Flexibility

You know the Giro was fast and windy when everybody is off the saddle just to go over the levee on Lakeshore Drive.

The weekend isn't working out at all the way I thought it would a week ago. I had been hoping to make the trip up to Shreveport for the annual Rocky Mount Stage Race. It's a long drive, but they have some nice courses and the race often attracts a few riders from Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. Sometimes more than from New Orleans, which is actually farther away. As the week started, though, things were looking bad. The forecast for the weekend was pretty awful, and no doubt as a result, pre-registrations were really low. Being able to see who is pre-registered is a two-sided sword.  On the one hand, when you see that a race has a lot of people registered, maybe including some big teams or people you haven't raced with in a while, it definitely encourages you to register yourself. On the other hand, when riders check and see that hardly anyone is registered they start wondering if it's going to be a small race with small fields, so then hold off registering, which of course creates a Catch-22 or self-fulfilling prophecy or something like that. Bottom line is that nobody registers because nobody else registered. Well, the weekend forecast for Shreveport was consistently calling for rain all weekend, like 100% chance of rain, plus winds in the 20 mph neighborhood, plus chilly temperatures in the 50s and low 60s.  I have to admit, the prospect of driving five hours each way to do three races in the rain, and in which I might easily get dropped, was not terribly appealing. I did want to bring the radios up there for the race, though, and then I needed to bring the generator and maybe race clock back with me for the TT championship we're putting on next week. Well, on Thursday morning they pulled the ripcord and cancelled, hoping to re-schedule in the fall.  Naturally, that pretty much guaranteed that the weather forecast would immediately improve, which it did. This whole change of plans gave me a little flexibility for the weekend but presented a couple of new problems. I guess I'll have to drive to Baton Rouge some time this week to pick up some of the LAMBRA equipment I need for the Time Trial. On the plus side, it's looking like we won't get any rain around here until tomorrow afternoon, if ever, so I'll get in two Giro rides I guess.

Time for a new chain

Having some unplanned free time due to the cancellation of the Shreveport trip, I decided to drive over to LaPlace after the Giro Ride this morning to re-paint the course markings for the 5k, 10k, and 20k turnarounds. Meanwhile, up in Grand Junction, Ben Spain and Ben Bradley are in the middle of the collegiate nationals road race right now. Ben Bradley got 6th yesterday in the time trial, which is impressive considering that he lives below sea level and the race is at 7,000 feet. Naturally some guy from Colorado won the thing.

This afternoon I took advantage of my unexpected free time to change my chain. I got an alert from Garmin Connect, which I use to keep track of mileage on some components like chain, headset, etc. I have it set for 3,000 miles for the chain. I had already picked up a replacement, since I like to have one on hand so I don't wait too long and end up ruining the cassette too. I usually look around until I find a Campi chain on sale, which is another reason to get it ahead of time. I've used mostly Campi chains on my last three bikes, mostly just because they seem to work well and last pretty long. I'm sure I could save a bit of money with SRAM or KMC or something, but really it's not such a huge difference and not really worth experimenting.

Been through a lot of chains.....

So tomorrow will be another Giro for me. I had been thinking that it would be raining tomorrow morning but now the forecast is looking pretty good for the morning and I guess we'll probably be fine. Here in New Orleans you have to be flexible because the weather is about as unpredictable as the politics.

Sort of Racing

Took a few pics of one race

When Yoda told Luke "Do, or do not. There is no try," he might have been talking about bike racing. I have always known, and often actually demonstrated, that starting a criterium at the back and staying there for any length of time is the equivalent of not trying. It is also the equivalent of getting dropped. And so it was last Sunday at the Harbor Master Criterium over at Esplanade Mall. I had decided earlier in the week that it was time to get back to racing, even though I was clearly still a little bit uncommitted. I knew I wasn't in particularly great shape for racing. While the collarbone is essentially all better now, I've spent the better part of the past two months lollygagging around the back of the group on the training rides and generally using any available excuse to keep my nose out of the wind. By last week, though, I was starting to feel like I was at least capable of hanging onto the back of the race for a while.

