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.