Low Pressure

Last night we had some magnificant lightning and rain as a line of storms streaked through at about 40 mph, so I wasn't quite sure what the morning would hold. Creaking out of bed a mere fifteen minutes before meet-up time for the morning ride I glanced out the window and was happy to see a dry street. I arrived at the end of Nashville Avenue about a minute late to find a larger than usual group waiting. One of the guys is here doing some kind of community work with Duke University. He's originally from New Zealand.  I had to ask, because although his accent was British, it wasn't very heavy and didn't seem like a proper "English" accent. Anyway, we rode out to the lakefront at a pretty good clip - I guess there was a bit of a southwest wind blowing - and when me met  up with everyone else I took a moment to count.  There were over thirty riders. Someone said that the lakefront bike path was dry, which was good because sometimes when there's heavy rain it is wet from runoff the next morning. I guess the ground was dry enough that it soaked up all the water.

We had a light tailwind heading east on Lakeshore Drive so although there was a little group already off the front, and the pace was fairly fast, I let myself drift to the back, anticipating the need to dig into my reserves later, once we made the loop at Seabrook, hit the headwind, and things got serious.

Rounding the loop at Seabrook there was a car merging into the right lane as the group came around, and of course they just forced the car to stop, but as everyone was shouting warnings about the car and the group mushroomed across the road I found myself way over on the right. That's when I rolled over something that slashed my front tire.  Naturally, it exploded immediately as I struggled to make the last bit of the curve on the flat and eventually rolled to a stop where a couple of the guys stopped to help. The tire had a half-inch incision in the sidewall that I could nearly put a finger through, but luckily I had a couple of pieces of Mr. Tuffy in my bag to use as a boot. The first time I tried to inflate the tire the boot shifted and the tube nearly blew through. Fortunately I was kind of expecting that and let the air out right away. My second try worked better, although I don't think I put more than 40 psi in the tire.  Better soft than flat!  That worked fine and so I rode out the length of Lakeshore Drive and the lake bike path to the Suburban Canal, carefully lifting the front end for every little bump in the road to keep from pinch-flatting. The group came up on me just before Causeway, so I was able to get on the back pretty easily, although making the turns was a little sketchy with the tire so low.  Made it back home just fine, though.  Guess I'll have to check on my tire inventory tonight!

Hot Time, Summer in the South

This time of year my Bianchi presents a problem that only short people can truly appreciate. With the advent of carbon frames and sloping top tubes came a whole new problem. With a normal water bottle cage there's not enough room to use anything except a small water bottle in the seat tube location, and even with a small bottle, there's no way to remove or insert it without hitting the top tube. For much of the year, this isn't an issue. Typical 2-3 hour training rides in fall, winter and spring are easily accomplished, at least by me, on a single large water bottle or two small bottles. However, things change in the summer. So on Saturday morning as I was filling water bottles I was wondering if, and how soon, I'd run out of water on the Giro Ride. I decided at that point it might be about time to visit the LBS and see what the options were for side-entry bottle cages.

Saturday's Giro had a typical crowd, which was good because I was planning on doing a lot of wheelsucking. I was slated for a ride at Red Bluff for Sunday with mostly Cat. 1 and Cat. 2 riders and although I wasn't committed to doing the planned 100 miles, I certainly didn't want to get dropped on the first of the three 33 mile laps. Fortunately, the Giro Ride, although fast, was pretty steady and forgiving and I arrived back home with a little water left and only slightly dehydrated, well before the temperature got above the lower 90s. Rather than go back out into the blazing sun I decided it would be a good day to clean out my T-shirt drawer and closet, a process that yielded about a hundred T-shirts for Goodwill and another full garbage bag of T-shirts for the trash. It was kind of interesting going through all of those T-shirts, but I was pretty ruthless about it and saved only a few of the newer ones plus a handful of old ones like the ones from the Coors Classic, Tour de La, and NOBC. Then, while searching under the kitchen sink for furniture polish I discovered that the sink drain was no longer actually connected to the waste line. The contractor had apparently used a 6-inch tailpiece for a distance that was, at the time, probably 6.1 inches. Something must have settled, pulling the end of the pipe out of the waste line, leaving a little gap. Since everything was still lined up there wasn't exactly a flood of water, but it was obvious that a little water had been spraying out through the gap for some time.  Anyway, a trip to the hardware store got that fixed pretty easily, but then when I was done I went to the bathroom to find the toilet running. The metal clip connecting the chain to the handle lever had broken, so now it's rigged up with a zip-tie. After all of that I decided to reward myself with a new side-entry bottle cage that ended up being a ridiculously expensive carbon one from Lezyne. By then I had learned that both Taco and Steve, who had been planning on doing the Red Bluff ride, had cancelled, so I'd be going up there alone.  Oh well.  Situation normal I guess.

