Spring Mileage

The Giro Ride rolls out along Marconi on Saturday.

It's the end of March, which means it's time to put away the long tights and winter jackets and winter gloves and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, it's also that time when I always seem to have entire days off the bike. If it's not officiating, or travelling, or holidays, it's rain or work. Seems I've had a little of all of that in the past month. I have to go all the way back to mid-February to find the last time I had a full, solid week of riding. Granted, the riding I have been doing the last few weeks has been getting progressively harder, partially because I'm intentionally doing more work on the group rides, but also because the group rides have been getting a little faster and more competitive. That's normal, of course, and I guess if I was using a power meter I might not have this nagging feeling I'm missing out on some important training. Compared to prior years, thanks to the neat Stravistix plug-in, it looks like I'm pretty close to where I've been the last two years at 2,581 miles, but a couple hundred shy of where I was at this time back in 2013 and probably even farther behind where I was a couple of years before that.

Last week was going pretty well training-wise until Easter hit. I got in a good Giro Ride on Saturday and was hoping to sneak in some miles on Sunday morning but of course it was raining during my only open window and the rest of the day was already booked.

After Saturday's ride we had some family over for crawfish and stuff, so I had to run out and get a new pop-up shelter since my old one hadn't quite made it through last year's racing and officiating season. On the plus side, Saturday's weather was great, which meant we could sit outside and eat tons of crawfish, drink a lot of sangria and beer, and eat way more cookies, cupcakes and pie than advised by the healthcare community. After some impressive thunderstorms on Sunday, Monday turned out to be so nice that I not only got in a ride in the morning, but I went back out after work for a few more miles. This morning the temperature was around 70F with a pretty significant southeast wind blowing. I overslept and had to rush out the door about fifteen mintues late, racing down Carrollton and Marconi to try and catch the group on Lakeshore Drive.  When I turned off of Marconi onto Lakeshore I could see the flickering lights of the group about 40 seconds up the road, but I was riding into a strong headwind and once they put the hammer down after the Bayou St. John bridge any hope of catching them quickly evaporated. They were probably close to two minutes ahead of me by the time I made a u-turn and inserted myself into the paceline somewhere out past Harrison. By then they had picked up a nice tailwind and it stayed fast all they way down Lakeshore Drive and along the bike path all the way out to the casino boat in Kenner. The average speed from Causeway all the way out to the casio was a bit over 28 mph despite a fairly sedate average heart rate of 144. So it seemed like a hard stretch but really wasn't as hard as it seemed.

I was really sad to hear about a fatality at the University of Washington collegiate race last Saturday. I went and looked at some of the course with Google Maps and then tracked down the Strava data from some of the riders to try and figure out what happened. The reports said that the rider had lost control and hit a guardrail in the Category D race. It looks like the speeds on that curving downhill section of the road course were in the 48-51 mph range, which could be a little scary for some new riders. I don't know any details about what precipitated the crash, but hitting anything at that speed would be terrible. I'll be helping with officiating at the Midwestern State collegiate race in a couple of weeks, but that course should be pretty flat. Even so, it's scary to consider what could happen at pretty much any race. Nobody ever said bicycle racing was the safest activity, of course. Even worse, this came in the same week as two fatalities (a crash where a race moto ran over a rider, and a heart attack at Criterium International) in the Pro ranks, and not long since the near-fatality involving ex-pro Phil Zajicek who literally had his arm ripped off in a downhill collision with a truck and is still fighting for his life.

So another masters racer got suspended, and this one's a real classic. The guy was on a public forum saying he was a 40 year old Cat. 1 masters rider and asking for advice about a doping regemin he'd gotten from an "Age Doctor" who had prescribed the following for him:  ".5ml depo-test 200mg/ml 1x per week, .1ml HCG - human chorionic gonadotropin - /arginine 6x per week, .2ml sermorelin 6x per week, .5mg arimidex 2x per week, 25mg DHEA daily, 25mg pregnenolone daily, 5g d-ribose before training daily, 500mg microhydrin 1x daily before training daily."  Holy crap. His stated goal was Masters Nationals. Well, fortunately somebody must have contacted USADA because they showed up at his door for an out of competition (OCC) test where he tested positive for a number of things indicating anabolic steroid use. At 40 or 41 years old, there's really no excuse for this kind of stuff. I can almost see it for somebody in his mid-60s and up, but even then, if you're being advised to do this kind of hormone supplementation it's time to stop racing against people who aren't. This is going to be a continuing problem for masters racing in all endurance sports, I think. I don't know what the answer is, though. If it turns out to be the standard of practice to put older men on these kinds of programs in order to improve their general health and longevity, there's going to be a big conflict between the perfectly valid goal of staying healthy and the equally desirable goal of being able to compete.

