Quiet Week

The Sunday Giro rolls out along Lakeshore Drive

The past week or so has been mostly a dull routine of morning group rides, hot commutes to and from work, and weekend back-to-back Giro Rides. I wish there were more races this time of year because it's hard to keep up the motivation when you haven't pinned on a number in two months. Fortunately, things should be picking up in August with the team time trial, and criterium championship on the calendar. Speaking of the calendar, there's finally some movement on the LAMBRA road championship that had been in limbo since Zack pulled out of promoting it on the Natchez course. I think everyone's in agreement that the course up there has just gotten unworkable because of the deteriorating road surface. It's a real shame because the course itself is great and the state park is a good location. It's also super-easy to control with only one intersection and practically no traffic. So last week I started rattling some cages about getting the race back on the calendar. Initially Stephen Mire offered his place on the northshore near Bush as a staging area. There was a nice low-traffic 10-mile course there that was pretty flat for a championship but definitely not out of the question. Given how late it is in the season and the fact that LAMBRA is going to have to promote it itself rather than getting one of the local clubs to host it, I figured we should make things as simple as possible. With a date at the end of September, I'm not expecting a huge turnout, so it looks like it'll be a one-day event with a few combined races which means that some of the masters will have to chose whether to ride their category races or their age group races. Guess we'll see how that plays out, but anyway it should at least allow for reasonable sized fields at the starting line. Anyway, after kicking around a few dates Scott Kuppersmith suggested a course up by Jackson, MS and offered to help. We had used some of that course before for Tour le Fleur many years ago, and the 11-mile loop he had mapped out looked pretty good. It has only two stop signs to deal with, pretty low traffic volume, few intersections of any sort (really only three turns per lap), and lots of parking. So that's in the works right now and unless the local police and sheriff balk, I think it will work out fine.

A coyote hanging around the water intake at the parish line

So last weekend I rode both Giro Rides, which were fine but otherwise unremarkable. I did do a few of the sprints and felt pretty good about that. We've been riding the river levee on Tuesday and Thursday now and usually have about a dozen people for that. They have kind of patched up the bad asphalt around the green pipes, but haven't done anything with the hole that caused the crash other than put a traffic cone on top of it. On Mondays and Fridays I've been riding mostly solo on the levee, which is pretty nice since I can sometimes go really easy and look at the scenery a bit. Wednesdays have been the WeMoRi, which for me is usually just about half an hour of any sort of intensity, but that works out well if I'm doing 40 mile rides on Tuesday and Thursday.

Patch job. Hope is lasts a while....

Even though it's only the end of July, I'm already noticing the shortening days. When you're out on the road every morning before sunrise, you really notice the small changes like that. It was the beginning of the week that I started using my bigger, brighter headlight again after not needing it for the past couple of months. I got a new tire and Mr. Tuffy for the commuter last week and before installing them I finally broke down and changed the hub spacing to accommodate the frame. For the past decade or two I've been cramming a 27" wheel with 8-speed spacing into an English 3-speed frame. The wheel came out of the shed behind Adam's Bicycle World some time around 2000, I guess and it's been a royal pain in the ass every time I have to fix a flat. It took quite some time to change out the spacers and locknuts on the axle, however, because the threads on the ends were completely mangled. I had to file down the axle anyway to make it the correct length, so it wasn't a big issue, just rather time-consuming. I should be good for a while now. Meanwhile, I flatted the front tire on the Bianchi the other day and noticed those tires are getting pretty worn down now and I'll be needing to replace them soon. Maybe next month. I just spent $800 on tree pruning, so the bank account is pretty anemic at the moment.

50% of racing licenses are in 8 or 9 states.
LAMBRA represents 1% of all USAC licenses.

This time of year I miss all of those races we used to have that offered big prizelists. Coming home from a weekend of racing with an extra $50 was always nice.  Now, the USAC is hearing from people, mostly professional promoter types, that they want to limit cash prizes to just the elite categories. I don't know how that is going to work out in areas like ours where it's a challenge to get people to show up for races. Sure, it would be nice not to have to come up with the cash, but if you remove that incentive and don't replace it with something else, like free beer and food, I don't see how it's going to help. Anyway, we'll  have to see where that goes. I don't think they are thinking about making it illegal to have cash prizes, but I do think they are thinking of ways to reward promoters who eliminate them. Meanwhile, there's the push for equal prizes for men's and women's races. That's something that just doesn't make sense for smaller races where you're lucky to have a dozen people in an open-category women's race but you might have 45 in the men's Cat. 1/2 race. I think this stuff is all coming from the promoters in the areas with lots of riders and lots of competing professional race directors. I see a huge gap between the ten states that have 50% of the licensed riders and the rest of us. Maybe something good will come of it eventually. I think everyone in the USAC road racing world is kind of grasping at straws right now. Licenses, especially road racing licenses, continue to trend down and are currently about 7% below last year, which wasn't exactly a great year either. I have to admit that I kind of fear the triathlon model where there are relatively few events each year, but each event is huge, professionally run, has lots of amenities, and costs a pile of money to enter.  It's great to have some of those of course, but I miss the steady stream of weekend club-promoted races we used to have. I think USAC tends to pay the most attention to the big race promoters since those are the kinds of races that the USAC people are always involved with.