So on Sunday I headed out a bit after 5:30 for the drive up to Morgantown, MS to meet Stephen, Jaden, Joe and a few others. This time I had two full large water bottles for the bike.  The new side-entry cage allowed just enough room to get a standard large-size bottle in there with about a quarter inch to spare. The plan, at least Stephen's plan, was to do three loops of the Red Bluff loop that includes almost as much chip-seal as climbing.  With about 1,500 feet of climbing per lap, Red Bluff is kind of a destination for area riders looking for a little more than the short little rollers available elsewhere. It can also be a pretty hard, hot, and unforgiving ride with lots of irritating chip-seal, a little gravel, etc. We headed out right around 8 am as planned, and I was relieved when we hit the first long climb, just a mile after the start, without it becoming a race to the top. Somewhere along the way Stephen decided that rather than do the whole counter-clockwise loop we would do the long climb on Sand Road and then circle back right away to the main road, returning the way we'd come. Apparently the road surfaces on the back side of the course had been deteriorating and he didn't want to deal with that. This was fine with me since I really like the return trip heading south on 587. Somehow I always feel better going in that direction. After getting back to where we started we then headed west to do the loop backwards, which of course meant riding on the same roads we had apparently been avoiding earlier. By then it was starting to get pretty hot and things were coming apart a lot on the longer climbs. The plan was to finish that loop and stop at the cars to refill bottles. I was feeling OK all this time since nobody was really attacking the climbs, and ended up rolling off the front on Joe's wheel for the last few miles.

Back at the cars I grabbed an ice-cold drink from my little ice chest, and then another, sitting down in the shade for a minute to try and rub some of the pain out of my right foot. As I got up I saw the other guys taking off their jerseys, a decision having apparently been reached that we'd had enough fun for the day. My Garmin was reading 102F by then and I wasn't planning on doing another full lap, although I would have been OK with another ten miles of easy out-and-back. Even so, I didn't feel in the least bit short-changed as we drove down the road to the local Wendy's. I was glad I'd gone on this ride, and also glad to have had the benefit of experience behind me. I've ridden Red Bluff a number of times in mid-summer and it has always been brutally hot which, combined with the power-sapping chip-seal and steady stream of uphills, always makes 60 miles feel like 80, especially on a course there there is no place to stop for refreshments. It sure would be nice if it wasn't so far from home, though.

This morning I slept a little late and was rushing to meet a few of the Tulane riders for an easy ride downtown for coffee at Rouler. As I rushed into the kitchen, The Wife looked quizically at me and said "you're going out?" That was followed by "It's about to rain."  I checked weather.com and saw that the current radar and the hourly forecast were dramatically at odds with each other, but there still seemed the possibility we'd miss the worst of the rain.  Indeed, although we got a bit of a misting on t he way there, and a few raindrops on the way home, we managed to avoid getting very wet.

Not So Easy

I woke up this morning feeling stiff and creaky and achy, a situation that seems to be getting more and more frequent as my ear hair gets longer and my telomeres shorter. Right off the bat I decided I'd try and take it easy on the Thursday group ride out on the lakefront.

It was a plan.

Arriving at the meeting spot at the end of Nashville Avenue, I was surprised to see a few more riders than usual and wondered what random alignment of celestial bodies might have precipitated such an occurrence right on the heels of the summer solstice. For the past few days, things at 5:45 am have been pretty nice.  The sun is almost up, so the big headlights aren't really necessary and the tail lights are more of a precaution than an absolute necessity. The wind, once again, was virtually calm, and for half an hour or so the air felt almost cool. I guess there were eight of us as we rolled out toward the lake, and for reasons unknown the pace seemed a little faster than usual. Out on Lakeshore Drive we accumulated a fairly large group that included a couple of TT bikes, and for a little while the pace was conversational. After making the loop out at the eastern end of Lakeshore Drive, however, conversations ended as a handful of guys up at the front started lifting the pace. Speeds that had been 22 mph went to 26 and 27 mph as the group started getting stretched out long and thin. That was only the prelude, though, and once over the bridge a couple more mph were lumped atop the others and back at the back gaps started opening up all over the place. Next thing I knew, my "easy" ride was not so easy as I closed multiple little gaps at 30 mph.