Of course I had also offered to help with officiating, and had brought Danielle along with me to help out while I was riding the Masters race, which I didn't figure would be very long. We got there early and helped set things up at the finish line and started putting the riders into the race database as they signed in. I did maybe three laps of the course and rolled up to the back of the medium-sized masters field with all the confidence of a Chihuahua at a Pit Bull fight. Fortunately, the first few laps weren't too crazy, so thing were going OK and I was feeling fine. Right about the time I started thinking that I'd better get my ass closer to the front before things got out of hand, they rang the bell for a prime. Halfway through the lap the field was strung out single-file, and I was probably somewhere around the five riders at the tail end. Not good. Coming around the last couple of turns someone a couple of riders ahead let a big gap open. By the time I got past we were already around the last turn and I knew I wouldn't be able to close it by myself. I took a dig anyway, mumbling "never let a gap open on a prime lap" as I went by, but blew up pretty quickly. After a little bit I was with a nice 4-rider group that was going OK but of course losing a little time on the field with each passing lap. Eventually we were pulled, but I didn't feel too bad about it. I thought that if it hadn't been for that unexpected gap I probably could have hung in with the main group, so in a way it was a good test and a decent result for me at this point.

I helped out with the finishes for most of the other races, but since there were two officials and two cameras I didn't feel like I needed to actually score every lap. Turns out I should have anyway. One of the cameras seemed to be pretty out of focus and badly aimed, and things got really complicated with the large fields on a short course that made it necessary to pull a lot of riders. Adding to the complication, they wanted to place the pulled riders. Results were generally OK but there were still some errors even today, on Wednesday, that I'm still trying to correct.

Yesterday I went  up to Baton Rouge for our annual Tulane Day at the Legislature where we have tables set up in the Rotunda, which is actual rectangular. I got to go up in a big van with some of the engineering physics students who had just won the NASA Big Idea Challenge.  The ride there and back was definitely the best part of the whole day for me. In the afternoon when the legislature was in session they got recognized in both chambers, which was nice. Otherwise it was kind of boring for me, but then again it always is. We have a stage race in Shreveport this weekend but the weather forecast is looking particularly awful. I feel like I need to race, but while a 5-hour drive to get dropped in a masters race is bad enough, doing it to get dropped in the pouring rain with 20 mph winds makes it particularly unappealing. I guess I have one more day to make the final call, so we'll see if the forecast improves by then.

No Timz

Post-event photo while tearing down the criterium course

For once it was looking like we would have a rain-free race weekend for the Tulane Green Wave Classic. The course was marked, the police arrangements were in place, everything was looking good except for the not so minor fact that there were about half as many registration as normal. Of course, since they, and by that I mean the SCCCC, had decided to put the conference championships on Easter weekend I was only slightly surprised. I'd expected fewer riders than normal, but by the time we closed registration Saturday morning there were only forty-odd riders spread over six categories, which would have been seven but nobody registered for that one. For a conference championship, even in the SCCCC, there really should have been more like 100. I'd driven up to Covington Friday evening and checked into the Holiday Inn with Danielle and the other official, Mike.

Saturday's road races themselves went pretty well, although there were a few snags. For one, the address that was in the flyer for the start location must have been wrong because Google maps was taking people to the middle of a field a couple of miles away.  For another, the police wanted cash despite the fact that we'd been told that the sheriff's office would send an invoice and we could pay afterward.  That sent Quentin all the way back to Covington to get about $800+ in cash out of his personal bank account. We combined one of the women's fields with a men's field, so at least the follow car he was supposed to drive wasn't needed. An hour or so before the start I fired up the laptop only to have it go into "update" mode.  That tied it up for a good half hour, but since there were only 40+ people to plug into the results, we were able to get that done and print out start lists in plenty of time.  The races themselves were fairly uneventful. The radios and Zello worked fine, so there weren't any surprises. All in all, the road race went off great.

Great watches -
as long as they're set to the right mode!

