Feast or Famine

Last week, specifically the one before the one we're currently in, was a nice solid training week for me. The weather has been starting to feel more and more like summer, which always makes me feel better on the bike, and there weren't many issues with rain or work to interfere with the routine. On the other hand, there weren't any races within reasonable driving distance, so although I may have felt good on the training rides, I know deep down that this feast or famine race calendar wasn't really doing me any good. You would think I'd have more than one race to my credit for the month of April.

Last weekend's Giro Rides were good, and it was nice to see Traci and Gary Rodosta in town from the relatively frigid northeast. With a number of the local riders up in Arkansas at Joe Martin, and one or two others missing, the Giro Rides seemed fast but maybe a little smoother than usual. Speaking of Fayetteville, there were some pretty impressive results turned in by LAMBRA riders. Although most of "our" guys in the extremely competitive Cat. 1/2 races didn't make the first page of results, there were some promising results to be found (there were apparently a fair amount of issues with results, but that's another story). In the Cat. 3 race, Lance Abshire was 5th in the TT, 15th in the RR, and 22nd in the Crit, so ended up 6th on GC, which would be impressive for this 65-rider race even if he wasn't 14 years old and riding junior gears. There were some others in there with impressive results as well. In the Cat. 5 race one of the local guys won, although I cannot figure out why that race had only 17 riders.

Early this week I had a visit from an old high school friend that was nice. It hardly seems like it's been over 45 years. On the other hand, we're at that age now when hearing about the death of someone you knew, either personally or as some sort of celebrity, is practically a weekly event. Late last week we learned that a former club member, Richard Beck, had died. That was around the same time I heard that Pat Fresneda had crashed on the levee bike path and broken a collarbone. I think he's supposed to have surgery next week to fix that since it was a well-displaced distal break.

This week's training has been pretty hit-and-miss. Although I got in 287 miles last week, work and other things have been getting in the way this week. I had to cut Tuesday's morning ride short, and then on Wednesday couldn't get out in the morning at all, so squeezed in a few miles after work on the levee instead. This morning I had to take Danielle to the airport in the morning, so it remains to be seen if the rain that subsequently moved in will allow for another evening ride. The Tulane team is heading over to College Station, Texas for the conference championship, so I think I will probably be driving. It looks like I'll be allowed to enter as an Alumnus and sit at the back of the A races, at least until I get gapped off, so at least I should be able to get in a few miles that way. Unfortunately it's looking like rain for the Saturday road races, but hopefully nothing like the complete wash-out they had at the last collegiate race. I think I'll be lucky to log 150 miles for the week with very little in the way of intensity.

Interestingly, and appropos to a blog by an old guy, a recent Tulane publication offers a credible explanation for why old guys like me have such a hard time dealing with sugar. The bottom line is basically that without adequate testosterone levels, blood sugar regulations goes south, which can end up clinically as diabetes. Of course, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case I figure all I need to do is become clinically diabetic and then USAC might give me a TUE for testosterone.

Wet Feet in Wichita Falls

Things started going downhill, figuratively rather than topologically speaking, on Tuesday. Leaving  uptown in the dark, the streets were dry and the air warm and muggy. Halfway there, somewhere along Marconi in City Park, the temperature suddenly dropped and the wind suddenly increased. Near Robert E. Lee the streets were wet, and then when we turned onto Lakeshore Drive we hit a brutal wind and the streets were completely soaked as if a big rainstorm had ended just moments before. We bailed out to do a lap around City Park where the wheelspray wouldn't be quite so bad, but halfway through the second lap it started raining and we headed back home. Wednesday morning it was raining, but I managed to get in a few miles in the evening after work. Then Thursday was completely rained out. I rode to work in the rain and spend the whole day with wet feet and soggy pant legs. Friday we were leaving for the 10-hour drive to Wichita Falls for the MSU races, but I was desperate enough to log a few miles before stopping at Enterprise car rental to pick up a minivan for the trip. Total mileage for Monday through Friday: 92 miles.