The short transit from the end of Lakeshore Drive to the start of the bike path used to be a recovery segment.  Lately, though, it seems that VJ and maybe a couple others are pushing the pace along there as we negotiate a couple of intersections along with various holes and cracks in the concrete roadway. Once on the bike path things kind of evened out and it seemed like the whole way out to the casino boat was just a long steady line of riders with almost nobody coming back from the front or moving up from the back to the front. Speeds were down in the 25 mph range and it should have felt easy to sit in toward the end of the string of riders on a windless day. It didn't seem so easy to me for some reason, but on the other hand it wasn't really all that hard either. At the end I made an impulse purchase with my legs and sprinted to close the gap up to Brian and a couple others who had gone off the front, resulting in about 15 seconds at 31 mph and a substantially longer period of heavy breathing. It felt good, though.

The ride back was more of the same, although slightly slower. Lately we've been taking Canal Blvd. and Canal St. back uptown from Robert E. Lee. Since the schools closed for the summer, traffic at around 7:30 is considerably lighter, making Canal a reasonable option. Aside from the traffic situation, the other advantage is that we have a much more direct route with fewer stops for traffic signals. It cuts about a mile each way off of our more circuitous "school year" route and probably close ten minutes off of the commute time.

Tuesday Mornings

The Tuesday morning ride heads east into the rising sun along Lakeshore Drive before things get more serious   

Ever since the Mississippi River bike path was closed off for an apparently infinite amount of time, a few of us have been meeting down at the end of Nashville Avenue at 5:45 am on Tuesdays and Thursdays in order to ride out to the lakefront. There are usually only three to five of us meeting there. At first, we would then meet a handful of other riders coming from Metairie and Kenner, and the resulting group would do a lap of Lakeshore Drive and then ride out on the lakefront bike path to the casino at Williams Blvd. before returning back to the lakefront and eventually uptown. A little later, another group started riding from the Robert's grocery parking lot, where the WeMoRi starts, about the same time that we were leaving from uptown, so then there would be three groups meeting up on Lakeshore Drive at around 6:10 or so. Gradually, word got out about the ride and more and more riders started showing up. Now, on a good day, there are probably around 25. Such was the case on Tuesday.

There was still a big group heading west to the Casino.

Now, being old and weak and fat, I appreciate the benefits of a larger group. I can ride sheltered from the wind until I forget how old and weak I am, go up to the front and take a pull until I'm wheezing for breath, which takes about fifteen seconds, and still find enough wheels to keep from getting dropped after I pull off. For the past few days there's been hardly any wind at all in the  morning, making these rides particularly pleasant for wheelsuckers like myself. The downside, of course, is that it's so sublimely comfortable sitting in a pack like this just cruising along at 27 mph without hardly putting any pressure on the pedals, that it becomes really difficult to actually take a pull or, even worse, respond to an attack.  Because naturally those guys up at the front are not so old and weak and know they would be subjecting themselves to ridicule if one of the old and weak guys got to one end or the other ahead of them.

The weather on Tuesday morning seemed particularly nice, probably mostly because of the lack of significant wind which is otherwise standard fare along the lake. However, it didn't feel quite as hot as you would have expected, which means the relative humidity must have been slightly lower than "saturated." All of this was particularly nice for me since I swear I could still feel some soreness in my legs from the prior Saturday in Gulfport.

So Wednesday morning I headed out to meet the WeMoRi group a little earlier than usual, but not early enough to hit Lakeshore Drive ahead of them. I rode out Lakeshore Drive, trying to do the math in my head to guestimate where and when I'd seen the group coming toward me at 32 mph.  It was a little too close to call whether I would be able to make it over the Bayou St. John bridge in time to circle around the traffic circle on the other side ahead of them. Once you're on the bridge there's no making a U-turn, so I rode up to the base of the bridge and turned around, knowing they couldn't be too far behind.  I rode maybe half a mile and made another U-turn, only to be surprised to see Woody and Judd go flying by, so I had to make another fast u-turn, followed by a full-on sprint before just barely catching.  Of course I was completely gassed after that and it took me a while before I could take a pull. Luckily for me Judd was going a little slower than Woody when he'd hit the front, which was probably the only thing that allowed me to recover at all.  I eventually started taking some pulls, although not quite every one.  Woody was doing most of the work and Judd was starting to look kind of stressed, you know, like me. The rest of the group was apparently not far behind.  I never looked, though.  I'd probably have gotten dropped if I had. Back on Lakeshore Drive we went around the Elysian Fields traffic circle and as we headed back we could see the rest of the group.  I guess they were 30-40 seconds behind. By then it was obvious that Woody was nursing the two of us along by taking long pulls and somewhat slower speeds than before. So we made it to the end ahead of the group.  I gave myself a pat on the back and headed for Starbucks for my celebratory iced coffee where I stayed until 7:30 before heading back home.

