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.