Tag-along

A rainy and desolate TT start for the SCCCC championship weekend. This was actually better weather than I'd expected.

The weather when we headed out from New Orleans last Friday morning was beautiful. The forecast for Wichita Falls for Saturday was ugly. Situation normal for a collegiate race weekend, I guess. I drove the "early van" with Gavin and Kaitlyn, starting our 10-hour trip around 9:30 or so. I'd brought my bike in hopes of getting in some miles during the Sunday morning road races, on the assumption that the cold front would have moved through by then.

The drive went pretty smoothly, at least until Dallas where it never goes smoothly. Somewhere in the Interstate spaghetti that is the Dallas highway system we came to a halt. Waze had alerted us just moments before and had already plotted a somewhat circuitous bypass to get us around the traffic jam that I assume had been caused by a crash somewhere up the road. That was interesting, and pretty soon we were tooling down the interstate again at the speed limit, plus or minus 5 mph. We got to the hotel after dark - I guess around 7:30 or so - and ended up eating a rather unappetizing dinner at a Denny's near the hotel. The forecast for Saturday was looking no better than it had the day before.

Kaitlyn was off the front from the start despite the wet streets

Saturday morning I was up early looking at the radar, which was really unnecessary since a glance out the window at the rain told me everything I needed to know. It would be very wet for the morning time trial. We were out the door by 6:30 or so, headed for what used to be one of the local bike shops and was now just an empty used-to-be bike shop where they were doing registration. They had already sent out a preliminary start list but promised a complete one after registration. Arriving at the start location maybe 20 minutes before the start, we were practically alone. The only clue that something might be happening was a solitary yellow portable toilet sitting in the triangle formed by the intersecting roads. We sat in the car with the heater running and watched the light rain. I was actually looking better than I'd expected. Obviously the roads would be wet, but the rain was pretty light. Eventually the officials arrived. As seems to be standard practice at Texas time trials, the start list, if there had ever been one, got tossed out the window and one of the officials was basically calling for "anyone" to come to the start line. While this kind of random start list can work OK, it does tend to open the door to mistakes when compiling the results. On the plus side, it meant that our four riders would be able to start earlier rather than later, which would minimize the amount of time I'd be hanging around in the rain.

The second row was a bad place to start for Gavin

The criterium was scheduled for 4 pm, which was just about the time the rain was supposed to be ending. First up was the combined Men C, Women B race with Kaitlyn. They were using a shortened course on campus because of some construction and a baseball game, but at least the road surface was fairly good concrete. Nonetheless, the group rounded the first corner at almost walking speed. By the second lap Kaitlyn was already rolling off the front. She would stay out there in time trial mode for the rest of the race. There was a small chase group that hovered anywhere from ten to twenty seconds behind her, but somehow they never got it together enough to catch, so she won. Gavin was up next in the Men's B race where his relative inexperience had him starting a little too far back. There was already a break by the time they were halfway around the first lap and Gavin was stuck in the second group which was showing no signs at all of chasing. He eventually realized that he could ride solo faster than the group and rolled off the front, but it was too little, too late. In the Men's A race, Elliott, who had upgraded to Cat. A the week before, was off the back right away, and Grayson ended up off the back as well, so that was a little disappointing. On the plus side, by the time the A race was underway the roads were pretty dry except for some puddles on the corners (of course), and there were bits of blue sky showing up. I ended up helping our with video of the Prime and finish sprints, and handling the lap cards.

Grayson went for, and got, the hole shot in the crit, but blew up dramatically later on.