I can't say the same about the afternoon Time Trial.  Time Trials are usually the easiest things in the world to run and score. We always have a starter who writes down every number and start time, and two judges at the finish making independent lists of bib numbers and times. Easy peasy, right?  What could possibly go wrong. Well, after the Road Race, I noticed that a couple of the new stopwatches (we have a nice set of six) had been accidentally set to "lap mode" instead of "split mode." There's a button on the face of the watches that toggles from one to the other, but once you start the stopwatch you're locked into whichever mode is set. I mentioned it to Mike and reset them to split mode and put them back into the case. Fifteen minutes before the start of the TT we gathered the officials and started five stopwatches - two for the start line and three for the finish line. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me, Mike had gotten the modes mixed up and had changed all three of the finish line watches to Lap Mode. This started a cascade failure that would play out three miles down the road when both judges hit the split button for the second time and saw the lap time rather than the cumulative split time. Both were confused. Unfortunately, Mike tried it again with the backup stopwatch, so now they had no cumulative times at all.  They went ahead and recorded the lap times hoping we could reconstruct the cumulative times.  Well, that didn't work out.  I guess that with the one remaining watch they didn't hit the button once or twice, or maybe hit it an extra time or something, but anyway once we got past the first few riders the times were clearly wrong. After spending hours trying to figure out a way to calculate reasonably valid times using a combination of math, lap times, finish order, and Strava segments, it because clear we were screwed. We ended up not counting the Time Trial at all, except for the Cat. A group which was the first and thus the least affected. It was pretty much the worst case scenario for a time trial and by far the worst I've seen at one of our races. So the moral of the story is to make sure the watches are set properly before starting them, always have one or two backup watches, and if you have to resort to the last backup watch, don't push any buttons!

No time to take photos, so here's one from one of the finish line cameras.

The Criterium went off very smoothly since by then there were only 27 riders spread over four races. Other than the winning MSU Cat. A rider who got relegated for coming over on the rider next to him in the last 100 meters, the races were fine and of course results were pretty simple to finalize. I'm sure the MSU guys think that I was playing favorites there since the rider who got moved up into first was a Tulane riders, but the fact is that I intentionally consulted with Ben Davis, the conference co-director, to make sure he thought the same thing since there was a perceived conflict of interest there. Anyway, the bottom line is that the race was well organized, the weather was great, the courses were great, and everything ran on time. The time trial disaster and the low turnout, however, really sucked.

It was disappointing to see Tulane miss out on winning the Club conference championship by only 81 points. Since the championship was worth double points, that was basically the difference of one more Tulane rider placing in the top five in a couple of Category B races, which would have been easy since four of the races had fewer than five riders in them.

So this morning, after riding through the wet and mud and grass to get over the lakefront levee at Causeway where they're doing levee-raising, we are thinking that some of us will instead do our Thursday training ride back on the river levee starting at 6 am from the pipes at Dakin Street. We'll see how that goes. I can't say I'll miss the commute to and from the lakefront.

No Rest

Painting the Road Race Course took forever

With the Green Wave Classic collegiate race fast approaching, I figured I'd better go paint arrows on the road and time trial courses or it probably wouldn't happen. So last Saturday after doing the Giro Ride I threw the bike into the car and made the long drive "up north."  The road course is almost 80 miles from home, and I was already pretty tired from the morning ride, but it had to be done. By the time I got there it was already after 1:00 and the temperature was well into the 80s.  That's when I discovered I'd left my jersey at home. I was wearing the wind-resistant base layer I'd worn for the morning ride, so while not ideal, it would have to suffice. Fortunately I'd brought one of those little string backpacks along, so all the stuff that would normally go into my pockets went into that, along with two cans of road-marking paint. Riding by myself way out in the country was nice, and I was happy to be on some very low-traffic roads, which is pretty much why we use them for this race. I rode around the 17 mile loop, stopping seemingly every few miles to paint arrows ahead of the turns and in the turns and after the turns. When I got back, I also marked the 200 meter and 1 km locations. Next, I headed back to the Time Trial course, and did the same for that 3-mile course from Lakeside High School. By then it was already after 4:00 and I was hot and sticky and hungry and tired. I stopped at Starbucks before hitting the Causeway back across the lake. Sunday, of course, was another Giro Ride. Meanwhile, a bunch of the local guys were up in Anniston racing Sunny King and the accompanying road race on Sunday. Some got their asses kicked pretty badly, but a few snagged good results. I was glad to be able to catch the live webcast of the main women's and men's criteriums Saturday evening. I guess those who can, do; those who can't watch it on the internet.

Heading back from Kenner on the morning ride after a fast outbound leg.

