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.