Get it Right

Fred and I had starter duties

I glanced over my shoulder at the big new expensive LED race clock and said out loud, "I've been standing here almost two hours." We were down to the last few Cat. 1/2s at the LAMBRA Time Trial Championship, having already sent around a hundred riders down the dead-flat 40 kilometers of asphalt we've been using off and on for decades. This year the weather was nearly perfect for the 8 am start, and although it was warmer and slightly more windy by the time we got down to the last batch of riders, conditions were still pretty good. I'd been worrying about officiating this race for a few days already, although I'm not really sure why.  I guess I just really wanted to get it right this time after having more problems than I'd like the last couple times I pulled on my blue shirt. I shouldn't have been worried. I'd been up until 1 am Friday night setting up the start list based on USAC Time Trial ranking points, posting it to the website, printing and sorting the entry forms and stapling the assigned bib numbers to them. Sunday morning Danielle and I packed the Volvo to the roof with equipment - clock, podium, p/a system, signs, traffic cones, generator, flags, tent, officiating stuff, cooler, etc.  It just barely fit.  On race day, when I opened the case with the stopwatches, every single one was set to Lap mode instead of Split mode. No idea how that happened, but I was glad I checked and was able to reset all of them. The night before I had drilled through the start/stop button on one of them so that you could insert a safety pin through the hole and make it impossible to accidentally stop the watch - a little trick I learned long ago.

Travis won the Cat. 4s

A number of club members had already stepped up to help with the race and I'd even gone to the almost unprecedented extreme of actually assigning most of the volunteer slots ahead of time. Truth be told, we often don't really know who or how many we have to help out until fifteen minutes before the start. This year we had a number of well-experienced people in all of the key positions, so things were looking pretty good. Still, there's always the chance something will go terribly wrong. There was that year when it was raining and the turnaround marshal couldn't find the painted marks on the road and somewhat arbitrarily put the turnaround a couple hundred meters past where it should have been. Stuff happens.

I finally got the last rider, a Cat. 2 from Indiana, started and rushed back to registration area where the computer was. Mignon and Mark had already started confirming and entering the start times, so I sent one of them off to collect the first batch of finish times while I filled out and double-checked the rest of the start time columns. The Juniors had already been waiting around for well over an hour to see their results, so we knocked those out pretty quickly. The rest of the results arrived, a page at a time, over the next forty-five minutes or so. Despite a few riders who had their numbers on the wrong side, or pinned way up on their backs where only satellites could see them, we didn't have any problems with times. With Danielle and Robin doing the timing and Branden sitting on top of his truck calling numbers, that had all gone quite smoothly. I made one typo on a finish time that was caught right away, but other than that everyone seemed happy.  Looking over the results, and considering the conditions, I was a little surprised not to see a time or two challenging the LAMBRA men's record of 52:17.  The closest was Matt Davis' 53:15. On the plus side, you had to go down to about 30th place to find a time over an hour. I was pleased to see Stephanie Smith break her own LAMBRA women's TT record, recording an impressive 58:21. We had a lot of riders in the various Masters 5-year age groups, including three in the 70+ age group, so we had an age range from 9 to over 70.

Frank Colangelo was the referee for the NOBC's first event in 1969. He's been racing since at least 1964,
so over 50 years, so far. 

I guess we got back home around 1 or 1:30, which was pretty nice since LaPlace is only about half an hour away.  I spent another hour putting the results on the website, then did the post-event report, paid for the insurance surcharges out of the online registration revenue, updated my race budget, re-organized and put away all of our race equipment, and finally called it a wrap. I even had time to get in a bike ride for myself, which I didn't do because I was pretty exhausted. By Monday morning I was already working on the Tour de Louisiane preparations, scheduling a meeting with the Covington officials. Thanks largely to Steve Johnson and Mignon Guerin we should have some significant sponsorship this year, which means we might not lose too much money. If the weather turns out to be good that weekend, we could potentially come out ahead, but you can never really tell with bike races.