The weather Sunday morning for the road races was beautiful, but cold. It had dropped down into the upper 40s overnight, but with the clear sky I knew it would warm up nicely. As always, it was windy. They don't call it the Vuelta de Viento for nothing. I got the OK to tag along behind the Men's B / Women's A race, which was scheduled for two laps of the course. This is always a frustrating way to ride, but I figured it would be more interesting than riding solo in the wind with nothing to look at but the featureless Texas prairie. Somewhere up near the front of the pack was Gavin. The only opportunity on the whole loop for a breakaway was on the one significant hill, which also happened to be on a long headwind stretch. Sure enough, that's where the group split with Gavin and a few others going up the road, and then the main pack splitting again before the turn onto the crosswind stretch. I was tagging along on the back to make sure I didn't do anything to affect the race, so watching these splits and not doing anything about it was difficult. For most of the rest of that first lap the little group I was with made an effort, however disorganized, to chase. At one point it looked like there was a chance they would regain the main pack, but just as they got close the gap started to open again and all the wind went out of their sails. Anyway, once the gap became clearly insurmountable I took a couple of pulls to help out a bit. Gavin ended up coming in 3rd, so that was good, and Kaitlyn was 2nd in her race, although there were only two Women B riders. Since the weather was so nice, and I was so in need of some miles, I decided to do an additional lap when the B group split off from the main loop for the short spur back to the finish line. I figured there would be some A riders somewhere around, but as it turned out I never saw any and ended up as probably the last person back to the cars. Kaitlyn called me at one point to see where the hell I was. Both Grayson and Elliott had quit a lap early from the A race after being dropped, which was disappointing. At any rate, I was happy to have gotten in 60-something miles, even if they weren't quite at race pace.

Gavin ended up 3rd in a photo-finish. More photos from
Brooks Bixler at http://brooksbixler.zenfolio.com/f90425403

The nice thing about having all of the road races in the morning was that we were able to hit the road for home right after lunch, and got back to New Orleans around 10 pm. I think this was the first year where I never had to drive through a terrifying rainstorm and/or arrive back home after midnight. The Tulane team is pretty much done for the year now since classes end next week. Now I'm concentrating on the Time Trial Championship that the NOBC is hosting in a little over a week, plus the 47th Annual Tour de Louisiane that we're hosting the first week of June.

Meanwhile, I've been logging both commuting and training miles this month as part of the Bike Easy Challenge where I'm unintentionally leading the straight mileage individual ranking with Elliott right behind me and Grayson in 6th place. If Tulane would get its act together rather than spreading itself out among no fewer than 21 separate "organizations" they'd be blowing away all of the other "Organizations." As it is, the "Tulane University" organization that I created is in 4th place behind the "Tulane Graduate Students." If you add up all of the Tulane organizations, they have accumulated amost 50,000 points. The current leading large organization is Ochsner Baptist with only 13,816 points. The Tulane Library has over 11,000 points all by itself.

Another weekend forecast

Saturday morning in Wichita Falls

The past few days around here have been pretty nice with morning temperatures in the upper 50s or lower 60 and not too much wind. I wish it would last, but it won't. There was a chance I'd get lucky and sidestep it all since I'll be driving over to Wichita Falls on Friday with the Tulane team for their conference road championship at Midwestern State. No such luck, though. The current forecast is calling for it to start raining before sunrise and to continue until early afternoon, at best. The silver lining to that cloud, though, is that the first event is the time trial and the criterium isn't until 4:00 pm. So while there's currently zero chance that it won't be raining for the time trial, there's at least some hope that it will be over by the time the criteriums start. The other good thing is that it should be clear and dry for the long 10-hour drive over there. Sunday, it should be better, which is to say it will be dry, cold,and as it always is in Wichita Falls, windy as hell. Hence the race title, "Vuelta de Viento." If the only rain is for the time trial, I'll be thrilled.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, the same line of rain that will be in Wichita Falls on Saturday morning is scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on Sunday morning during the Harbor Master Criterium. Hopefully the event won't be essentially rained out due to the weather or low participation or both. Ordinarily, I'd be planning on racing and officiating there. This year Ricky won't be able to make it down from Monroe to officiate, so we've assembled an officiating crew of three that will hopefully be able to pull it off. It was really messy last year because of big fields and some finish camera issues. This year there will be just the one linescan camera that we used for the Tulane race, and if it's dark and overcast, it might not be particularly helpful since it really struggles when it's dark. The other night I decided to set it up with the LAMBRA laptop at home so I could write up detailed step-by-step instructions for the officials. That went fine until it didn't. The LAMBRA laptop is almost never connected to the internet. It runs Windows 7 and probably hasn't seen an update in a few years. A couple of years ago I had it at home and connected it in order to download some software for the radios. Well, while I was writing up the setup instructions, it prompted me to update the RapidCam software that runs the camera, so I did. Of course, something went south in that process and then the software wouldn't run at all. I eventually found an earlier install of the software buried in the downloads archive folder (who knew there was such a thing). Luckily, that worked. At least I hope it worked. It's hard to really tell until you actually set it up on the side of the road with enough light for the camera. Guess they'll find out on Sunday. A couple of people are coming over to the house tonight for a quick lesson on setting it up, because the process of creating a new race with the software is anything but intuitive, not to mention the three adjustments that have to be made on the camera itself to account for ambient light, focus, and zoom. I'm hoping I can get up really early tomorrow in order to get in a short ride before picking up the van at 9 am and hitting the road. I guess I'll bring the bike and hope for a chance to do some riding around the road course on Sunday while the races are going on.