Wind and Wheelsucking

Sitting on the break at Race du Lac for the Hot Spot non-sprint

The reports of flooding all across Louisiana continued throughout the week, and by Thursday I'd heard from Ricky that he wouldn't be able to come down from Monroe to serve as Chief Referee. I had been hoping to unload the LAMBRA race equipment at the start line on Saturday and spend the rest of the weekend pretending to be just another bike racer.  That didn't quite happen, although I tried my best to leave most of the judging and officiating to Mike and Chris (and the four motorefs). For the next couple of days things just kept getting worse.  Interstate 10 was still closed at the Texas state line and on Friday the authorities told the promoter he couldn't put the road race on the planned course because part of it was being used as the detour.  To their great credit, the promoting club secured an alternate course for both the road race and time trial, re-issued the event announcement and race bible and got the word out to almost everyone. A couple of Texas riders showed up at the old location but somehow made it to the start in time anyway, and the turnout was pretty decent in most categories.

One would think that the course changes would have been the biggest issue for this year's Race du Lac over in Lake Charles, but those concerns were completely overshadowed by the wind.  Saturday's road race and time trial were conduced on a mostly barren flat course with a steady north wind I'd estimate at 20 mph with gusts well over that. After making the 4-hour drive that turned into almost 5 hours because I stopped at a gas station en route to wait out a blinding thunderstorm, I to  the Econolodge around 7 or 7:30.  The next morning I got up early and arrived at the start location in the dark to help set things up since I had most of the LAMBRA equipment stuffed into the Volvo. The officials tent was staked down and tied to road signs and, eventually, a vehicle to keep it from blowing away. I would be racing in the first wave, with the masters following the Cat. 1/2/3 and Cat. 4 groups on the 12.5 mile course. At the start of the 1/2/3 road race a number of riders lobbied for an additional lap in order to get the race closer to its original distance and closer to the max upgrade point threshold. The consensus was to add the additional lap, although I wouldn't call it a "vote." Then, a junior rider from Texas had broken  his seat binder bolt making some ill-advised last-minute saddle adjustment (he had one of the new S-Works Power saddles). So the officials delayed the start for a while while he and others tried to MacGyver something, but it wasn't working.  Then, in what turned out to have been a huge mistake, the official suggested that they let him sit out the first lap to fix his bike and get put into the race when the group came through. It was a bad call, but nobody in the field complained when it was suggested, so the group took off on its first lap without him. On the next lap, after he was put into the group as if it had been the free lap in a criterium with 12.5 mile laps, he went off the front in a break with Stephen Mire and ended up finishing 2.5 minutes up on what was left of the group, which had completely shattered along the way. Naturally a number of riders started complaining to the officials as soon as the race finished and the officials ended up penalizing him to take him out of GC contention since, of course, he had not ridden the full distance, which he and his mother, of course, protested. Then they compromised by giving him the 2nd place placing so it would look good on his resume but still docking his time. Later, at the criterium, there was more drama about all of that with his father, with the group finally agreeing, after the race was over, to let his result and time stand for GC, but skipping over him for the GC prizes, which were substantial. Lessons were learned for the officials. One unfortunate rider in the Cat. 5 race came running up to the start line as the race was finishing its first lap, saying that he had flatted during warmup and could he have a free lap. The official did not hesitate a second to say "no" in light of what had happened with the 1/2/3s.

Anyway, back to the masters race.  It was a really small field of only 11 riders for the combined 40+ and 55+ race, of which only 4 were racing 55+. Acadiana had three riders, all in the 40+ race, and Lake Charles had two. The race started out with a long tailwind stretch at around 30 mph, after which was a 90-degree turn into a full-on crosswind from the right.  I knew what was going to happen.  Acadiana pushed the pace while trying to gutter everyone against the centerline. I think maybe a few got dropped, but it was a short stretch so I survived OK.  There were two more crosswind sections. The second one was even shorter, so it wasn't much of a problem. Coming up on the turn into the third crosswind section one of the Acadiana guys attacked hard.  I knew it was a setup, and even though I wasn't technically racing them I felt obliged to try and close it up a bit since I was left on the front. Of course, once I started to blow up, which didn't take long, the counter-attack screamed past, unfortunately for me mostly on the right which left me in the wind, so I got pretty badly gapped off. I watched the string of riders sail around the next turn and pick up the huge tailwind, and followed about 20 seconds back thinking my race was over.  What happened, though, was that a 2-man break had gotten off the front, with one from Acadiana and one from Lake Charles. That left only two riders in the chase group who didn't have a teammate in the break, which was lucky for me.  I put my head down and time-trialed at 30 mph the full length of that section, finally catching the break shortly after the turn onto the first crosswind section on lap two. After that things settled down a lot.  There was maybe one minor attack but otherwise it was turning into a training ride. The break would finish over five minutes up on what was left of the pack, which at that point numbered six. On the last lap there was an attack just before the last turn, about two miles from the finish, and I just couldn't bring myself to dig deeply enough to go with it since I was the only surviving 55+ rider.

The TT that afternoon was on the last 3 miles of the road course, so it was about a mile of crosswind and then two miles of strong tailwind. I hadn't even brought my clip-on aero bars, so I wasn't too motivated for the TT, so I was DFL of the 10 riders left in the race. The Lake Charles rider who had won the Road Race also won the Time Trial, but didn't race on Sunday (he also had an expired license, but that's a whole other story), so that basically left Alex from Acadiana in first place with an insurmountable lead of almost six minutes on Scott going into the criterium.