After the WeMoRi and a relaxing cup of coffee, I always feel fast.  The feeling doesn't last long, but it's nice while it does!

Criterium Criteria

It's kind of nice to see a few more one-day Criteriums around here. For a while, it seemed like every weekend was either a stage race or an omnium, and although they invariably included criteriums, it isn't quite the same when there's that "overall" weekend time or points total at stake. Some criterium are very simple affairs and some are huge, complicated events. Most of those around here tend to the more simple end of that spectrum. In some ways, that's a good thing, especially for the newer criterium riders.  It can be a little intimidating jumping into your first crit and having to deal with the faster speeds, harder accelerations, and technical, sometimes scary, high-speed cornering all at once, especially if you aren't one of the stronger riders in the pack to start with. Fortunately, smaller scale criteriums ease the transition a little bit by having much smaller and less aggressive fields. Last weekend's Tour de Gulfport criterium was a case in point.  Here was a nicely organized criterium on city streets with a couple of technical corners, just a touch of topography, a few wide and fast corners, and a long wide finish stretch. Added bonuses were ample barricades, road furniture protected by hay bales, food and drink, and a nice deep prizelist on top of USAC championship medals.

With a slightly threatening weather forecast, pre-registration for the race was pretty low. There was a reasonable chance of rain, it was Father's Day weekend, and the race-day entry fee was only about $1.50 more than the combined pre-registration entry fee plus the online service charge. I was worried that field sizes would be embarassing, especially since the City of Gulfport was pretty directly involved in the event. As it turned out, there were a fair number of race-day entries, so in the end they were up to 108. Granted, an event like this should have seem more like 150 at least, but I guess we have to take what we can get.

So I drove over to Gulfport, which is less than an hour and a half away, with Candy early enough to get there while they were still setting up the venue. I was bringing the USAC medals and the race radios, but wasn't planning on doing any officiating. The Masters race was one of the first, and I was glad to see that the field size was  up to 23, which was about twice what pre-registration had been. We had a bunch of riders from Peake Racing, a few from Palmer and Bike Crossing, and one or two from some of the other area clubs. Notable by its absence was Acadiana.

The 50-minute race started out pretty smoothly, and really for the most part there were not a whole lot of attacks. I was feeling OK, but was kind of expecting some fireworks that never quite materialized. Various surges and minor attacks ensued, and the group thinned out just a bit from attrition, and eventually on rider rolled off the front and built up a lead of perhaps 10 seconds. There wasn't a very organized effort by anyone to chase it down, and after a few laps Matt launched a solo pursuit. I thought that if and when he made contact with the lead rider they would have a very good chance of staying out there, considering the dwindling pack. When he made contact, they were about three city blocks up the road and I though it was looking pretty good for them as we were getting down to the last six or seven laps of the race. As it turned out, though, the original breakaway rider was a little toasted by then and wasn't working with Matt, so with maybe four to go I could tell that the gap was getting smaller. By then the pack could smell blood, and things picked up significantly. With two to go I knew we would make the catch and indeed that happened on the bell lap.

So during the last few laps I had been trying to move up closer to the front, and as we rounded the first couple of turns on the last lap I was thinking I was in a pretty good place, maybe five riders back. Then between turn 3 and 4 everyone else decided to move up too and I got pushed over to the left, narrowly avoiding a disasterous encounter with a steel barricade and hay bale that was kind of randomly placed on top of a dip in the road where there was a storm drain. I very nearly crashed as I yelled something that was hopefully inintelligible, ran over the foot of the barricade, had to touch the brake, and lost three or four spots with half a lap to go. I was pretty screwed for the sprint at that point, but did manage to reclaim one or two spots, coming around the last corner maybe 6th wheel for the ensuing drag race to the line. Of course, by then the first three places were already way up the road, but I found myself on Matt's wheel as he motored past a few riders who kind of sat up before the finish. I didn't have the heart, or energy, to jump past him at the line and ended up 6th, which under the circumstances I was pretty happy with. By then it was starting to get hotter and although there were some big clouds around it was looking like the rain was going to miss Gulfport.