Hanging out at Z'otz after an easy Monday morning recovery ride. Could be worse.

Anyway, as I was saying earlier, it hasn't been a bad week for riding, and for the most part I've been feeling pretty good on the morning group rides. Yesterday I woke up a little early for the WeMoRi and got to Lakeshore Drive well ahead of the group. I decided to ride in the same direction the group goes, on the assumption I'd be caught fairly quickly, but as it turned out I was still about a mile ahead of them going around the Seabrook loop at the east end of Lakeshore Drive and didn't get caught until I was off of Lakeshore Drive and onto Marconi. For a change, there wasn't a break off the front, so I got a chance to ease my heart rate up into training ride territory relatively gradually. I was all set to contest the sprint to the top of the Wisner Overpass when, just as we came up to Harrison Avenue, where we had a red light, someone yelled "car." Naturally, half the group then sprinted across the intersection. I was behind Brian Baum who grabbed two full handfulls of brake, however, and was lucky not to crash into him. Later, I heard there was also a police car at the intersection. Only in New Orleans can a group of cyclists race around stopped cars to run a red light right in front of a police car and suffer no consequences. Anyway, I was feeling pretty good on Wednesday and got on to the NOBC leadout train at the end as Chris, who unfortunately is moving to Baton Rouge, took a long fast pull to launch Andrew across the finish.

This morning we had a fairly big group for the Thursday levee ride. It seemed like the wind was picking up the whole time, though, and since it had a pretty substantial crosswind component there wasn't much draft at the back. Fortunately we had a steady paceline going, so you were at the back for only a few minutes before you moved up far enough to get a little draft. The temperature was in the low 60s, though, so it was actually fairly nice. I am getting kind of tired of dodging all of the long-neglected roadwork problems on my little two-mile ride back home, though. There are two places along Carrollton where there's water leaking out of the asphalt from some broken pipe. I usually try to go around those in the traffic lane, since the bike lane there is now a big wet mess. Then, right after turning onto Spruce, I have to negotiate the gaping and ever-deepening hole that's been there for over two weeks since they repaired a water leak that had been there for months. I guess they think that putting a traffic cone in the middle of the road solves the problem.

Weird Weather Pattern

Thursday morning was pretty nice along the river

This irritating weather pattern continues. It seems we're stuck in some kind of "Groundhog Day" infinite weather loop where the weather gets nice around mid-week, then a cold front comes through on Saturday and it rains buckets, and then it gets unseasonably cold by Sunday morning. I mean, really, it's freaking April 16 and I rode this morning in knickers and long-sleeve jersey with base layer and a wind vest on top and I was still pretty chilly for the first 45 minutes or so.

On Thursday we had a good turnout for the 6 am morning levee ride. There's still a lot of water covering the batture, but it's considerably lower than it was a few weeks ago. The forecast for Saturday wasn't looking too good, though. They were showing a 100% chance of rain for Saturday.

That time again. I try not to go
more than 3k miles on a chain.