Sunday morning was cold (like 40s) and very windy (also like 40s).  We tied down the officiating tent and camera tripods and bungied the computers to the tables but by the time it was all over two of the computers and the printer had hit the concrete. Somehow they all survived, which was good because one of those computers had the results on it. The masters race was early, around 8:40, so I rode it with two jerseys and arm-warmers and was never hot. Acadiana apparently wanted to move another of their riders up onto the podium, so predictably launched attacks on the second and third laps that resulted in a 3-man break. With only six other riders in the whole race, and winds in the 20+ mph range, things kind of shattered right away.  I found a nice home with Peter Stephens and so we just started trading pulls with I think one solo rider in-between us and the break. A while later my rear tire suddenly went flat and I had to stop at the pit where the guy who was there grabbed my spare rear wheel and inexplicably unscrewed the quick-release as I commented, "What are you doing?  There aren't lawyer tabs on rear dropouts." Anyway, on the next lap I was back with Peter but right away we got lapped by the break. I said "Come on, Peter!" as they came by and I latched onto them, but he was still hurting from that lap and a half alone and didn't catch the draft. So for a long time I just sat at the back of the 3-man break, with the two Acadiana riders taking pulls and Scott Gurganus just sitting on. I was wondering why they weren't attacking him, but later found out they had all come to an agreement since Acadiana needed to make sure they put enough time on the rest of the field to secure 3rd place.

Anyway, that was all great until, just a few laps before the finish, we lapped Peter and the other rider who had been out there alone. The two motos, one that was the lead for the break that I was with and the other that was the tail-gunner who was following Peter, came together in the middle of the twisty part of the course and I had to hit the brakes and go around one of them in a turn, losing the draft of the break. So now I was with Peter and the previously lone rider, Michael, for the last few laps.  I didn't really sprint very hard at the finish and ended up in 5th overall for the Crit, 1st for the diminutive 55+ group, and the same on GC, which was nice since I won enough to pay for my hotel room and I guess some of the entry fee. Overall, I felt like my fitness was beginning to come around, and it was clear that the only way I'm going to get anywhere this season is if I race more because my normal group rides aren't really doing it for me.  Of course, there are always solo interval workouts, but really, I'm too old for that shit. 3

I spent the rest of the day shiverring in the cold with jeans and a jacket over my slightly sweaty riding clothes helping sort out the results and trying to keep things from blowing away.  A wind like that makes officiating so much harder! Fortunately the cameras survived and worked well, so other than one rider who we skipped over when inputting results, that all went fine. Despite the 4-hour drive back to New Orleans, I was still home in time for dinner.

Rouge Roubaix Weekend

Rouge-Roubaix Pro/1/2 field ready to go.

The weather for the past few days had been absolutely terrible. By Friday there were flash flood warnings all over Louisiana, and the forecast for Saturday wasn't looking to improve a whole lot. Somehow, the worst of it was consistently sliding just north of New Orleans, so while people just across Lake Pontchartrain were watching the rivers overflowing their banks and flooding their houses, we were still getting in most of our regular training rides. I had innocently offered to help with officiating Rouge Roubaix some time back, largely because most of the LAMBRA equipment was still at my house and I'd need to get it up there anyway. Complicating the whole weekend, though, was an NCURA conference here in town that I needed to attend on Thursday and Friday. That put a bit of a dent in my weekday riding routine, but of course I knew I'd be off the bike entirely on Sunday.

Saturday morning rolled around and although the sky was cloudy and there was a steadily increasing chance of rain throughout the day, we got in a pretty good Giro Ride with a somewhat smaller than usual group. Then I got the bad news I'd been expecting. Ricky wasn't going to be able to come down and officiate because of all of the flooding up around Monroe. He works for the Public Works department up there, and was still dealing with flooded roads and associated problems all over the parish. It was going to be just Chris, Mike and me at the finish line, so I knew results would be coming out a little more slowly than usual. A couple of hours later I was loading up the Volvo with tables, tripods, tents, generator, and all the other stuff you need to pull of the deceptively complicated task of making a list of riders when they cross the finish line. I got up to St. Francisville around when late registration and packet pickup opened and got to work populating the multiple spreadsheets as people picked up their numbers and signed their waivers. There were the usual ones who hadn't renewed licenses, wanted to sign release forms for other people, or were running late because they'd hit a deer and the front of their car was being held together with bungie cords from a gas station. Situation normal.  We closed up registration around 7 and so I had lots of time to relax in my own room at The Bluffs as I double-checked the pre-registrations.  There were still a lot of people who would be picking up numbers early the next morning, of course. All this time the actual race course was in a state of flux. They had already had to cut out two of the prime gravel sections because of the rain and flooding, and were going back and forth about whether to bypass the "lowwater bridge" that was to take riders out of and back into St. Francisville.  It was still under water on Saturday but they were thinking it might be OK on Sunday. The police were pushing for it because the alternate route meant putting riders onto busy Highway 61 for a while. We wouldn't know the final course until 7 am the next morning.

