The NOBC had a decent enough turnout, particularly for the women. I would be riding a 44 mile race with the combined 55+/60+ group. There was a time not too long ago when I would have felt that 44 miles didn't even constitute a legitimate road race distance. Those times, however, are gone. In fact, given my recent racing history I was rather concerned about getting dropped right out of the pack if things got out of hand.

Jen and Ed and parents, mentoring

With a field of only ten, and two groups not necessarily all racing against each other, things can get out of hand pretty quickly, so from the start I was trying to stay up front. The big attack I was expecting on the hill a few miles after the start didn't materialize, and then VJ stationed himself on the front and just towed everybody for at least five miles at a steady 24-25 mph pace. I'd bet he spent at least half of the entire race on the front. The last four or five miles of this loop feature a bunch of short little hills and lots of curves that make for good attacking conditions. I found myself maybe third wheel, over on the right, when Mike Lew launched an attack up the left side, pulling a few riders behind him. The problem was that those riders kind of eased up when they got even with the front of the pack, so this big gap opened up suddenly and had no place to go. I saw Butch just ahead and to the left hesitate for a moment and then jump to close the gap as the rest of the riders pretty much just sat there, trapping me. By the time I realized the extent of the danger and was finally able to jump myself, the gap was ten to fifteen seconds, I guess. I made a big effort at 28-32 mph trying to make the bridge up to them, and got about three-quarters of the way before I blew up and had to wait to be reabsorbed by the remnant of the group. A couple of miles later Mark McMurry started launching little attacks that I was covering reasonably, but not easily. A few miles after the start of the second lap, where the longer hills are, he attacked again and we separated from the pack. It was immediately clear that Mark was way stronger than I, but I was trying to take short pulls whenever I could to at least justify my presence.

The rest of the lap was basically a 2-man team time trial, except that Mark was doing about 75% of the work at the front while I was sometimes struggling to stay on his wheel. We had long ago lost sight of the 2-man break up the road, and glancing back around ten miles from the finish I couldn't see the rest of the field either. Mark was in the 55+ race while I was in the 60+ race, and likewise the lead break had one rider each, so I don't think either break actually sprinted for the finish. In fact, a mile or so from the finish we decided to see how close we could make the finish so they'd have to use the camera and rolled across the line at about fifteen miles per hour!

Anyway, it is always a fun event and I was pleased to have survived another one. A little while after we finished, the NOBC-packed 40+ women's field came through with Mignon taking the bunch sprint (her first ever). So I ended up 2nd in the 60+, followed by new teammate Will Backstrom, while Rick Selby took 3rd in the 55+ race. There was a little bunch of 10-14 year old Juniors this year, which was a nice development thanks to Jen and Ed Novak's tri/road team. Ed, by the way, finished 12th in the TT at Masters Nationals in Utah about an hour ago.

In the 40+ race Kenny Bellau was in a long break that started with three and finished with just himself and Todd Hickman.  Todd had been apparently pulling like a locomotive for much of the 60 miles they'd been away, and Kenny was confident that he'd be too wasted to mount much of a sprint, so he confidently took the lead over the last kilometer. He was, however, sadly mistaken. Todd launched early and blew past him 100 meters before the line like he was standing still. Todd lives way up in northern Mississippi, practically in a suburb of Memphis, so he does most of his racing up in Tennessee and was apparently a little bit of a mystery to some of the local guys. In fact, Kenny thought he lived in Tennessee and therefore that he would be skipped over for the LAMBRA gold medal, but when I checked I realized that he actually did live in Mississippi.

The Tulane riders are all back in town and riding the local group rides lately, so it's been nice to have a few more young grasshoppers to liven things up. Riding back from the Giro last Saturday we had quite a few with us for the ride home. Speaking of the Tulane team, Tulane's club sports folks have apparently decided that they should be made to suffer like all the other club sports despite the fact that they have a willing and able advisor (me) with a corporate travel card. They don't want to allow me to use my travel card, and instead want they to have to use their personal credit cards for car/van rental, fill out travel expense reports ON PAPER, submit them through Club Sports, wait for Club Sports to send them to Student Activities, who then requests reimbursement via CHECKS that I guess go out in the MAIL.  Brilliant. Instead of a single online expense report done by a single person, we'll process three separate expense reports, tie up student credit for two or three weeks, and do things the way we did in the 80s.

The great western wall

Since we were off for Labor Day, an email went out about a "holiday" Giro Ride. Danielle and I rode out to Starbucks where we eventually found just a few more riders. We ended up doing a lap of Lakeshore Drive, where we picked up a few others, and then went all the way out to the Great Western Wall of Kenner, which we followed past the end of the airport runway, partially on gravel roads, to the levee, which was closed off for the next phase of construction. We rode Jefferson Highway in to River Ridge where we finally could get back onto the bike path. It was a very nice Labor Day ride, actually.

Yesterday I made my way downtown via both car and bike to a short film segment for a new TV show called Lost and Found where they surprise people who have lost things by finding or replacing what they lost. In this case, it was our own Kenny Bellau, who was completely surprised as far as I could tell, and they presented him with a replacement for his mom's old Okeefe & Merrit stove that had been lost in Hurricane Katrina. It should air some time in November, we're told.

That same morning I'd been stuck at home with AT&T trying to get my flaky internet connection problem fixed.  Over the weekend it had gone from bad, where it had been for almost a year, to useless, cutting in and out every few minutes. It was impossible to get anything done, so I finally broke down and resolved myself to another visit by the service folks. Having learned from prior experience, I went first to the online technical service chat, quickly typing in my problem along with my cellphone number and name. As I expected, the connection soon went down and they called me up on my phone, which was exactly what I'd wanted. Anyway they scheduled someone to come the next morning at 8:30 and indeed that's when the guy showed up. I immediately explained to him that on a prior service visit they had replaced the house wiring with nice new twisted pair and tested everything inside and that I therefore expected the problem to lie somewhere out there amongst the 60 year old telephone wires threaded through the oak trees. After testing the connection box down in the basement he apparently agreed and unlike previous service people got the ladder out and climbed  up to test the connection at the drop. He then drove off to test another connection farther up the line, only to return and tell me that there was definitely a line problem (it was cutting in and out for him too) but that it was in a box that he didn't have access to and he'd have to put in a service ticket. Although my hopes weren't very high, when I got home that evening and checked the log I found that it hadn't gone down since 2 pm. A while later I go a text that the problem had been resolved. Amazingly, everything had been rock-stable since then, which is a huge, huge improvement. Let's hope it stays that way this time!