Wednesday afternoon

The drive to Wichita Falls was long, but the weather was fine despite the forecast. We were expecting some rain on Saturday and then a ton of rain on Sunday. The skeleton crew that was racing decided to skip the morning time trial, but I was already committed to helping to officiate in a couple of follow cars, so I headed out on the bike in the dark with a very heavy messenger bag and Dustin who wanted to ride the Open time trial. I had mapped out the route on google maps and put an earphone in my ear so I could listen to the directions as I rode, which worked out pretty well. The sky wasn't looking too good, but it wasn't raining.  Yet. The team TT start was the usual chaotic situation, caused by the fact that they didn't know which teams would be riding, or who would be on those teams, and they hadn't posted any sort of start list. So there was one official trying to line up teams roughly in order of category, and another starting them at one-minute intervals. I ended up showing the riders the TT course as they were in line, since most of them didn't know the course and didn't even know if it was out-and-back or something else (it was something else). I don't know why they don't require the teams to specify who is riding what at registration so they can post a start list, but basically registration was pretty much a hit-and-miss affair anyway. They were telling riders that if they had pre-registered online they didn't need to check in, so as a result they weren't confirming bib numbers or even actual attendance, which ultimately caused a few problems with the results. I think they may still have a couple of placings for which they have bib numbers that don't match the list they were working from, so basically they don't know who those riders were.

After the teams there were a few individual TT riders, one of which was Dustin who posted the fastest ITT time, except that they did the math wrong initially and had him two minutes slower than he was. After the TT session there was just about an hour before I had to be at the road race start which was where the TT finish had been. I rode a couple of miles back to the bike shop where they were doing registration, hung around there for a little while, then headed to the RR start.

First off, I was in the follow car for the Category D men. This was a fairly good-sized field, but as expected it started to blow apart right away. Eventually it was down to a fairly small but un-aggressive group, so it came down to a sprint. As we rounded the last bend in the road the sprint had already started, and suddenly I saw a bike fly up into the air off to the right. A rider was stretched out in the road and wasn't moving as we passed and parked the truck. There were like five officials on hand and when I got there the MSU rider was conscious again but had clearly suffered a concussion. They called an ambulance immediately as the injured rider, lacking any semblance of short-term memory, kept asking the same questions over and over again - typical of bike race concussion victims: "How did I get here?" "Why is my jersey torn?" By the time he was loaded into the ambulance he had figured out he'd been in a crash and was asking if anyone else went down. The local hospital apparently kept him for observation for a while and then released him, suggesting only that he take it easy on the bike. By the time the second wave of road races was ready to start it was raining, luckily only lightly. I piled into the Men's B follow car for what turned out to be a fairly boring race. They lost a few riders to attrition and flats, but in general the group stayed together. Tulane looked to be the only team with more than one rider in the resulting 9-rider group, but for some reason they decided to just ride tempo rather than try to get one of them off the front. The result was 3rd and 4th places, which were OK. Naturally, they had Ben's number wrong since the list they were using came from the Arkansas race where they also had Ben's number wrong, so I had to get that fixed after they posted results showing a mystery rider in 4th place. Anyway, by then my feet were pretty wet, but I'd never been really stuck in any heavy rain, so it wasn't too bad. I was glad that we hadn't had any big thunderstorms to deal with.

Making do after a cancelled criterium

That night the weather went downhill considerably with multiple thunderstorms. The first criterium was scheduled for 8 am on campus, which was just about a mile away, so I waited  until the last minute, put on my rain jacket and rode over there in jeans and regular shoes. There was a little lull in the rain, which is to say it was raining, but not "pouring" so although my feet and legs and head got quite wet it wasn't too bad. I arrived at the start after riding through a few places where the water was flowing across the road, only to find nobody but one of the officials and the MSU coach. He'd sent out a notice saying that the chief referee had cancelled criteriums a few minutes earlier. The forecast was for heavy thunderstorms all day, so there really wasn't much hope, and with a couple of corners featuring slick fake bricks I guess it might have gotten ugly for the newer riders. The Tulane riders set up trainers in the hotel fitness room and got in an hour or so of exercise before we headed back home. On the plus side, that meant we'd be home around 10:30 pm instead of 2:30 pm like we'd been expecting.