So this week's training was pretty routine with just a couple of quirks. The levee-raising work on the lakefront has now closed the bike path on the east side of the Causeway, so we are riding in the grass then up over the concrete apron, underneath the overpass where it's about five feet high, down the levee on the other side, and finally back onto the bike path. I guess it will stay like that for at least a month. These projects always seem to lack any sense of urgency.

Not an easy detour for the morning ride

I was trying to ride pretty hard on Tuesday and probably hadn't recovered from the weekend, so by the time I went out to meet the WeMoRi I was already feeling pretty tired. I had seen the group coming on Lakeshore Drive, so I'd turned around and made it onto Marconi before being caught by Eddie and Woody who were off the front. I made a huge effort there to get on, which was fine, but halfway down Robt. E. Lee the effort started catching up to me. I probably could have hung on, but I knew, or at least thought I knew, that the group was right behind us. I glanced back and saw lights and eased up with the idea of going back to the relative safety of the group. Unfortunately, the lights I'd seen were from cars, not the group. Turned out the group had been held up at the traffic signal and was now way, way behind, so I was stuck in no-man's land for a little while. Anyway, I rode the rest with the group once they caught me, slamming into a rock somewhere on Lakeshore Drive but luckily not pinch-flatting. That evening, although I was feeling dead tired and was starting to get some sort of sinus infection I rushed home and rode out to the WNW training race. I got there a bit late but got in with the group right at Elysian Fields where the neutral warmup ends. There was a nice big group and little wind, so it wasn't very hard sitting in near the back. My plan was to do two of the three laps and then wait at the finish. Well, partway through the second lap, as we were going up the levee before the Seabrook loop, I saw Matt accelerating down the right side as the rest of the group bunched  up on the left, so I latched onto Matt's wheel. A moment later I heard a crash behind and to the left. Michael B had gone down when I guess he ran up onto someone's wheel as the group bunched up while he was drinking out of  his water bottle and unable to hit the brakes until it was too late. I turned around along with a few others to make sure he was OK, which he was.

This weekend I'll be officiating the collegiate race along with Mike Abshire. Danielle will be helping, so that's good. I went ahead and sprang for two nights at the Holiday Inn to cut down on the Saturday morning drive time a little bit. We're not doing the Friday night registration like we have in the past because so few of the collegiate riders seem to show up for it. It's possible that Saturday morning will be some form of chaos if a lot of people show up who haven't pre-registered. Anyway, I'm just hoping they will have enough follow cars and lead cars and all for the road race. Once that's out of the way, the rest is a lot less stressful. The weather is looking to be pretty good, so that's good. Turnout, however, is not looking so good. Online registration ends tonight and I'm seeing only about 30 registered even though this will be the conference road championship. I shouldn't be too surprised since it's Easter weekend and, for some, also Spring Break. Hopefully all of the cameras will be working and judging will be relatively easy. The biggest downside for me is missing another weekend of riding. I've been putting in decent mileage lately, and mixing in a little bit of intensity here and there, but I can't say I am feeling very confident about my race fitness.

Steve Tilford

Steve Tilford

The streets were wet this morning, and for a minute I debated whether I should to out in the dark to meet up with the WeMoRi. I took the old Orbea, thinking I'd probably get wet and dirty and maybe puncture a tire. Halfway to the lakefront the streets were dry and I merged into the group as it came flying down Marconi, turning onto Robert E. Lee maybe third or fourth wheel. The pace picked up, I accelerated, hanging on to the wheel in front, then, Wham, I slammed the front wheel in to that damned little pothole that I never see till the last second and blew the front tire. I coasted to a stop hoping it wouldn't snag or come off the rim before I could get my feet down. The first spare tube blew out. It was still dark and hard to tell if there was a cut in the casing somewhere, so I put about 40 psi into the second spare and headed home.

I thought it was a bad morning - until it got worse.

First thing I saw when I fired up the computer to upload Strava data was that Steve Tilford had died in a car accident. The details are on his blog, posted by his friend Vincent Davis who was with him.