So Sunday morning I headed back to the start, which wasn't the finish, for 6 am and we got everyone signed up. With an already announced half-hour delay because of the route change (the lowwater bridge was still impassable), we weren't too rushed and we started each of the five groups right on time. We were trying out the new LAMBRA radios for the lead vehicles. The results were unimpressive, as I would later learn. We were also trying out Zello, which actually turned out to be extremely useful. Anyway, after the start we immediately went to the finish line about a mile away. The shortened race distance was 100 miles, so I was figuring we wouldn't see any riders for at least four hours. As it turned out, the winning Pro/1/2 riders arrived at 3:47.  Anyway, I spoke briefly with the USADA representative, who was on hand to do some testing, and we got the finish line tents up, computers and cameras set, finish line down, communication equipment going, generator going, etc. We didn't have long to wait until the first riders came up the hill from the river, and from then on it was a steady stream for about 4 hours.  I guess the biggest group left had about ten riders, but there were usually no more than a couple still sprinting by the time they crossed the line.  Most were just glad it was over. I was calling numbers and times into my recorder as Chris was writing them down and Mike was writing and checking the finish line camera when necessary to confirm numbers or finish order. During the increasingly brief lulls I was entering places and times into the results sheets. After about an hour, it became very difficult to sort out the finish order for each race since the slower riders from multiple races were all pretty well intermixed. At the same time, the amount of time I had in-between finishers to do data entry was steadily decreasing, so I soon stopped entering times at all and we just tried to make sure we could get the promoters all of the placings that were in the money. Everyone else would just have to wait until later. I guess it was around 6 pm by the time I headed back to New Orleans, and nearly midnight by the time I'd transcribed all of my times and placings from the recorder, cleaned up the results, entered the times, and posted to the website and facebook pages. On the way home, I contemplated whether it would have been easier to have ridden the race instead.  Indeed, this was probably one of the easiest and fastest Rouge Roubaix races of the last ten years thanks to the loss of two gravel segments and the six miles shorter race distance. It will probably be another day or two before people stop emailing me about errors or omissions in the results and I'm comfortable sending them to Robert to upload to USAC.

The Rest of the Week

This morning I went out  into the darkness to meet the WeMoRi at the lakefront. It was windy. I put in 27 miles at an average speed of 17.6 mph.  The wind was faster, averaging 18 out of the southeast, although the gusts were considerably stronger.  Riding along the park on Marconi I sat up briefly to unzip my jersey and a gust of wind almost blew me right off the bike.  That was the last time I took my hands off the bars that morning. At the moment, the wind is blowing at 27 mph.

I rode out to the Bayou St. John bridge, turned around and waited to be caught by what I assumed would be a pack going 30 mph. Somewhere on Marconi a handful of riders came by.  I jumped onto the tail end and glanced back but couldn't see anyone else. The headwind on Lakeshore Drive had decimated the group, which was smaller than usual to start with. So we did a reasonably brisk ride around the park, but by the time we got back to Lakeshore Drive we were down to only three. The rest had already called it a day. Instead of riding all the way out to the Seabrook loop and dealing with both the wind and the traffic, we instead turned around at the Elysian Fields circle, which may become the standard route next week since the ride has been losing a lot of people who don't want to do a full second lap of Lakeshore Drive. I ended up with a decent enough workout for a Wednesday, which for me is typically a quasi-recovery day where I only make a few brief efforts and otherwise try to stay protected.  It wasn't so easy to do today, though.

Tomorrow begins a 2-day NCURA Pre-Award conference downtown here in New Orleans. It also begins a couple of days of sketchy weather.  Between the time constraints and the weather, I may not be able to get in much, if any, riding until Saturday. I'd really been counting on being able to ride the Giro on Saturday. Naturally the forecast for Saturday morning is currently showing a 100% chance of rain. The National Council of University Research Administrators conference will probably consume all of Thursday and most of Thursday night since I'm signed up for a dinner group as some touristy restaurant on Bourbon Street. At least I'll get to hear all about PCORI, NIH, Uniform Guidance, faculty incentives, compliance, ARPA-E, and all the other hurdles standing between university researchers and their funding. Should be fun. I'll also be occasionally staffing the local concierge table where I will be dispensing questionable information about restaurants, local attractions, and various other tidbits of misinformation.

Saturday I'll be heading up to St. Francisville to help officiate Rouge-Roubaix on Sunday. If the heaviest rain misses the area it won't be too bad, but I have to wonder what the gravel and dirt sections will be like if there's a ton of rainfall on Saturday. It's looking like the race itself (I'm not handling the Gran Fondo ride on Saturday) will have around 300 riders across six races, including a Cat. 5 field that's looking like it will hit its 75-rider field limit. Fortunately, we rarely see any big bunch sprints thanks to the course, distance, and generally uphill finish.  We'll be running two finish line cameras anyway since there's some big money involved in a few of the races and over the course of 104 miles there's lots of overlapping of riders in different groups. All I'm hoping for is to have no serious injuries and the ability to read all of the bib numbers that come across the line, which I already know won't be likely. Ricky called me this morning to say that if the flooding in north Louisiana continues he may not be able to come down to officiate, which would be a big loss. Anyway, it will be another busy weekend.