By Friday the city was issuing weather alerts about the approaching cold front that was expected to include heavy winds, lots of rain, and tornadoes. They cancelled all of the Saturday French Quarter Fest activities. The TV weather people were practically in a frenzy. Situation normal. So Thursday evening I decided it was time to replace my chain, since I'd gotten my 2,500 mile alert from Garmin Connect a couple of weeks earlier. This is normally a pretty quick process that I've done a LOT of times, even though I use Campi chains that require a bit of finesse with quality chain tools. Well, perhaps I was rushing, but when I went to push in the connecting pin with my trusty Park chain tool, the pin on the chain tool broke, and in the process broke the connecting pin. Crap! Nobody was going to have a spare connecting pin for an 11-speed campi chain on hand locally, and they certainly wouldn't have a replacement pin for the chain tool either. So at lunchtime on Friday I rode over to Bayou Bicycles and picked up a $22 SRAM chain to get me by until the replacement stuff arrived. Yes, I know the SRAM chains work just fine and cost less than half of what the Campi chains do. I just like the Campi chains for purely esoteric reasons. So now, it was just a matter of precisely when that cold front would be coming through on Saturday. A couple of hours one way or the other would make all the difference. Meanwhile, up in Fayetteville, the front was plowing through the middle of the Joe Martin Stage Race and would be dropping temperatures up there down into the 30s for the weekend. In the meantime, the Pro and Elite riders were treated to two days of cold and/or rain on Thursday and Friday. I was glad I wasn't there this time.

Hanging out on the riverfront listening to the music

Saturday morning I awoke early and stared at the radar and hourly forecast. It looked like we were in luck, but just barely. It would be windy, but if I could be back home before 10 am it looked like there was a reasonable chance I'd stay dry. I rode out to Starbucks wondering how many others would come to the same conclusion. Apparently many did, and we had a really good Giro Ride. By the time we were coming back down Lakeshore Drive, the western sky was getting darker and darker. Right on schedule, the rain started around 10:30 or so.

Monday's eagle

Unfortunately, the cold front kind of stalled shortly after it came through, so we had thunderstorms and rain for the rest of the day and most of Saturday night. By Sunday morning, though, the streets were dry, the air was cold, and the wind was blowing out of the WNW at 15-25 mph. Besides the Giro, there was another ride planned from the Scarsdale side of the Belle Chasse ferry landing down to Pointe a la Hache. I'd have liked to have done that one, but I was scheduled to head down to the French Quarter Fest after the Giro, and I figured that the Belle Chasse ride was going to involve a couple more hours than that. As expected, turnout for the Giro was a little thin, but not really all that bad. The wind, of course, made for a hard ride, but I was quite happy with it anyway, even if my legs were a little sore from Saturday's efforts.

Looking down from the Westin at part of the French Quarter Fest crowd

After the Giro I headed downtown where Candy had been working a conference since Thursday at the Westin. The weather was nice, but of course it was still very windy and a bit chilly. It never did really warm up much on Saturday. We hung around with Kenny and Candy and Sofia and listened to the music for a while before heading back home around mid-afternoon.

This morning the temperature was around 52, but at least the wind had died down a bit. I did my usual solo recovery ride on the levee, where I got a few photos of an eagle. I saw him again later in the ride, but he took off just as I stopped to pull out my camera. Whenever it's a chilly and clear morning you can be sure to spot eagles perched up high enjoying the sunrise. The forecast for this coming weekend?  You guessed it.  Cold front coming through on Saturday with rain. This time, though, I'll be way over in Wichita Falls with the Tulane riders for the conference championship at Midwestern State University where 15-25 mph winds are considered normal.

The Tulane Race

Last weekend was the Green Wave Classic, the collegiate race that the Tulane club has put on almost every year since around 2012. As often happens, people procrastinated, bureaucracy stalled, and things fell through cracks. To complicate matters, Spring Break ended just five days before the race, which meant that not a whole lot got done during that time. By Monday I was feeling pretty nervous about things. I didn't know if all of the follow cars had been lined up. I didn't know how much cash we were going to need to pay the police for the Time Trial. I was pretty sure we still didn't have official approval from Lakeshore High to use the campus for the TT parking and the criterium on Sunday. Even worse, the weather forecast for Saturday was showing a 100% chance of thunderstorms ahead of a cold front. I can't say I was looking forward to a weekend of officiating in the rain, but the worst case scenario was that between weather and the school availability, the entire event might have to be cancelled at the last minute. So on Monday I started rattling the cages. Pretty soon I got word that there was a problem with the school. They needed a form/waiver signed in order to get approval from the school board. The form wasn't ready until Monday. Unfortunately, all of the schools on the northshore were on spring break that week, which is to say that nobody was there and nobody was answering the phone. They wouldn't be back until the following Monday. What to do?