I didn't know Steve personally - never met him, probably never raced with him - but on the other hand I felt like I knew him very well. He started racing just a few years after I did, but while I was always down here in the small local races, he was way up there in the big international races. He was one of the real pioneers of U.S. cycling, moving seamlessly from road to mountain bike to cyclocross and winning championships in all of them. He never really capitalized on any of it. If he had enough to get to the next race, he was happy. In a lot of ways, I identified with him. I added a link from my blog to his a few years ago. He was one of the few who consistently updated his blog, and was never shy about calling out the dopers or the cheaters or any of the other things that threatened to drag bike racing down. If you don't know who he was, well, you're probably relatively young. Steve made 57 earlier this year and was just about ready to resume racing following the skull fracture and TBI he suffered, and documented on his blog, last fall, a few months after being inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.  I will really miss his blog posts and I will especially miss reading about his come-back from his skull fracture. I have no doubt he would have been dropping guys half his age by June. So his unexpected death feels like a real personal loss to me and a huge loss to the U.S. cycling community. It kind of sucks being at this age where life stops giving you things and starts taking them away instead.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/5141593-155/two-dead-in-crash-of-semis

 "A chain reaction accident involving two semi-trailer rigs and a van killed two men — including internationally known cyclist Stephen Tilford — early Wednesday morning on Interstate 70 near the Utah-Colorado border. Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Todd Royce said the tragic events began with the first semi drifting off the road and then overcorrecting. It overturned, coming to rest on its side and blocking all eastbound lanes of the highway at mile marker 214. Moments later, a Mercedes-Benz van plowed into and through the big rig's trailer. Tilford, 57, of Topeka, Kansas, got out and was standing next his vehicle when a second semi crashed into the wreckage, striking and killing him. 
The driver of the second semi, 70-year-old Stanley Williams of Grand Junction, Colo., also died of his injuries at the scene. A passenger in the van was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries; the driver of the first semi was not reported hurt. The highway was closed down for nearly four hours as wreckage was cleared and the scene investigated by troopers. Tilford, inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2000, had five Union Cycliste Internationale masters' class championships, four U.S. National Cyclo-Cross titles and two world championships in Masters Cyclocross competitions, in addition to a U.S. National Mountain Bike championship."

Back in the Pack

Riding weather doesn't get much better than what we had on Saturday.     

After nearly three weeks of gradually increasing (some might use the term "sputtering") intensity, interspersed with long periods of overly cautious wheel-sucking, I finally started to feel like I was more or less back to normal last weekend. Although it was painfully obvious that the fitness is still lagging pretty far behind, and there's still some dull pain around the collarbone, Saturday's Giro was the first time I've gotten my heart rate above 90% in a couple of months. For the record, that was 52 days post-injury, so roughly 7 weeks. I guess that's about normal.

On Saturday the weather was perfect for riding. Blue sky, light wind, temperature in the low 70s. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that there was a big turnout for the Giro Ride, despite the fact that a few of the local guys were up in Fayetteville at the Joe Martin Stage Race, which I still think of as the Fayetteville Classic. It's one of the oldest stage races in the country and has evolved into a pretty big regional event with a professional event management company running things and lots of overlapping classes and categories that I find a little confusing. As expected, some of the local guys were in a bit over their heads, but that's exactly what makes going to races like that so important. A couple of the Tulane guys went with the 4D Racing team to ride the 2-day Cat.  1/2 race, which had a surprisingly small field of only 25. A few of them did pretty well there, although I was a little surprised to see that a couple of them got dropped pretty badly in the RR and Crit. I suppose there's a story there.

Anyway, I pretty much pulled out the stops last weekend, which is to say I sucked wheels a bit less than usual and didn't sit up too early for the Giro Ride sprints. I felt pretty good, considering, so I guess all of those easy rides I did early on helped me maintain a little bit of fitness. The weather was so nice on Saturday that after the Giro I continued out onto the lakefront bike path with Jaden and Stephanie to log a few more easy miles. By then the wind was picking up, so we had a pretty noticeable headwind on the way back, but we weren't going very fast so it didn't really matter.  I woke up Sunday morning with some soreness in my legs, which I totally expected, and headed out to do the Sunday Giro. Turnout there was a little lighter than Saturday, which is normal. The weather was changing and although it was warm, the sky was overcast and there was rain in the forecast. We got in a good ride, though. By the end I was happy to ride straight back home, having logged almost 310 miles for the week, which was about where I had been back in the first week of January.

Last night a big line of thunderstorms came through, along with tornado and flood watches, so I guess I won't be riding today unless I sneak out this evening. No matter, I probably should take a good recovery day anyway and get to work on the Tour de Louisiane.