Hell's Kitchen

Fayetteville overlook.

Last weekend I drove up to Fayetteville, AR for a dual-conference collegiate race that also offered a non-collegiate Ca.t 1/2/3 race. We had only two of the Tulane riders, Ben and Katie, for this trip, I guess mainly because it's a 10-hour drive each way. Well, that's not counting the extra mileage to and from the hotel that was another half-hour plus from Fayetteville and practically within walking distance from Oklahoma. Anyway, unlike last year, the weather was great, which is to say it wasn't freezing cold and/or raining.

First up on Saturday was a 6.7 mile TT with a bit over 1,500 feet of climbing. I was planning to put in a decent effort on that, but didn't want to trash my legs too badly since there was a far worse road race that afternoon. I rode this one watching my heart rate, keeping it generally in the 170 range which is around 90-92% max HR. The course was pretty steep for the first half, but the second half offered slightly easier grades and some short downhills, so it wasn't really as bad as I'd expected and I finished with my legs none the worse for wear.  Couldn't say the same for my lungs, however.  They wouldn't recover from the cool dry air for another day and a half. As expected, my time placed me DFL among the mere 5 riders who had registered in that category.  No surprise there. Dustin, who started 30 seconds behind me, passed me I guess within the first mile and a half and placed 3rd, finishing I think around two and a half minutes faster.  I'd know for sure if they had ever posted my TT result, but in typical collegiate race fashion, and despite more blueshirts than you could shake a stick at, I was listed as DNS and without a bib number. Ben finished a respectable 10th out of 17 in the Bs and Katie 3rd out of 4 in the Women B.

Yeah, I thought that seemed hard.

So that afternoon was the dreaded road race with the even more dreaded Hell's Kitchen climb. This is one of those climbs that always makes me wonder if maybe I should just stop and walk the rest of the way up. For the non-collegiate racers (there was a A-Cat. 1/2/3 group and a B-Cat. 4/5 group) we were all lumped together. I thought that might prove to be a good thing for me.  You know, more wheels to follow. Wrong!  I guess a couple of the teams (yes, there were a couple of teams with significant numbers) decided it would be prudent to shell the slower riders immediately rather than risk having them muck up the race, so the second we got out of the brief "neutral" zone the pace went to around 30 mph and just stayed there. Immediately, gaps started to open, and as usual I was near the back having gambled on a nice big group to draft off of. Within a couple of miles a fairly big group split off the front and I found myself in a much smaller group of maybe eight making an extremely disorganized effort to chase. There was one women in with us who was strong and trying to keep things organized but it wasn't working very well.  We weren't going very slow, averaging around 25 mph, and made some brief progress closing the gap, but from my perspective it was clear our race was over by the time we were seven or eight miles in. We hit the big climb at around 10 miles and as usual things kind of blew apart. I was down to 6 mph in the 39x27 for a bit. Like last year, I came over the top in-between two small groups and eventually we came together to make a group of maybe seven, I guess.  The second lap was a little slower since it was clear to everyone that the main group was long gone, but it was by no means easy. The race was only 44 miles and I had over 2,900 feet of climbing. I was feeling OK most of the time, but definitely hurting on the steeper climbs. The second time up the big Hell's Kitchen climb, which was around a kilometer I guess, three riders separated and, once again, I found myself in-between them and a group of four or so behind me. When I made the left turn, about half a mile after the top of the climb, and felt the headwind I decided I may as well wait for the second group to catch me because there was no way I was going to close what was by then around a 40 second gap to the three riders ahead. Once we got back together things settled down a bit and there was even a period of actual paceline where almost everyone was taking pulls. I figured since we were all probably ten minutes OTB by then we'd just roll back to the finish line in civilized fashion. Then, just as I'd finished taking a pull, one of the riders went sprinting up a hill to my right with a few more on his wheel. I was pretty surprised and under the circumstances never really had a chance to go with them. That left me alone with a few riders behind me. As I soon realized, the attacking riders must have known that was the last climb before the turn to the finish about two miles away. Since I had entered this race with a "training ride" mindset, I didn't even know for sure how long it was. Anyway, I rode in to the finish for 18th place in the Cat. 1/2/3 race and I don't know what place overall among the combined field, but despite the unimpressive placing I felt like I'd gotten the good hard training ride I'd come for. As I found out later, Dustin had gotten into a late 6-rider break from which he'd won the sprint, which I found very impressive considering the competition and course profile.