When I found out about the problem I called the school board office in Covington and was glad that someone answered the phone. That person gave me the cell phone number of the principal, so I relayed that to the student who was handling it and hoped for the best. Well, that kind of worked, and the principal forwarded the forms and insurance certificate to the school board for approval. A couple more days went by with no word. The principal stopped answering the phone calls from the student. By Friday, we still didn't have approval. I started trying to think of another course we could use, but it was just impossible on such short notice. Then I remembered that I'd worked with the Asst. Principal in the past for the Tour de La time trial, and I had his cell phone number in my contact list. I gave him a call and left a message. A couple of hours later he called back and basically said, "Don't worry about it, I'll unlock the gates for you." That was about an hour before I started cramming a truckload of race equipment into the Volvo.

Although I had originally planned to just drive back and forth across the Causeway on Saturday and Sunday, after looking at the weather forecast I decided to shell out the $200+ for a hotel room so I wouldn't be trying to load up the car at 5 am in a pouring thunderstorm. That's just not a good way to start a full weekend of officiating. Since I had a room, Gavin would be coming with me because he needed a ride, and Quentin would be meeting us over there later since he'd be working the race rather than riding it. At that point there were just two things I was worried about - the rain, and the turnout. Pre-registrations had been really low. I guess a lot of the Texas riders decided to skip this race. The MSU team, however, was actually driving even farther in order to ride the Sunny King races in Alabama rather than our race. Anyway, I loaded up the car with the new generator I'd bought (since the LAMBRA generator was up in Shreveport for a conflicting race), podium, P/A system, traffic cones, two tables, two chairs, two pop-up tents, two computers, finish line camera, race clock, traffic cones, megaphones, extension cords, medals, first aid kit, fence posts, clothes, etc. and headed out to pick up Gavin and his bike around 7 pm.

So early Saturday morning, sitting on the edge of the hotel room bed in the dark, I studied the radar. It was already raining outside and there was a line of heavy rain coming our way. The timing was critical, though. The races were scheduled to start at 9:00, which was right around when the worst of it would be moving through, but it was moving fast, and it looked like things would be a lot better by 9:30. I called Dustin and told him to tell the police to push things back by half an hour. As it turned out, this was the right call. We arrived at the RR venue around 7:30 with only a very light rain, and by the time the races started the street was almost dry and the rain had stopped. I'd been fully expecting to spend the day in pouring rain, so this was really a spectacular bit of luck. We set up the tents and generator, fired up the computer and race camera, handed out radios, logged in to Zello, put down the finish line tape and flag, put up the signage around the course, and started registering riders.

As usual there were a couple who had registered online and since they already had "permanent" SCCCC bib numbers, didn't stop by registration to let us know they were actually there and didn't sign the waiver. Damn I hate the whole "permanent number" concept. It only works when riders never upgrade and need new numbers and when riders never lose their numbers and when riders get new numbers at a different race and you don't know about it, etc.

Unfortunately, race-day registrations didn't do much to bump up the numbers and we ended up with an all-time low of 37 riders spread over five classes and categories. Really rather pitiful. On the plus side, everyone who raced scored big conference points. The road race went super smoothly. All of the follow cars showed up, nobody crashed, and with the tiny fields it was super easy to pick places, especially with three officials on hand.

That evening was the Time Trial. Naturally, a light rain started falling as we got ready to start. Fortunately, it never got any heavier, and with only 37 riders we were done at the start line in less than 20 minutes. We crammed everything back into the Volvo and headed back to the hotel to post the TT and omnium results and then found a nice Mexican restaurant for dinner. Officiating is pretty easy when there are so few riders.

Sunday's criterium also went really smoothly, although I was freezing for the first couple of hours because the temperature had dropped down into the 40s by morning. For once, there wasn't anything happening on the baseball field behind the course, so we didn't have any problems with cars or anything. The finish line camera worked fine and everything was wrapped up by 2:00 or so. All-in-all, I was amazed that we made it through the whole weekend without any significant rain. I got home, unloaded the car, posted the final results, updated the SCCCC spreadsheet and sent it off to Ben Davis, formatted and uploaded results to USAC, completed the USAC post-event report, created the officials' invoices, and poured myself a very big glass of wine.