Today the weather here was pretty nice and I did the usual Tuesday morning group ride. The sun is starting to come up now around the time we're on Lakeshore Drive, so that's encouraging. Not so encouraging was my discovery on Monday that they have torn up a small section of the levee bike path, presumably to fix some bad work there, and haven't provided any reasonable way to go around it other than riding down the grass into River Road traffic. How all of this work on the levee bike path can take so freaking long is completely beyond me. The contractor who did the bike path work did a lousy job in my opinion, and now apparently the Corps of Engineers agrees, albeit rather late in the game.

Harbor Master Masters

Sunday wasn't just Paris-Roubaix, it was also the Harbor Master Criterium, a local race now in its third year. Originally located at South Shore Harbor in the parking lot of an abandoned casino boat operation, they had to find a new venue this year because the South Shore Harbor property was finally under development by none other than Tipitina's, which should be pretty interesting once it's done. So when they called asking about the Esplanade Mall location in Kenner that we had used for Rocktoberfest, I gave them all of our contact information and pretty soon they had everything lined up for the new venue. The Mall folks suggested moving the start/finish from the far side of the circuit to the side adjacent to the mall, and although we were a little concerned about the shortened sprint, which was down to maybe 100 meters from the last turn, we went ahead with it and it turned out to be much better all-around. Since I still had the LAMBRA computers and cameras, I arrived early to help set up and right away Ricky told me his old laptop that he was planning to use for registration and results had apparently died. I had brought my own, equally old, laptop along for just such a contingency, however, so next thing I knew I was working registration. This being an early season criterium, there were a lot of riders who had renewed their licenses at the last minute and so weren't in the database, but otherwise things went pretty well. I was registered for the masters race, so I abandoned my post just before the end of the prior race and was able to get in a few warm-up laps before rolling up to the back side of the group that had already assembled on the start line.

Talking with one of my teammates, Steve Johnson, during warm-up I told him that I was fully expecting a couple of attacks by Acadiana immediately after the start, which turned out to be on the mark. On the plus side, we had a reasonably sized field for this one that even included a few of the local guys who regularly tear up the training rides but rarely travel to races. There video of the whole race on YouTube.  At the start line I noted that Kenny was there, so naturally I expected him to clip in immediately and basically sprint the entire first lap. I was not to be disappointed. He did, and thirty seconds into the first lap we were strung out all over the place at 28-30 mph. There was some danger that this would create an immediate breakaway, but I hadn't clipped in quickly and was stuck pretty far back at the time so there wasn't much I could do but pedal and hope. Kevin Landry took advantage of the situation and rode off the front taking Tony Del Valle with him. The break hovered up there as the pack kind of re-grouped for a while. Mid-way through the third lap one of the Acadiana guys surged to the front for a bit, bringing Kenny with him, but ultimately just serving to slingshot Rob Konrad off the front who very quickly made the short bridge up to the break. So five minutes into the 40 minute race, while my lungs were still trying to figure out that they were in a race, the winning 3-rider break had been established. At the time, and for the next fifteen minutes or so, I didn't even realize that Rob had bridged up. Anyway, that put two of the teams in the pack on the defensive and took some horsepower out of any chance to pull the break back.

A couple of laps later I was finally starting to feel warmed up and started spending more time up near the front of the group, which was fun because I was really liking the course. Although there were a few lulls, the pace stayed reasonably fast, which is to say the pack wasn't lapped, and there were a few soft attacks and splits, a couple of which I ended up working pretty hard to bring back. Still, I don't think we dropped many riders.  With a few laps to go I started trying to maintain a decent position up near the front, although by then I'd realized we'd be sprinting for 4th, which was a little demotivating under the circumstances. On the plus side, I was feeling pretty good and planning on at least contesting the sprint.

