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.