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.