One More Week

The Giro Ride taking an alternate route back through Gentilly

There's been a lot going on lately, the unfortunate consequence of which is that I don't find the time or energy to write about it much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between blog quality and potential blog content.

Last week went pretty well from a riding perspective. I logged nearly 300 miles, rode the Giro on Saturday, and did the Feliciana Road Race on Sunday. That was followed up with an easy group Memorial Day ride, apparently the 7th annual one, on Monday.

The Saturday Giro Ride had a reasonable turnout despite conflicting with a local triathlon that was being held along sections of Lakeshore Drive and Hayne Blvd. that the ride uses. As we headed out in the morning there were police stationed at the intersections, but the race hadn't yet started so we were allowed to take our usual route. Like me, I guess a number of riders in the group were planning on racing the following day, so the pace never got too much out of hand, which is to say it was a little slower than you'd otherwise expect this time of year. On the way back along Hayne Blvd. we could see a police car blocking the Casino overpass, and when we got there we weren't allowed over it.  Likewise with the Seabrook bridge, so we had to ride up Jordan road and cross the Industrial Canal at Chef Menteur. Knowing that we probably wouldn't be allowed on Lakeshore Drive, we just continued down Chef to DeSaix to Wisner, so I just headed home from there.

Sunday morning I was up before 5 am, since I  had to load some of the LAMBRA equipment into the car and get up to the race north of St. Francisville at least an hour ahead of the 9 am start time. The night before I'd installed a nice new cassette on my race wheel. Although I had a new chain on hand, I hadn't installed it because if something had gone wrong that evening when I was doing all of that I'd be stuck without access to a bike shop. The chain didn't look to be stretched, and I knew, or thought I knew, from my Garmin Connect equipment reminder that it had just a little over 3,000 miles on it, so I didn't really think twice about that. As it turned out, it actually had more like 3,800 miles on it by then and as a result two or three of the smaller cassette cogs were worn. Anyway, I arrived at the race after a nice 2-hour drive, helped Mike with the camera software, and picked up my number with lots of time to spare.  The Masters race would be starting third, so that meant 20 minutes after the Cat. 1/2/3s at 9 am. I dropped off my spare wheels at the wheel truck and went out for a little warmup. Immediately I could feel and hear the old chain not meshing very well with the new cassette. I decided right away that racing 64 miles like that wasn't worth whatever small weight savings there might be between my venerable old Rolf wheels and those Mavic wheels sitting in the follow car, so I rushed back and swapped them out, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that those heavy Continental Gatorskin tires might be a liability at some point.