Ben finished with a 3-man group either 9th or 14th depending on whether you believe the results they sent out this morning or what he actually believes to be true. How they managed to screw up the registration and results in a race like this is beyond me. The RR finish area was basically a nightmare with farm equipment, hay trucks, and numerous ambulances and fire trucks going past on the narrow country road. Again, I think there were at least five officials at the finish line. They scored one of the B women who had bailed after the first lap of their 2-lap race as winning, so Katie and Ben had to protest the finish order that was eventually posted the following day. I think they also had Ben as a DNF initially.

So that brings me to the ill-fated criterium held on the University of Arkansas campus. We took our time getting there that morning since there were some junior races scheduled first, and when we arrived I was surprised to find that none of the races had started yet.  They were already about an hour behind schedule. The course looked fairly brutal with a very steep two block climb to the finish and a fast downhill turn a couple of corners earlier. It would have been exciting to watch, if only for the inevitable crashes. When it looked like they were finally getting ready to start the Cat. D men, we went down to the downhill turn to see how the new riders negotiated it. What we found was disconcerting.  There were probably ten cars still parked on the course, one of which was on the inside of the fast downhill corner, and the other on the outside of the final corner.  Pretty much the worst places possible. We waited as they were apparently trying to get the cars towed off the course, but the only thing that was happening was that other cars, along with three or four full school buses, were randomly showing up driving on the course. It was almost two hours past the original start time that I said to the hapless corner monitor that if I was the official I'd be thinking about cancelling the criterium about now.  Well, as it turned out that's exactly what the official was thinking. I gave up waiting a few minutes later and rode back up the hill to the parking area to find out the criterium had been cancelled and that Ben and Katie were planning on going for a training ride with the LSU guys instead. Other teams likewise packed up and headed home or went off to find someplace to do a ride. I'd been told we were going to ride out highway 17 for an hour or so and then come back to load up and head home. Well, apparently the plan changed and so I'm following the group as Dustin is leading them up steeper and steeper little neighborhood roads. It turned out they'd decided instead to ride up to this scenic overlook about 500 feet straight up. So I'm in like the 39x27 wondering where the hell we're going as the guys are sprinting up the climbs. I ended up doing under 8 miles that was a far cry from the nice recovery ride I'd been promised.

Thanks to the cancelled criterium, we got back to New Orleans as the relatively reasonable hour of 10:00 or so instead of 1 am like we'd been expecting, so that was kind of nice.

Crosswinds and Eschelons

I got home yesterday from work and was glad to find the replacement derailleur hanger for the Bianchi in the mail. After putting some rice on the stove for stir-fry I was planning to throw together later, I went downstairs to bolt it onto the dropout and put the derailleur back where it belongs.  I was surprised to find that after installing a brand new hanger it was still significantly out of alignment (yeah, I have one of these). I was pretty reluctant to put too much pressure on the new hanger, since the problem is more likely to be with the dropout itself, so I just tweaked it a little bit and got it reasonably close and left it that way.  Everything seemed to shift fine and it's not close to the spokes when on the big cog, so I'll see how that goes.  If it really starts bugging me, I'll probably order a backup derailleur hanger first before applying any significant force to it though.

So the pre-dawn weather was kind of like yesterday, only with a bit less wind and a cloudy sky that of course we didn't know about for sure until half an hour later. Summer kit plus arm and leg warmers. Just as we rolled out at 5:45 we felt a tiny amount of misty rain, but it ended as quickly as it had started. Nothing was in the forecast until evening, and as it looks now we probably won't get much more than an occasional sprinkle anyway.

With the prospect of some real hills looming over my head this coming weekend, I didn't want to do any damage this morning, so I was trying to stay toward the back. Taking it easy wasn't quite as easy as it would seem, however, since the wind was mostly from the southeast and the ride was mostly east and west - in other words, crosswinds and eschelons. The pace today was brisk but not brutal, and so the biggest challenge was really just staying in a position that offered a little draft, otherwise knows as riding in the gutter. Despite my best intentions, it did put in a couple of efforts here and there, spending a few minutes in the 80-90% max heart rate range, but mostly I was just cruising along with the group. I've been using the Chrome extension for Strava called StravistiX, that is pretty neat. I particularly like the 75th quartile numbers it provides. For example, while my average speed for the morning ride might have been only 18.5 mph, the 75th quartile figure of 21.5 excludes a lot of the commute back and forth through traffic and stop lights and all, so it's a bit more representative of what the meaty part of the ride actually felt like. It does the same thing for heart rate, power, etc., and calculates a "Toughness Factor" using some methodology apparently not susceptible to normal means of analysis - something about reserve heart rate and other factors. Anyway it does seem to be useful in comparing one ride to another.

Tomorrow I'll have to go pick up the rental minivan from Enterprise and pick up a couple of riders for the 9.5-10 hour drive up to Fayetteville for the Arkansas Classic.  Most of that drive is fine, but there are a couple of long stretches on country roads that can be uncomfortable at night, especially if it's raining like it was last year when we were driving back. It's looking like we won't have any bad weather this time, though. The temperature Saturday morning for the time trial should be in the mid-40s with zero chance of rain, rising into the mid-upper 60s by afternoon, so the road race should be fine. I'm riding the 1/2/3 race that has 17 people pre-registered right now, a couple of whom are Cat. 1s, so I'm expecting to get my ass kicked pretty bad by the combination of hills and riders almost young enough to be my grandchildren. It should be a good workout, though. I won't be doing the criterium on Sunday since it's last and we're going to need all the time we can get if we want to be back in New Orleans by like 1 am.