With a couple of laps left to go the remaining Acadiana guys took some digs, but were pulled back pretty quickly. At the start of the last lap Lenny surged, I guess to help out Brian Baum who was on the front, but when he pulled off one of the Urban South guys attacked. He blew up on the back side of the course as I was sitting about third wheel when Matt attacked hard on the right with Kenny on his wheel. I was overlapping Brian who hesitated for a moment and then almost hit the Urban South guy who was by then going backwards through the pack, so Brian didn't catch Kenny's draft and I didn't catch Brian's, making it just a drag race through the last three turns to the finish. I think I might have caught Brian, given sufficient motivation, which was apparently lacking, so I ended up 7th which I was not too unhappy about.

After that I quickly pulled off the jersey and put my official's shirt back on and headed back to registration and results duty. There were some reasonably sized fields, and we were having a lot of difficulty reading race numbers because of the glare from the sun, especially those numbers that were placed higher on the riders' backs. It definitely slowed down the results since some of those riders had to be identified by the process of elimination, team kit, etc. The Cat. 1/2/3 race was pretty interesting with a somewhat late break involving Matt Davis and Dustin Drewes that came down to a photo finish with the pack right on their heels. There's video of that race too.

Results are on the LAMBRA website.

This morning the forecast was looking bad, but the radar looked like we'd be OK for at least an hour, so I headed out at 5:40 am to meet the uptown group for the ride out to Lakeshore Drive. It was warm and humid as we rolled through Mid-City in the dark wondering how much riding we'd get in before the rain started. Riding along Marconi I felt a sudden drop in temperature and a few light raindrops and knew we were in for trouble. It wasn't too bad, so we continued on, but as we crossed Robert E. Lee the streets went from merely damp to soaking wet. By Lakeshore Drive we were in a strong 20+ mph wind coming off the lake and it was raining. Out at West End we picked up a couple of guys, one of whom was Ray who just got married and moved to Lakeview from Kenner. We quickly made the easy decision to abandon Lakeshore Drive and do laps around City Park instead. It seemed all of the heavy rain had fallen to the north of Robert E. Lee because for our first lap around the park the street was just damp and the rain very light.  For the second lap, not so much. By the time we were on Harrison on the second lap it was raining pretty good and I could feel my feet sloshing around in the water inside my shoes.  It was time to head home.  So 20 easy miles instead of the usual 40.  The next few days seem to be up in the air as well because of rain.

Weekday Routine

Part-way to work on Lowerline Street approaching Willow on a nice Spring morning

It's been a pretty routine week around here. After what I felt was a solid week of training, I was feeling a little achy and decided to make Monday a "rest day." The night before I'd re-cabled the Bianchi, spending quite a bit of time spraying lube into the right shifter in hopes of getting it to work a little better. The sad fact is that no amount of lube is going to make up for the fact that it's just plain worn out. Anyway, I got to bed kind of late, so it wasn't hard to decide to stay in bed an extra half hour. Tuesday and Wednesday were the regular early morning group rides. Neither was particularly hard, but neither was too easy either, especially since I was trying to do a little more work than usual. This morning I was feeling a little dragged out from the start and quickly decided to spend the ride hiding from the wind at the back. The weather around here has actually been pretty nice. The early morning temperatures have been a little cooler than I like but half an hour in I'm warmed up and it's fine. I think I was the only one wearing arm-warmers this morning.

Closer to St. Charles and the River you see lots of houses that
were built around 1890-1915 or so - wooden shutters, some
with Victorian accents, built on brick piers three or four
steps up from the ground.

Since it's been so dark in the morning and the rides have been so routine, I haven't been taking any photos lately, so I decided I'd instead take some on my commute to work. My regular route is a very relaxing two miles or so that I traverse at an average speed of maybe 10 mph. I ride down Lowerline Street, which is so named because it was the lower, or downriver, border of the town of Carrollton that was eventually annexed to New Orleans as it expanded. Carrollton is laid out in a fairly consistent grid, although the streets on the upriver and downriver sides aren't quite parallel. As a result, a number of streets that start out at the river end at some point before reaching South Claiborne. The original layout had large squares with the streets in one direction being named after trees (Maple, Oak, Willow, Elm, Sycamore, Birch, Hickory, Spruce, etc.) and those in the other direction named for people. Later the large squares were split up into four smaller squares, so the new streets generally got named after people from the town. After Carrollton was annexed to New Orleans, some of the streets got re-named to inherit the names of the city streets that they connected with.

