Crit on the Coast, Weekend of Crashes

Hanging on as usual

Candy and I rolled out early Saturday morning for the hour and a half drive over to Gulfport for the LAMBRA Criterium Championship. With the first race starting at 9 am, there was lots of time to pick up some coffee for the drive. I was planning on racing the Masters race, which was the first one on the list of start times that went well into the afternoon. Chris Lemoine pulls this race together with help from the City of Gulfport, and always has the course well under control by the time I arrive, so I wasn't surprised when, arriving a good hour and a half before the first race, I found directional signs and course marshals already in place.

Three OTB

This year's course was a new one. The traditional course was off-limits because of construction, so Chris had to resort to Plan B, which turned out to be a pretty interesting and challenging course on narrow old roads with lots of twists and turns. The whole course was on the grounds of the optimistically labelled "Centennial Plaza." This was actually an abandoned US Veterans Hospital that had never been rebuilt after hurricane Katrina. The surviving buildings, of which there were many, had been gutted but were still looking pretty good, having been built back in the 20s when people built things to last. The race director had patched a bunch of holes in the asphalt, so the road surfaces weren't really too bad. I think if we'd had a 50-rider field, however, the narrow twisting roads would have been a huge problem. As it was, though, I think the venue was fine.

I walked over to register and when they handed me the filled-in waiver from pre-registration I knew something was wrong. All of the waivers that they had downloaded and printed out were missing about half of the waiver text! Yikes. Luckily I had a bunch of waivers with me (this ain't my first rodeo) and also luckily only a few people had already registered and filled out the worthless waivers, so all was good. Half an hour before my race I went out to try and warm up and see what the course was like. What had looked on paper like a course with a lot of nice sweeping curves turned out to be a lot more challenging in real life. Turn #1 was a regular right-hand turn, festooned with a drainage grate and a few significant cracks that demanded some attention, that took you onto a narrower little road that curved first left and then made a long decreasing-radius turn to the right that put more than one person in the grass, or on the asphalt. For me it provided a few "oh shit!" moments as the left edge came up really suddenly when at speed and required a whole lot of lean. From there were more curves, then a slightly downhill off-camber right that was thankfully rather wide, followed by the final right, followed by a couple of curves before the short finish straight. This should have been a good course for me.

Well things started out quickly and by the time we were around the first turn there were already a couple of guys off the front. The narrow road and constant twists and turns made it difficult to go around anyone. Of course a chase ensued and after a few laps it came back together briefly. Having not been in a race, especially a criterium, in literally months I soon found myself near the back. A counter attack strung things out again and then on the back side of the circuit the rider in front of me started to fade. Then he blew up. It just seemed too risky at the time to try and jump around him, and so I just sat there as the gap opened. We never caught, of course, since there was now a break off the front that a chase group trying to close and all sorts of teamwork going on. With the small field in this race, there wasn't enough available horsepower to close what should have been an easy gap to close, not that my teammate Chris didn't try. Meanwhile, I got together with one or two others and we continued at a respectable tempo. Up ahead there ended up being two groups. We were maybe two-thirds of the way through the 45 minute race when the first group of five or so lapped us. We jumped on and hung in with them for a few laps until a surge split everything up again. I found myself with two others, one of whom I think had already crashed and taken a free lap. So that was nice and I figured we'd just ride it out to the end at that point. With six or seven laps to go I led through the sketchy right-hand curve maybe just a bit faster than usual, and behind me heard the sound of a crash. That left just the two of us to ride it in to the finish. At least we were never lapped by the second group. The course definitely kept the speeds down a lot, so I think if I'd held my position earlier in the race instead of dropping to the back I probably would have easily been able to stay in the second group. As it was, I finished feeling more hot than tired.

I spend the rest of the day helping with scoring, all of which was relatively easy since the field sizes were so small. There were a few crashes, but nothing too serious. We stopped for a couple of badly needed frozen margaritas and an early dinner before hitting the road back to New Orleans.

Evan, awaiting transport

So on Sunday I headed out for the Giro Ride with surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, fresh legs hoping to make up for Saturday's lackluster ride. We were going pretty fast down Hayne Blvd. as usual, but toward the end there were doing some repaving and one lane was closed off. After making the turn at the end onto Paris Road, we found it covered with rocks and crap that had fallen from dumptrucks and it wasn't long before I heard someone's tire explode.

Took a while to get everyone rolling again

A few of us stopped, but most of the group kept going. The tire was slashed all the way across the tread. Luckily I had an old race number and piece of Mr. Tuffy in my bag, so we got him patched up, put in the minimum amount of air, and sent him home as the rest of us continued on with a nice steady paceline until we saw the group on its way back. The pace coming back down Chef highway wasn't too fast and by that time it was getting up around 90 degrees. We turned off onto the service road, crossed under the interstate and made the right onto the service road. The pace was moderate at best, but of course it got strung out going through the turn, so riders were kind of all over the place getting reorganized. I was kind of toward the back, luckily, when all of a sudden there were bikes flying all over the place in front of me. I searched for the gaps and slowed down dramatically. There were bikes all across the road. Behind me I heard another crash and was just waiting for someone to plow into me from behind. Luckily I came to a stop without hitting anything and without being hit. The road looked like a yard sale was going on. There were water bottles and computers and sunglasses and keys all over the place as riders started picking themselves  up off the ground. I think three or four actually crashed. I looked around and saw my teammate Evan sitting on the ground with his right arm in that classic "something's broken" position. He probably broke either his collarbone or scapula. Ben, who had just crashed a few days prior on the levee ride, had also gone down hard and was ripped up from shoulder to ankle but otherwise OK. We put Evan on some conveniently placed road furniture (the service road is a popular dumping ground) and called home for extraction. A number of us waited with him for half an hour or so until he got picked up.

Meanwhile there was a crash on the northshore MS Tour training ride that took down young Madison. Reports are that she's fine, but with a busted lip. Up in Colorado, a few of the regular guys were doing Leadville 100, which seems like pretty harsh torture for sea-level riders. Woody finished in 11:14. The winner finished in 6:15 apparently, which is hard for me to wrap my head around. 50th place took 8 hours. Woody was 883/ 1,259.

So it turned out to be a pretty low-mileage, low-intensity week for me. Woody may need a little more recovery time, though.