Which Way?

Nice TR3 scenery on the way to work.

I could hear the trees blowing in the wind outside as I pulled on both arm and leg-warmers at 5:30 this morning. Another cold front had come through, dropping temperatures just a bit into the upper 50s, and I knew before opening the door it would be a long ride out to the lakefront. I've been on the old Orbea while waiting for a replacement derailleur hanger for the Bianchi. I'd straightened the hanger a couple of weeks ago after it was slightly bent when someone knocked it over at Starbucks prior to a Giro Ride, but then last weekend it spend the whole time in the panel van crammed up against all of the race equipment. It wouldn't normally have been a problem, but there had been this one situation where I'd had to slam on the brakes to keep some clueless person from hitting us. Everything slid forward, including a stack of about 25 traffic cones that crammed into the derailleur.  When I took the bike out of the van Sunday afternoon I could see that the hanger was bent again.  One thing about aluminum derailleur hangers - you don't usually get a second chance.  I put the derailleur alignment tool on it and it was pretty dramatically bent, so I knew I had about a 50% chance it wouldn't break when I tried to straighten it.  Well, I lost that coin-toss.  Anyway, I digress.

So I got out to the lakefront, rode down to the Bayou St. John bridge, turned around and was half-way back when Woody, Jaden and Rob came by.  They weren't really killing it, going about 25 mph, so I jumped onto the tail end as my heart rate went from 98 bpm to 140 in about twenty seconds. We sped up a bit on Marconi, and then when we got to Robert E. Lee, Rob went straight instead of turning (we never found out if he was unfamiliar with the new route or just was heading home), almost taking Jaden and me down. I was back on Woody's wheel right away, but Jaden I think had to make a U-turn on Marconi and then chase back to us, so we eased up to wait for him. It wasn't until we were on Wisner that we were back together. By then I was already skipping pulls now and then to keep from dropping the pace in the cross/tail wind that pushed us up to the 28-29 mph range. We made the circuit around the park and then at Robert E. Lee Jaden sat up, leaving just Woody and me to contend with the 18-20 mph headwind going east on Lakeshore Drive. Woody was doing 90% of the work while I was taking very brief and increasingly infrequent pulls to give him a little break. I think there was a group chasing us not too far behind, but I never actually looked back since all my concentration was focused on staying as close to Woody's wheel as possible. Once we made the loop at Seabrook and picked up the tailwind I never saw the front again.  Woody just motored the five miles back to West End at an average speed of 28 mph with a little kick at the end up to 33.6.

So it looks like I'll be driving up to Fayetteville on Friday with a couple of the Tulane riders for the University of Arkansas race. They're doing a non-collegiate Cat. 1-3 race, so I'll do the TT and RR on Saturday with the absolute certainty of being dropped like a rock on the 10% climb in the road race. Hopefully I will get the replacement derailleur hanger today, so the Bianchi should be back in action. I wonder if I should put my special "Six Gap" 12-27 cassette on there for this one or just make do with the 25.  It should be a good workout either way.

Road Trip Weekends

The Green Wave Classic - Criterium at Lakeshore High

'Tis the season for long road trips to bike races and, perchance, to race. First up was the criterium up in Monroe. This one is often cold or rainy or windy or some combination thereof, and I skip it as often as not. At the end of the cyclocross series I ended up with much of the LAMBRA equipment, so I not only needed to get it up to Monroe for the race, I also needed to get it back to NOLA for the Tulane collegiate race the following weekend. Fortunately, Stanton was interested in going, so I had company for the drive.

Kuppersmith goes, taking Kevin with him

This year the weather was pretty nice - amazingly nice actually, for mid-February. I'm talking summer kit here. There was a pretty strong headwind along the finish straight, and it was overcast, but otherwise it might have been a nice Spring day. I signed up for the Masters race, which had a 15-rider field - pretty typical for this low-key race. From the start I clipped in quickly and put some pressure on the pedals through the first turn before easing a bit to slot in a few riders farther back as my breathing struggled to keep up with my legs. Half a lap later there was a surge, and then another one, and before we'd finished two laps Scott Kuppersmith and Kevin Landry had rolled off the front with a quickly expanding gap. That kind of strung out the field and with gaps opening up all over the place I soon found myself with two other riders chasing the main chase group of about five. Those two riders kind of blew up after a couple of laps, and although I'd made up a lot of the gap, I knew I'd never close it alone, so I just settled into a moderate pace as the gap continued to grow.