Tailgunning as usual

A little while later I went ahead and signed up for the Cat. 1/2 race. This was one of the rare events around here that offered separate Cat. 1/2 and Cat. 3 races, and there were fewer riders registered for the 1/2 race than there were prizes in the prizelist, so I figured I'd get in some exercise rather than stand around watching. I was planning on staying at the race until the end of the final race so that I could bring the results home with me for posting. For this race I was strictly in Tailgunner mode, which pretty much guarantees you'll be dropped at some point as gaps open up in front of you. Fortunately, the pace wasn't super-fast, so I was fairly comfortable sitting back among the last few riders, but I knew there would be some action eventually.  We were only about fifteen minutes into the 60-minute race when Jaden rolled off the front. With a little blocking by his teammates he quickly established a big gap, but I was still thinking it was pretty early for such a move to be successful.  On the other hand, we'd started with only 14 riders, and of the remaining 13, four were his teammates. Palmer and Bike Crossing made up the next largest contingents, but a number of those guys had also raced the Masters race earlier. It was also starting to get pretty warm. Anyway, although Jaden got a nice gap right away, there were some good efforts to bring him back, and when those started I quietly made my exit out the back door. That was around 20 minutes in when Taco suddenly sat up. I don't know what happened there and he was gone by the time we finished, so I never found out.

After I dropped off, the pack split in two, so there was Jaden out solo, then a small group of like four, another gap, and then another group of four or six or something.  So I rode around solo for a number of laps and was planning to hop onto Jaden's wheel when I got lapped.  Jaden's a really smooth rider and I knew it would be fairly easy for me to sit on his wheel. Unfortunately, when I stood up to catch his wheel, which was on the only little one-block uphill on the course, I felt both calves start to cramp. I was quite surprised by that even though I'd already done the masters race and it was getting pretty warm. I haven't had muscle cramp issues in a short race like this in years, and I kind of suspect that it had something to do with the electrolyte drink I'd filled my bottle with before the race.  I usually use nothing but water. Anyway, despite the impending leg cramps I got Jaden's wheel and followed him around for a lap before dropping off for some more quiet time and to see if my legs might recover a bit.  A little while later I found myself on Ed's wheel. Surprisingly he had gotten dropped out of the first chase group. I guess he'd pretty much worked himself over in the master's race and first part of the Cat. 1/2 race. After a few laps of that we were caught by some more riders and so for the final laps I was sitting in with the remnant of the second chase group and eventually cruised in, snagging 12th place, which in this case was DFL.  It was actually pretty enjoyable since I hadn't gone into that race with any expectations other than getting a workout. Somehow, we got through the entire day witout a drop of rain. Back in New Orleans it had been raining all day, so I'd definitely made the right call!

Summer Weekend

All the ingredients were present this weekend.  Heat, humidity, and of course, rain.  With the days getting longer and longer, lights were hardly an afterthought as I rode out to the Giro Ride on Saturday. The weather forecasts this time of year are mostly the same - always a chance of scattered thunderstorms, more in the afternoon. Saturday morning we headed out under a sunny sky with the temperature already above 80F and the humidity pretty much off the scale. A little while after we got onto Chef Highway, though, it started to rain, so most of that stretch, both out and back, was a compromise between having a nice draft and having water sprayed into your face from the wheels ahead. Apparently it had rained only out on the far end of the route, though, because once we were back onto the service road it was bone dry again. The ride itself didn't seem unusually fast, but without much of a delay out at the turnaround it seemed more consistent than usual. Indeed, we were back to Lakeshore Drive a good ten minutes earlier than usual.

As I rode back home with Quentin and Ben I suggested maybe doing a ride on the northshore on Sunday. Some time that night it came down to just three of us, but it was looking like it would be a good day and I was really feeling the need to get out in the country for a change.