A small shotgun near Black Pearl with a large, recently added
Camelback addition.

Since it's springtime down here everything is bright green and there are all sorts of flowers all over the place. Today there were a lot of bright yellow Cat's Claw flowers in the road here and there. Although their flowers are pretty, the vine itself is pure evil. It's practically impossible to get rid of, so the best you can hope for is to establish a stalemate.

Office Parking

Weekend at Home

Small Saturday Giro Group

With a bit of a lull in the local racing calendar, I spent a lot of time at home this weekend. Mostly, I was wishing I was at a race somewhere else. For me, the one thing that consistently gets me in shape is a steady diet of weekend races, and even though I'd raced just the weekend before, it felt like it was ages ago. So once the Friday deluge and associated flooding abated, I was more than ready for some weekend training rides. A rider from Bermuda was meeting me at 6 am Saturday to borrow a bike for the Giro, so at least that was something to break up the routine. Unfortunately, it was also the weekend of the Alabama Cycling Classic, aka Sunny King weekend, so a number of local riders were over in Alabama. Some would be kicking ass, but for others it would be mostly a learning experience. Regardless, it was going to take a few of the regular Giro riders out of the mix.  That, however, wasn't the biggest problem for the Saturday Giro Ride. The real problem was the sudden drop in temperature and corresponding increase in wind speed. We had had a couple of weeks of nice spring-like weather, but the cold front that had brought all of the rain had also dropped the temperature. I went out Saturday morning wearing two jerseys and arm-warmers, and was still a little chilly as we rode straight into the 20 mph north wind. I knew a lot of riders were going to skip the Giro because of that. Indeed, we rolled out from Starbucks with maybe a dozen riders. Sarah, the visiting rider, had been with her team in Greenville but had shipped all of her riding stuff back with the team in order to make a quick visit to New Orleans. Luckily, she was able to fit my old Orbea pretty well, and her 38.5 feet weren't too small for my old size 40 shoes. The only thing she was really missing were shorts. She ended up riding the 50+ miles in, basically, gym shorts.

Lance won the Jr. 15-16 race

Saturday's Giro was really a strange one. Aside from the freakishly low turnout and gusting north wind that threatened to blow me right off of the Seabrook bridge, there were other complications. When we turned off of Hayne onto Paris Road and caught the tailwind the pace ramped up dramatically and Sarah was caught off-guard. Going over the I-10 overpass I looked around and saw her off the back, so I eased up to wait for her and to make sure she didn't get killed crossing over the two lanes of interstate traffic on I-610. Once I picked her up we had a really nice steady pace down the service road and Chef Highway. Of course I was expecting to make a U-turn a mile or so before Venetian Isles to pick up the group on its way back. We were only about halfway out, however, when I saw a small group coming toward us and figured it was the 5:45 group. Then, as they went by, I looked over and saw Matt and some of the other guys from our group. They had turned around early. We made a quick u-turn but it was really too late to catch them. David and another rider who had apparently turned around too late caught up to us right away, so at least we had a little group. We took the Bullard short-cut and eventually met back up with the group on Hayne where I discovered that a couple of people, including Taco, had continued on to Venetian Isles.

Palmer Racing's first legit Pro/1 race as
an official Domestic Elite Team 

Anyway, it was a pretty good ride but I was short about ten miles by the time I got home. I spent a lot of time that afternoon and evening watching the live video from the Sunny King criteriums, and was impressed with Lance Abshire who won his 15-16 junior crit and then took 5th in the Cat. 3 criterium that was won by Bryan Mutell. The Cat. 2 crit was interesting but Dustin was stuck at the back basically the whole time. The Pro/1 criterium was pretty interesting. I could occasionally make out a couple of the Palmer guys in the huge pack. A 3-rider break was off the front for a long time until one of them attacked and went off solo. It was a noble effort but he got swallowed up by the pack just a couple of corners before the finish on the last lap thanks to the UHC riders who went to the front for probably ten laps and towed the entire field up to him. After that questionable tactic, the best they did was, I think, 5th.