Eventually the two-rider break came around and lapped me, so I tagged along for a few laps, which was really quite easy and nice, until Scott surged again and I was back on my own. Somewhere along the way two or three riders had split off the chase pack and soon they lapped me, so I got onto the back of that little group and had a pretty easy time sitting on along with one other rider who might have been lapped as well. With just a few laps to go I was surprised to see that we were catching that original chase group, now the 3rd group, and with two laps to go we caught, so I'd gotten a free ride back up to the group I'd originally been chasing and would be sprinting for, I guess, 5th. I had a decent enough sprint and ended up 8th, which was the 1st 55+ rider, so I got a little cash to cover my entry fee. Scott won the masters race and then also won the Cat. 1/2/3 race. Not a surprise. It was a pretty nice day.

Last weekend was the Green Wave Classic collegiate race. Planning and preparation for this year's race had been going really slowly and there were a lot of things that were in danger of falling through the cracks. Volunteers were few and far between, which means for the road races and time trial I basically had Danielle and Fred Schroeder.

Measuring and marking the TT course

Fortunately I'd taken Friday off from work and gone up there to mark and ride the RR and TT courses, and we had five police officers lined up for the RR plus three for the TT, so the fact that we didn't have the corner monitors we needed would probably not result in disaster. On Thursday I'd received a batch of new Bao Feng radios about which I knew essentially nothing. On Saturday I pulled them out of the boxes with whatever charge the batteries had received in China, figured out how to set them to Channel #1, whatever that was, and handed them out to the follow cars. Although we clearly should get some longer magnetic mount antennas for the follow cars, they worked pretty well despite the fact that the finish line was down in a low spot on the course. For the RR I had Tim Thompson as Chief Judge, which helped a whole lot. The new SCCCC co-director, Ben, had come over from Texas land to help and do the conference scoring, so at least I had one other actual official at the finish line. It would have been nice if he'd helped me with my own race scoring rather than essentially ignoring the official race results and duplicating all of the results on his own computer with a Google Docs spreadsheet of which he was extremely proud. I had my spreadsheets set up to calculate conference points, so he really could have done all of that after the fact, although I did find a mistake in one of my formulas when our points figures didn't match up. On the plus side, he was pretty good at judging and picking places and keeping track of lapped riders and such. 

The Time Trial was on a "Plan C" course, so it wasn't my first choice, but at least it was a smooth and scenic road. I'd marked out the 4-mile out-and-back course on Friday with offset start and finish lines, and we had gotten permission to use a paved parking lot in front of a big show barn, so with three police officers on tap to slow down the speeding cars, of which I expected more than a few, I wasn't feeling too bad about it all - until we arrived.  Right in-between my start and finish lines there was a huge power company truck with flashing lights and traffic cones and a couple of guys standing around looking at a pole that had been snapped in half by a car some time earlier. Checking with them I discovered that they were waiting for an even bigger truck with a big replacement pole to arrive pretty much at any time.  So we ended up moving the start and finish up the road a bit, which meant that the distance was something less than the advertised 4 miles. Fortunately the police were very good and we got everybody off on time without too much confusion. I was glad that Danielle was there because she was the only person recording times at the finish. As I was starting one of the first few riders (at 30-second intervals), Ben walks up and sticks his own start sheet with numbers and names in about 6 point type right on top of the paper I'm using to record bib numbers and start times. I ripped if off and handed it back to him and fortunately didn't have the time or energy to completely blow up about it. I mean, there are lots of ways to handle the start of a TT, and I've got mine that has evolved and worked extremely well for the past, oh, thirty-five years, so I really don't need to have somebody come along and try to tell me to do it his way after the race has started.

Sunday was the criterium at Lakeshore High, and once again we discovered after the first race was underway that there was some kind of baseball practice going on that we hadn't been made aware of. That meant shuttling baseball moms on one side of the course in-between gaps in the races. Since we had essentially one volunteer who couldn't stay the whole day, we were lucky that Mike Lew showed up and was willing to spend most of his time playing traffic cop along with a couple of the Tulane riders at the other end of the road. Somehow nobody got hit despite the fact that the Cat. A riders came around the first corner on their first lap to meet head-on with a string of five or six cars because the corner monitors didn't know that the race had started. As soon as I arrived to set up the finish line I knew we'd be running late. Most of the Tulane riders were busy warming up or just basically not around, so it was basically just me and Danielle and one or two others to unload the van and set everything up.

As I was setting up the finish cameras, which I'm really not too experienced with, I remembered that last year we'd had trouble reading the numbers because we were on the wrong side of the road and there was a lot of glare from the sun, but it was too late to fix that by then. As a result, the cameras didn't really help all that much, but then again we didn't have any really super-close finishes. The only problem was with riders who had their numbers pinned on way too high on their backs for us to read. I guess they thought we were using helicopter cameras or something. Anyway, we somehow survived despite being rather severely under-staffed and arrived back home pretty much exhausted.

There's another collegiate race in Fayetteville, Arkansas next weekend. It has a separate non-collegiate "A" race and "B" race, so if I end up driving up there I'll be able to do a hard uphill time trial and a painfully hilly road race, which will be much better than missing three days of riding.