Crosswinds and 'Cross

A big group turned out for the combined Saturday ride, but it didn't stay together for very long.

This morning, Monday, was the first ride in weather I'd call "cold" so far this fall. The temperature was actually in the 40s when I headed out the door for a much-anticipated solo ride up the river on the levee bike path. The brutal crosswinds we'd had last Saturday were long gone, and as the sun rose I could feel the warmth on my back. I'd had to dig deep down into the bottom of the drawer that morning to locate the long tights and long-sleeve jersey, but was glad I'd done so. It's critical to over-dress a bit on those first colder winter rides so you don't have that fear of freezing in the back of your mind the next time.

It was an interesting weekend.  On Saturday Brian had kind of tried to organize a big group ride combining the Giro Ride with the earlier WeMo group and the later STCC group. In his head he was imagining a nice controlled paceline ride with 60 or 70 riders. I think a lot of the other riders were imagining the same. That morning when I saw the 18-24 mph north wind, however, I was imagining carnage. Although the STCC ride and the WeMo ride are intentionally controlled pace-wise, the Giro isn't. Also, there is no "leadership" for the Giro Ride, so there's no way to even be sure you've contacted everyone who rides it, much less impose any sort of restrictions on it.  In the beginning, there was just the Giro.  The other rides formed because those riders wanted a more controlled and somewhat less demanding ride, so I knew putting them all together probably wouldn't last too long. As it turned out, there were a number of people on the Giro who had no idea that Brian had organized this combined ride.  They were also mostly the people at the front.  On the plus side, we started out with at least 60 riders that morning as we rolled down Lakeshore Drive, bypassing the east end of the road because the waves were splashing over the seawall due to the wind. Once the group got down from the bridges onto Hayne Blvd. the pace picked up just like any regular Giro Ride, made worse by the crosswind.  Naturally, as the speed increased, so did the gaps, and by the time we rounded the curve at the end of Hayne Blvd. it looked like just the regular Giro group. Picking up the tailwind heading south from Hayne and across the interstate to the service road the speed was well into the 30s, and when I looked back as we turned onto the service road I couldn't even see whatever was left of the group. Mind you, I'd never gotten even remotely close to the front and had to really redline a few times to close gaps just to stay in contact. In that regard, it was basically just another Giro Ride. I spent about 90% of the stretch down Chef Highway balancing in the six inches between the fog line and the rumble strip, scrapping for a little bit of draft. When the road curved right after Highway 11 and the wind became a full direct crosswind things near the back started coming apart very quickly. Riders were dropping like flies and I had to make some more big efforts to close gaps up to the rapidly dwindling front group.  The ride back offered a little more tailwind along Chef and Hayne, so speeds got up pretty high there, but at least the necessary effort level was a little lower than it had been on the way out. Except for the wind issues, it was pretty much a regular Giro Ride from my perspective at the back and I hoped it wouldn't piss off too many of the people from the other group who may have been led to believe it would be an easier ride.

Great photo by Murat from Sunday's cyclocross race in Audubon Park

That afternoon I rode over to Audubon Park to check out construction of the new flyover that the DSGP was putting up for Sunday's cyclocross race.  It was pretty impressive - and big.  My fears that it might be some poorly constructed makeshift arrangement disappeared when I saw the huge trailer full of pre-fabricated sections made with three-quarter inch plywood and enough framing to build a small house. I  helped out as much as I could, although the injured wrist made me reluctant to do any heavy lifting.  Since it was the first time they had put all the pieces together, it took a while to figure out where everything went and in what order, but by the time I left for home at 4:30 it looked like they had it more or less under control, although I was pretty sure they would be working well in to the night before it was finished. One thing that seeing it confirmed was that I would definitely not be trying to race, even if at a slow pace and at the back. Just looking at the transitions was enough to make my wrist hurt and I knew I'd just do more damage it I tried.

The flyover certainly made things interesting

On Sunday I brought the old Trek mountain bike out to the race, along with a car full of stuff for the officiating setup. I even rode most of a lap around the course.  I walked it up and down the flyover, though, for obvious reasons. I had already handed Rusty my Garmin so he could log one lap of the route. I then converted the FIT file to a GPX file to upload into CrossMgr for the animation.  The first race, which was a combined Cat. 5 and Junior race, was kind of chaotic from an officiating standpoint because of the relatively large field and the fact that Ricky was riding it rather than helping officiate it. I wouldn't be surprised if we got a couple of the placings wrong down beyond 10th place.  I was just using CrossMgr, and Tim was scoring on paper, but he wasn't very successful with it so I didn't really have any backup data for a couple of things I wasn't too sure about.  Nobody has complained so far, so I guess that's good.  Ben Spain took a header coming down the flyover and looked like he hit pretty hard, on his head. He seemed OK afterward but went to the doctor to get checked out just in case. Otherwise, the races went pretty well. It was still a long day.  I left around 4 or so and spent probably another two hours cleaning up the registration and results information, posting to the website, etc.  There were a bunch of one-day license riders and various registration screw-ups that I had to clear up in order to put up decent looking results.  That meant going through the stack of release forms and trying to decipher a lot of very poor handwriting, often followed by looking up stuff on the USAC site to fill in the gaps.

Looks like it'll be in the upper 40s tomorrow morning and then gradually warming up toward the weekend. We probably won't see the anything in the 40s again for another couple of weeks, which is pretty typical November weather down here.

This morning I had a nice easy spin on the bike path out to the end of Jefferson Parish and back.  I ran into Donald for a little while before he had to peel off to head home at Jefferson Playground.