With only three people you'd thing things would go smoothly for a quick little drive across the lake, but by the time we actually got onto the bikes over there I guess we were a good half hour later than we'd planned. We rode mostly the standard training ride route, including both Tullos Road and South Choctaw, which made for a pretty hilly ride. When I pulled my bike out of the car over at Lee Road Junior High I immediately realized I'd left both waterbottles at home.  Digging around in my bag, though I came up with a small bottle of Coke, so I stuck it into my pocket and we headed out around 8:00. I was planning on a moderate but steady pace with maybe a few efforts on some of the hills. That plan was going OK, but about halfway through the ride I could tell that David was starting to have trouble. When I pushed the pace a little bit on a hill on the back side of the course he came off the back. That was repeated a few more times during the ride, but by the time we were at 50 miles or so the heat, and maybe lack of water, was starting to get to me a bit. We stopped at the closed gas station on Lee Road where I filled up my Coke bottle with metallic tasting water from the faucet.

By the time we got back to the car my Garmin's notoriously inaccurate thermometer was showing 100-102F, but whatever, it was definitely in the 90s by then. For a ride of only 67 miles, I was feeling pretty toasted by the end.

That evening I enjoyed watching the live feed from Tulsa Tough, although the video quality on my end made it nearly impossible to find the Palmer guys.

Monday morning I went out early for an easy ride on the river levee. Sadly, there was still absolutely no sign of progress on any of the torn up and/or closed off sections. This is getting ridiculous. That work was supposed to be completed months ago. Seems like the contractors, rather than the Corps of Engineers, are in charge here, no doubt preoccupied trying to figure out how to get more money out of the government than what they originally agreed to.

On to Summer

The heat and humidity really seem to have moved in this week, so it's feeling a lot like summer around here. Following the Tour de La, I skipped riding on Monday and got most of the post-event stuff taken care of, so by Wednesday everything was closed out. Say what you will about the soon to be updated USAC website, but for people who have to deal with more than one or two events a year, the system for all its flaws is still way better than filling out paper reports, waiting for checks to arrive in the mail, writing out and mailing checks and forms, and basically taking three weeks to close out a race. The local bank made an awesome video of the Cat. 1/2/3 criterium. You can find it on their website (scroll down to June 5).

Anyway, with the Tour behind me I went out for the group ride Tuesday morning feeling like I'd been off the bike for three weeks instead of three days. It was warm and humid, like it's been all week, but other than that it seemed like a fairly subdued ride, and toward the end I finally started to feel more or less normal again. Wednesday's WeMoRi, on the other hand, just seemed inexplicably hard to me. Out on Lakeshore Drive saw the break with Jaden and Rob and jumped onto it. They were just fifteen seconds or so ahead of the rest of the group, I guess, and were going fairly hard. The leap from 16 mph to 27-28 mph seemed particularly difficult and I was still not recovered from it as we turned off of Wisner onto Harrison. I may have taken one very brief pull, but was otherwise sitting staying on the back as Jaden and Rob traded pulls. Then, Rob took what turned out to be one last hard pull toward the end of Harrison.  I should have known better, but I guess I was a little anoxic at the time and dropped back a bit to let him slide in ahead of me like I'd been doing. The only problem was that he was done for the day and eased up, leaving a shockingly fast-growing gap in front of me to Jaden. I was already on the rivet, so any effort I made to close it probably wouldn't have been discernible to the naked eye.  I watched Jaden round the corner onto Marconi, made the turn myself, and to my relief looked back and saw the group behind me. I eased up for a moment to recover and slotted back into the pack when it swallowed me up. The rest of the ride was pretty moderate until the final mile when the speed went up to 31 or 32 and kind of stayed there.  I spent a long time at Starbucks sipping a heavily sugared iced coffee after that. Thursday's ride seemed quite fast to me as well, no thanks to a relentless crosswind, but I survived it OK I guess. This morning I went out for an easy ride with the Tulane Friday Ride group, which this time of year is composed of 3-5 people on a good day.

I've never seen anything like this.

So I guess everyone has heard about the terrible car "accident" (the driver has been charged with MURDER) that happened in Kalamazoo.  Five riders killed and the rest of the group hospitalized when some guy just plowed in to a regular little group ride, apparently at a high rate of speed judging by the result and the extensive damage to the front end of the pickup truck. The group looked to be a regular fitness/social group - riders with triple chainrings and mirrors and that sort of thing - so they were probably riding well over to the right of the road at a moderate and controlled speed. As far as I know the police still aren't saying what they think caused the accident and interestingly haven't said anything about intoxication, so that seems ominous. If it was basically an intentional slaughter by some nutcase, that's pretty frightening. Even if it isn't, getting plowed down from behind by a distracted and/or drunk driver is pretty much everyone's biggest fear nowadays.  When I started riding, that sort of thing just never seemed to happen. Maybe it's just because there were a lot fewer of us out on the roads, but I suspect otherwise.