Our race started out on time with the temperature relatively comfortable for the end of May. With most of the Acadiana masters AWOL for this race, Kevin was left as their only representative. The combined 40+/55+ race had a pretty good turnout of around 25 riders, so I was a little surprised at how slowly things started out. The fact that I ended up on the front for an extended period of time would certainly indicate a lack of aggressiveness.  This was a 22 mile loop that I've ridden a ton of times and never really gotten right. I'm never quite sure which hill is the last hill before the finish. Anyway, after a pretty easy ride for the first 8 miles or so we came to a left turn onto Hwy. 10.  Leading up to that, I saw Kevin moving up toward the front and tightening his shoes, and remembering that there had often been successful attacks launched from that uphill turn I looked over at the rider next to me and said, "Get ready for an attack here." Sure enough, Kevin attacked the turn but the gap was small and the pack closed it up almost immediately. A couple of miles later, as the pace lagged again, Will rolled off the front completely unchallenged. We still had like 50 miles to go, so it was definitely a rather bold gamble on his part.  Complicating the entire situation was that the 55+ riders, including me, were a little reluctant to invest a lot of effort in chasing the 40+ riders. Normally I'm willing to do some work in that regard, but there were lots of 40+ riders in this group so I decided to leave that responsibility mostly to them. Anyway, Will kind of rode off into the sunset rather quickly and by the time we started the second of the three laps he was out of sight.  On the second lap Kevin repeated his attack at the same place, but this time got clear with one other rider. There was a brief and disorganized chase for a mile or two, but by the time they were thirty or forty seconds up the road the pack kind of sat back and let them go. At that point we could see Will a couple of minutes up the road, and I figured the three of them would get together and disappear, along with the podium places. Early on the third lap, however, the rider who had been with Kevin came back to the pack, and about halfway through that lap so did Will.  Will had worked for a while with Kevin when he'd been caught, but was struggling on the hills and eventually blew up. By that point we were getting close to the end of the race and surprisingly there were essentially no attacks. It really would have been the ideal time to split the group, but it seemed like everyone was either on the defensive or just waiting for the big efforts on the hills leading up to the finish. I wasn't having any difficulty at all on the little hills, and set the tempo on the second-to-last one. That was followed by a fast downhill and then another little climb onto a false flat about 400 meters from the finish. Of course there was an attack about halfway up the last climb. I got onto a someone's wheel as he came past and then waited patiently for the 200 meter flag where I finally jumped past. There were still a few riders ahead of me, and I was only barely holding my own initially, but of course that is way too long of a drag race for me once the road flattens out. For a while Butch and I were sprinting elbow to elbow, at least until I blew up about 50 meters short of the finish. I'm not sure where I ultimately finished overall, maybe around 6th or 7th, but anyway it was 2nd in the 55+ which got me a handshake and "podium" photo, the traditional podium in this case being the steps of the cabin where the race stages. I actually enjoyed the race a lot, probably because it wasn't really all that hard, plus there was beer and pastalaya afterward.

The Memorial Day Ride

So on Monday I did Kenny's annual Memorial Day ride out to Chalmette Battlefield and then to the WWII museum where one of the veterans of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam came out and told us a couple of stories. This year we met at Rouler, a new coffee shop / bike shop on Baronne street down in the CBD. The coffee was pretty good and although the location makes it unlikely I'll be there on a routine basis, it's a nice place with a nice theme.

Now, I'm focused on the Tour de La next weekend, hoping the predicted rain somehow misses us or at least isn't too bad. Everyone's done a ton of work this year to pull off the 45th annual Tour de Louisiane. I'll be officiating as usual, continuing my recent streak of putting on races rather than riding in them. On the plus side, after putting on four races so far this year, I should be more or less in the clear in one more week.  I could really use a break.

Back to LaPlace

It was a whole week out and I was already starting to feel stressed about the LAMBRA Time Trial Championship. No doubt I wouldn't have felt stressed had I been planning on actually racing. Instead, I'd be officiating and race directing. Things really started to get complicated on Monday when after I dropped Danielle off at the airport and then learned I had to make an unplanned little trip to Houston for a couple of days of meetings about  and upcoming DOE proposal for a "Modular Chemical Process Intensification Institute for Clean Energy Manufacturing." Candy was already in Atlanta at a meeting until Wednesday. So I made some quick airline and hotel reservations that had me leaving for the airport around 4:15 am on Wednesday in order to arrive in time to make the start of the workshop around 8 am. The meeting went fine, and I was back home early Wednesday evening, but it all really cut into the time I would otherwise have had to get things together for the time trial over in LaPlace on Sunday.  I had some new caution signs to pick up on Thursday, and my brother and sister in law were coming in on Friday. Online registration was set to end Friday night. Before I left work on Friday I printed out release forms for everyone who had already registered, but with another five hours of registration time left I knew there would be more. That evening my brother and his wife, came over, I drank a fair bit of wine, and periodically checked the online registration numbers. By the time registration closed around midnight we had around 108 riders. After everyone went to sleep, I was up until around 2 am seeding riders based on their USAC time trial ranking points, setting up the results workbooks, assigning bib numbers, etc.