Sunday's Giro was chilly but otherwise totally different from Saturday's. The turnout was back to normal and the pace was pretty good, so coming home from that one I felt like I'd gotten a good workout. I ended up spending hours in front of the computer later in the day watching the Women's and Men's road races from Alabama. I was mostly impressed with Debbie Milne who made the break in the women's race and ended up 6th. At 46, she was probably twenty years older than most of the other riders in the break. The Men's race turned out to be kind of boring as the Citadel riders really controlled things and most of the coverage was just showing the small breakaway trading pulls. They finished a couple of minutes ahead of what was left of the main pack. The Palmer guys did OK with Andrew in 36th and Ed in 40th, but still something like eight minutes back.

Rain Day

Some riders really relish riding under adverse conditions. Rain, cold, snow, gravel roads, wet cobblestones - these are all defining features of the "hard men" of cycling.  I am not exactly one of those.  Although I'll endure some pretty uncomfortable conditions in order to avoid resorting to riding a stationary bike, I do draw the line when the big raindrops start to fall, and at any rate I most certainly get no enjoyment out of riding in the rain or freezing cold or on gravel roads or any combination of the aforementioned. Since Monday I'd been expecting to miss some saddle time because of rain. The forecast had initially been calling for rain from Wednesday through Friday, so to accommodate, I rode a little harder on Tuesday. When Wednesday morning arrived and the promised rain hadn't arrived, I rode a little harder on Wednesday because surely it would be raining Thursday.

Then on Thursday there was still no rain in sight so I went out into the humid 20 mph south wind. Only Rick was waiting at the end of Nashville, and when we got out to West End we picked up only one other rider. Along Lakeshore Drive we picked up a few more, but after the lap of Lakeshore Drive all but one turned back or went home rather than fight the wind along the lake. By the time I was coming back from Kenner I was all alone, but at least I'd gotten in yet another morning ride I'd been expecting to miss.

The forecast for today was looking pretty bleak and it was clear my luck was running out, but when I checked the radar around 6 am it looked like I had a brief window before the rain would arrive. The streets were wet and for all practical purposes there was a very light rain falling, but the air was still warm so I went out for a short spin, arriving back home about ten miles later pretty wet but not cold.

So earlier this week I got one of those emails I routinely receive from someone visiting town who is looking for information on local rides, or rental bikes, or both. Sometimes these are recreational riders who would clearly be out of place on the weekday training rides or weekend Giro Rides, and I'm probably not a lot of help for those people. I usually check to see of the visiting riders have USAC licenses or Facebook pages that might give me a clue as to their cycling experience and fitness. The person this weekend looked like she might survive the Giro Ride, so I'll be lending her a bike Saturday. Hopefully she won't get dropped right away and will get the kind of training ride she's looking for. Some of the local riders will be up in Alabama at what we used to call Sunny King, now the Alabama Cycling Classic, which might, maybe, make the Giro very slightly less intense. A couple of the Tulane riders are going up there for the Cat. 4 races. I hope they survive. This year the Palmer Cycling riders will be competing as a USAC Domestic Elite Team, which essentially means that the Cat. 1 riders get to accumulate NRC Team points. The criterium is supposed to be streamed on Saturday so perhaps I'll be able to watch some of it.

Yesterday I ordered a set of six new stopwatches for the LAMBRA officials. The stopwatches you usually see at the local sporting goods stores don't always work so well for things like stage races or time trials because they typically stop showing tenths of seconds after something like 40 minutes. Since stage race ties on GC are broken by tenths of seconds in the time trial stages, that's a problem, so you have to be sure to get watches that will maintain a 1/100 second display for at least a few hours, preferably 24. The ability to go back and review splits is also useful for those time trials where two or three riders come across the line so close together that you only have time to hit the split button repeatedly without being able to write down each time. Anyway, we've had a few of the Robic watches in use for a few years, so these should hold us for a while. I remember back in the 70s having to go to a local clock and watch shop any paying over $100 for a mechanical stopwatch that would register hours. Wish I knew what happened to that watch!