This weekend will be just training rides for me. Some of the Palmer guys are up in OK for Tulsa Tough, and hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the live-stream of their races. Although I may have had some slight delusions about my own racing capabilities in my younger days, I've never ever had any doubt that I lacked sufficient toughness for Crybaby Hill.

What it Takes

The weather forecast for the 45th Tour de Louisiane had been looking pretty bad all week, and I was expecting the worst. Apparently a lot of riders were too, because pre-registration was below 100 riders when it closed at midnight on Thursday. I had taken Friday off of work in order to get things ready for the trip across the lake that afternoon for Friday night registration and the ensuing weekend. It really takes a small army to make this event happen. I try to limit my own role to handling the website, race bible development and printing, bib numbers and pins, event announcement, USAC permitting, course selection and control, pre-registration, race-day registration, race-day finish line setup, officiating, race communications, and related activities. Bob and Roberta and Mignon had spent months trying to piece together enough sponsorship to make the event feasible. Feasible, in this case, means that for a year like this with threatening weather the club loses a few thousand dollars.

On Friday Robin came by and picked up our course signage so he and Fred could set up all three courses. That task involves literally hours of work prior to each stage, not to mention marking all of the turns and bad sections of road, and repairing some of them with cold-patch asphalt, in the days leading up to the event. Bob and Fred had made all of the arrangements with two Sheriff's offices, the Covington Police and Fire (first responders) Departments, along with the Mayor's office. There were also lots of little things that go into the event like portable toilets and podiums and sponsor banners and arrangements with food vendors, in this case McAllister's, the local brewhouse, in-kind sponsors for primes and goody bags, etc., etc. All of this is done by volunteers, in their spare time.

By Friday night registration the forecast was still looking bad, but there looked like a chance we might at least get race-day registration done before any serious rain moved in. We had a few new registrations during the evening, which was encouraging, but some of the categories were still really, really low.  The Cat. 1/2/3 race field looked relatively normal with some strong teams represented that promised a good competitive race.  The Cat. 4 field was smaller than normal, but the big hit was the Cat. 5 field, which was super small. Even by race day we had only 13 riders in the Cat. 5s. Normal for that field should be 40-50 riders.  By the time race-day registration was over we were up to just over 100 riders.  Normal would be more like 160-180. I was very thankful to see a number of the local guys sign up, albeit at the last minute to bolster the Masters and Cat. 4 race numbers. Even so, the missing 50 riders meant around $3,000 in revenue that the race needs to even approach breaking even in a typical year. You'd think that the $85 entry fee would provide enough to at least cover the $6k prizelist, but you have to realize that the race doesn't see a lot of that.  First, there's the per-rider per-day insurance cost. For a 2-day race that's $7.50. Then there's the online registration fee that we absorb. That's another $4.85 or so. Then there are the free registrations for club members which was $500. Plus there's the LAMBRA pre-rider fee of $2. So basically, of those riders who pay an $85 entry fee, we see about $70. To support a $6k prizelist, we basically need to raise around $6-7k in event sponsorship, which is a pretty heavy lift for an event with 100 participants. So anyway, the bottom line is that what it takes is a ton of sponsorship that we are rarely able to attract in order to do things right.

So back to the race.  Saturday morning looked surprisingly good. I can't even begin to describe the huge sense of relief once we got all five groups on the road and there was still no sign of an imminent thunderstorm. With races that would be going on for nearly four hours, though, we were still expecting rain, possibly heavy rain. We had even moved the finish line a little farther up where there was less of a roadside ditch. Somehow, Bob and Fred had rounded up enough follow cars for the road race, and along with three moto-refs we had everyone on the road right on schedule. Mike set up one of the magnetic mount antennas atop the road sign to which we had tied the officiating tent (expecting of course a torrential thunderstorm to hit at some point) and I was very impressed at how well the LAMBRA radios worked on the course. As the follow cars came around the last turn, which was at least two miles from the finish, we could hear them very clearly. We were also using the LAMBRA Zello channel, which allowed for race communications among everyone even when they were out on the back side of the 16-mile circuit. I think there was one minor crash during the road race, along with a number of flat tires (and remarkably few spare wheels in the follow cars), but in general the road races went very smoothly and, incredibly, without any significant rain.  What a relief.