A few hours later it was time to head out to the Giro Ride. The weather was nice and there was a good group, so it was a pretty good ride, but as soon as I got home I started sorting out release forms and stapling bib numbers to them, being careful to avoid missing any or getting them out of order. Once bib numbers were assigned, I then had to re-sort the forms with numbers into alpha order within categories so that it would be easy to find each rider's form at registration on Sunday. I think it was probably 1 pm before I finally peeled off my riding clothes and took a shower. Before it got dark I loaded the podium and tent into the car to save some time the next morning, and then grilled steak and chicken for dinner. Finally I got all of the stuff down in the basement staged for loading into the car early Sunday morning.

Arriving at the race venue around 6 am on Sunday I was relieved to find a number of volunteers already there. With a nice breeze blowing and unseasonably tolerable temperatures, it was quite pleasant for those of us working the race. For the riders, however, there were 12.5 miles of significant headwind waiting for them. With 108 riders and a couple of time gaps for the 10 km and 20 km riders, was starting riders for about two hours straight before I could switch to working on the results.  That all went fairly smoothly, even though we had a few illegible numbers on the results sheet and had to radio out to the finish line to confirm them from the backup sheets. Anyway, the TT was a success by all accounts and the club definitely came out ahead on it financially, which is good because we probably won't for the Tour de Louisiane stage race a week and a half from now.

Once I got home I spent another hour or two publishing results to the website and finishing the post-event report. By then all of the sleep deprivation from the prior week was really starting to catch up with me. I think I went to sleep around 8:30 that night.

Next weekend I'm planning on racing the Feliciana Road Race over around St. Francisville and then the next weekend is the Tour de Louisiane.  If I can just make it through that weekend, the rest of the season should be easy! Bob and Roberta and Mignon and Fred have been pretty busy making logistical arrangements for the Tour. It's really a ton of work to make sure all of the arrangements are made for three different venues over two days - police, volunteers, hay bales, portable toilets, meetings with the city, permits, sponsors, banners, goody bags, etc., etc.  Having three NOBC-promoted events in quick succession this year has definitely been a little stressful.

Races of Truth

I have never been very good at Time Trials. When I first started racing, back in the Nixon administration, we did a lot of them.  This was before the USCF, now USAC, went from Imperial measurements to Metric measurements.  The standard TT distance back then was 25 miles, just a tad longer than 40 km, and in fact the reason we now use 40 km as the standard. Unfortunately, some years ago USAC kind of abandoned 40 km as the national time trial standard, allowing Nationals promoters to use various presumably more convenient distances for championships.  I hated that.  Still do. Up until the mid-80s the national records and national champions were published in the back of the rulebook.  I miss that too, especially after local rider Brian Roberts set national records in 1982 on the LaPlace course for 75, 100,  and 125 miles the year that they decided, after the fact, to cease publishing (or really even recognizing) such records. For the record, his 100 mile TT time was 4:16:42, and yes, that was before aero bars, time trial helmets, carbon wheels, etc. -- basically Merckx-Style.  Speaking of which, at the LAMBRA TT Championship this coming Sunday we will be awarding special medals for the top three men and top three women overall who ride Merckx-Style, which for simplicity we are defining as collegiate mass-start legal, so although there won't be any solid disk wheels, there will be aero wheels, aero helmets, and perhaps some aero frames. Should be interesting.

