In a Chair up in Ruston

Last weekend was a two-day cyclocross race up in Ruston, Louisiana that I'd agreed to help officiate. Ordinarily, I might have planned to jump into maybe the masters race just to salvage a little bit of the weekend, training-wise, but my left wrist is still giving me trouble and I knew that a hilly cyclocross race would be practically the worst possible thing I could do.  So I left the bikes at home and walked out the house around 4:30 am for the long drive, arriving just about 45 minutes before the 10 am start of the first race. Way up north in Ruston it was a whole lot colder than New Orleans, but the sky was clear and the wind calm, so it wasn't a problem at all. Anyway, I rushed to get the computer set up so I could track the race with CrossMgr, just barely getting it all together in time for the start of the first race.  Unfortunately, help was in short supply and Ricky, the other official, was riding in that race, so I was pretty much on my own, trying to manually enter bib numbers as riders crossed the finish on each lap while concurrently trying to write them down on paper. Naturally I screwed up a few of the electronic entries since I hadn't used the program since last year, but since the field was small and the course was hilly it didn't cause any issues.

The race was held at Lincoln Parish Park where there was an established mountain bike course with some pretty significant hills. It hadn't really rained up there in weeks, however, so the ground was hard and sandy, and included a stretch along a sand beach.  Even so, lap times were in the 6:30 - 7:00 range. I was kind of disappointed with all of the errors I made logging lap times on the first day, but with such small fields the results were easy anyway.  After the race a bunch of us went down the road to eat the Log Cabin Grill, and then Ricky and I drove over to Monroe where he had found me a temporarily unoccupied apartment for the night.

Sunday morning started out in the upper 30s, but by race time it was probably closer to 60.  This time I had a lot more time to get organized and set up the CrossMgr software.  Ricky had cropped out one lap of his race from the prior day so that I could load it into the program for the race animation feature, which is pretty cool.  Here's the HTML file that the program can create, in this case, Sunday's Cat. 1/2/3 race.  The races went well and scoring was easy because of the somewhat predictable low turnout in that part of the state, so I had a pretty nice relaxing day of mostly sitting in a chair and clicking on bib numbers.  The software supports chip timing, which would make things really easy, especially for large fields where it would be almost essential.  What I like most about it from an officiating standpoint is that it helps calculate how many laps a timed race will be based on the average lap time for the first two laps.  Also, of course, it helps a lot with keeping track of lapped riders and detecting those who aren't showing  up at the finish when expected because of some incident elsewhere on the course. Anyway, I got in zero riding for the weekend and about ten hours of solo driving.  Glad I sprung for Sirius XM in the car.

Next Sunday we have another cyclocross race here in New Orleans.  Somehow, Wes has apparently gotten permission to hold it on the "Fly" which is part of Audubon Park between the levee and the river.  I suspect it may be a pretty short and fast course and I'm kind of expecting to see some complications with pedestrians since it's a pretty busy public park in a metro area.  On the plus side, I would also expect to see a pretty big turnout. Should be interesting. Unfortunately, my wrist is still causing problems if I have to twist it or anything, so there won't be any cyclocrossing for me.

On Saturday Brian Baum has kind of organized a big super-Giro, combining three of the traditional rides that do the same route but at different times on Saturdays. The idea is to make it a smooth paceline kind of ride.  I'm not too sure about how that is going to go down with the racing rank and file who are accustomed to using the Saturday Giro as a hard training ride. It will be mixing Cat. 2 level bike racers who spend most of the time somewhere north of 25 mph with local fitness riders who tend to stop at stores twice during a 45 mile ride to eat, so it should be interesting to see what happens.