After Ricky and Mike finished up entering the road race results into the computer (while the rest of the crew was taking down signage, cleaning up the venue, packing stuff into trucks, etc.) we finally headed out around 2 pm, stopping at a roadside McDonalds for food and internet where I uploaded results to the website and sent out notifications to everyone via email and Facebook. I stopped at Starbucks on the way to the TT site, arriving around 4:15 to unlock the school gate.  Robin and Fred had already starting setting up the course with caution signs and about a million traffic cones. The police officers arrived around 5:00, just before a big thunderstorm came through. I sat in my car responding to the many texts and messages asking if the TT was going to be cancelled. We had been looking at the radar and it looked like we would be in the clear by 5:15 so we delayed the start by around twenty minutes. Of course our already-posted TT start times kind of went out the window as a result, but it was too late to try and re-do those and somehow inform the riders of it, there being no dry place to even post a revised list.  The current list taped to the LAMBRA trailer was, of course, soaked anyway.  Amazingly, the rain stopped and we got all of the riders started and finished without a drop of rain falling on them. Afterward we again tore everything down, loaded up trucks, cars and trailers, and hit the road back to the hotel to do the results. I was behind Ian, one of our motorefs who had volunteered to stay for the TT and Criterium to help out. The trip to the hotel was only around four miles, but halfway there the sky opened up on I-12. I was glad I was behind him in the car to give him a little protection from any inattentive drivers coming up from behind. We got the TT results done and posted to the website and finally headed over to Acme Oyster House for some dinner, the first actual meal I'd had all day.  That night there were more thunderstorms.

Sunday morning the sky was cloudy but the forecast was looking better. When I arrived at the criterium about an hour before the first scheduled race at 6:20 or so Robin and Fred and Bob and Roberta were already hard at work setting up the barricades, hay bales, signage, etc.  We got the finish line officiating tents set up, set up the P/A system, finish line cameras, generator, radios, etc. and were ready to go before 7:30, but with only two Juniors for the first race, they both requested that they be allowed to race with the Women, which was the second race on the schedule, so we had a little breather before things got started. The streets were, amazingly, dry except for what I assumed to be some water draining across the street just before the first turn.  I kept wondering why it wasn't drying up. Once the second race started, I was occupied mostly with entering the results in to the computer and printing out results while Ricky and Mike scored whichever the next race was that was going on. I got a little time during the Masters race to walk down to the corner to investigate the water situation and discovered that there was a sump pump on the other side of the building that was literally pumping water onto the course. Luckily, it was plugged into an outlet on the underside of the old rail car that was part of the restaurant, so I unplugged it for the duration of the race. By the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race was underway the street was dry. Again, the LAMBRA radios were a huge help for the criterium. I'd given one to one of the police officers, and then another to a course marshal on the far side of the course. Robin had one as well. There were a couple of crashes, but the only serious one was when Will got into the gravel on the outside of the very fast Cat. 1/2/3 race and hit a pole with his thigh.  They drained about 50 cc of blood and fluid out of his knee this morning. Anyway, results went pretty well and after tearing down the venue and loading up cars and trailers once again I guess I was on the way back home by 3:00 or so. I unloaded everything one last time and settled down to post results to the website, send out announcements, upload the few photos I was able to take, fill out the Report of Occurrence for Will's crash, send that and the 1-day waivers to Ricky who was the Chief Ref this year, and then, finally opened up a bottle of wine.

It was a long weekend, and I think the riders had some good racing, so in that sense it was pretty satisfying. It was truly amazing that we had somehow managed to put on all three stages wihout anyone having to race in the rain on a weekend when the forecast really offered zero hope of that being a possibility. Now we just need to figure out how to keep the race going for another year, because there's no way we can go more than a year or two without at least coming close to breaking even, and I'm pretty sure we were a very, very long way from breaking even this year. Of course, there are a lot of things we could to do save money, but they would all tend to lessen the quality and fun of the event. We could cut back on the number of toilets, not pay for motorefs and hotel rooms, move the criterium to a parking lot or someplace that didn't require half of the Covington police force, move the road race to a course with fewer intersections needing police, etc.  I hope we don't have to do any of that.