Back when I started racing, and indeed for nearly a decade afterward, I was generally happy with a 25 mile TT time of anything under 1:10. We used to schedule six of these time trials in the spring, and, riding with a mechanical stopwatch clamped to my handlebars, I eventually got my time down to around 1:02 or so.  Then, around 1980 or 81 or so, things started to change. First, Glenn Gulotta did the first sub-hour time trial we'd ever had. It was a watershed moment. A number of other riders, finally realizing that it was indeed possible for normal humans to go sub-hour, followed suit the very same year. I vividly remember my first sub-hour time trial, which was a 59:59. It was a hot weekend and I'd been invited to a party at a farm up in mid-Mississippi with a bunch of grad students. On Friday I loaded the bike into my old Triumph GT-6, and with the engine heat filtering through the cracks in the firewall, drove up there for the weekend party. Then, early on Sunday morning, I snuck out, drove back down to Belle Chasse (the standard TT course went from the Scarsdale ferry landing across the river from Belle Chasse to a basically non-existent town of Carlisle and back) for the TT.  I gutted out that first sub-hour TT, then jumped back into the car that had been baking in the sun and drove back up to Mississippi for more partying. On the drive back home that night I started to run a little fever. A week later I was still running a fever and eventually went to the doctor. About a week later we finally figured out I had mononucleosis, but by then it was causing some hepatitis so they sent me straight to the hospital where I was stuck in enteric isolation for about a week until my liver enzymes went back down. That little bout with EBV kept me sick off-and-on for about a year afterward, and it was fully a year and a half before I felt truly recovered, which was around when I came down with pericarditis which had me lying around eating aspirin for another month or so, which cured the pericarditis and caused a stomach ulcer. Next thing I knew we had a baby. I somehow kept up an adequate amount of riding that once I was finally back to normal I could resume some semblance of training.

For a few years, before the really aero wheels and frames and helmets started to appear, I actually developed the ability to pull of some competitive stage race prologue time trials. Those are the three and four-mile ones that require you to start fast and then accelerate the rest of the way. I was amazed how much faster I could go with my old clip-on aero bars and a skinsuit. Eventually the expensive TT bike technology surpassed my ability to compete without it and my motivation, which was never very good for time trialing anyway, started to lag. Perhaps I'll try a Merckx-Style time trial one day and see how close I can come those times I did back in the 80s.

Or maybe I'll just keep volunteering to officiate them instead.

Rain Complications

The weather's been kind of crazy all over the place, it seems. I was watching the live video of the Charlotte criterium Saturday night. This is a huge event, culminating with a $15k women's race followed by a $15k men's Pro race.  It was raining for most of the women's race but they made it through without problems. The men's race was another story. They were only ten or fifteen minutes into it when the rain started coming down in biblical proportions. It was pretty bad, but these were pros and they were handling it until the officials decided to stop the race. I can think of a lot of reasons for that, but for a big race with the big teams and all, I was a little surprised. I figured they would re-start the race once the rain let up, but the rain didn't really let up much and they ended up cancelling it. Wow. No prizes and no points for teams that must have spent tons of money to get there. I wonder if the promoters had event cancellation insurance and if that influenced the decision.

Anyway, this morning I saw the video of the huge pile-up at the Red Hook criterium that happened when one of the lead motos stalled just past the start.  Of course, the fact that this race is essentially designed to ensure the maximum number of crashes didn't help. I mean, having a big field doing a criterium on the street on track bikes is just asking for disaster. The event(s) is hugely popular, but personally, as a bike race, I think it's kind of stupid in the same way I think professional wrestling is kind of stupid.

So I ended up not going to the collegiate race in College Station since they had enough drivers and I really didn't want to miss another weekend of riding. In a way it's good that I didn't go because I think I would have gone a little crazy when the sheriff showed up at the circuit race and shut it down Saturday morning.  I guess proper arrangements hadn't been made or something.  As it was, they were really lucky that the rainstorms missed them both days for the most part.  The SCCCC road season was pretty screwy this year with the Arkansas criteriums being cancelled because the course wasn't secured, and then the MSU criteirums being cancelled because of rain, and then the Texas A&M circuit race being cancelled (all except the Cat. A). With only four races this year, the Tulane race was the only one where all three races happened, and so far it's the only one for which results have been posted. Anyway, Adrian won the Cat. B season overall, and Hannah won the Women's C overall, but I guess the relatively low participation at races this year keep them from winning the Division 2 championship.

Here in New Orleans we kind of lucked out both Saturday and Sunday mornings. I got in two pretty good Giro Rides, got back home, and watched it rain the rest of the day.  Both days. Major rain.