Feliciana Road Race

Thursday on the levee after the turnaround

Last weekend already seems like it was a long time ago (it's Thursday), but I figured I should log something about last Sunday's Feliciana Road Race while I can still separate it from all of the other times I've ridden that course. The much-hyped tropical depression Alberto did what I was expecting it to do, which was to track more and more toward the east. The net result for us was that we had some relatively dry air and mostly clear skies for Sunday's annual Feliciana Road Race up in St. Francisville. There was a pretty good turnout for the race, a bit over 100 riders, which made for a decent field of 14 for the Masters race. For this one Acadiana had four riders and 601 Racing/Velovit, which is what was C-spire last year and was once Palmer and before that Herring (when they weren't so old), also had four riders. I was the lone NOBC representative. VJ, Mike Corcoran, Hamrick and a few others filled out the rest of the field. Having done this race a number of times I pretty much knew what would happen on the first lap. From the start I rode at the front for the first mile or two to turn #1 where I knew one of the Acadiana guys would attack. He did. I followed with great effort. He looked back, realized he wasn't going to go clear, so eased up so his teammate could counter-attack, which I also expected but by then wasn't in a very good position to do anything about. Fortunately that counter, which pulled away one or to others, was quickly chased down and things came back together. We were probably no more than six miles into the race. We were still on that same stretch of road when VJ and a couple others just kind of rode off the front. Frankly, I was at the back when that happened and don't really know the details there, but at any rate they weren't pulling away very fast.

As we approached the left turn onto Highway 10, I looked over at Woody and told him I was expecting an attack at the turn. Well, that didn't quite happen, but a little while later a gap opened up, various people went to the front, and next thing I knew there was a group in-between the break and the remnant of the pack that included both Woody and Frank. This was not good. As we headed north, still only maybe 12 miles into the 66 mile race, I could see that group slowly closing in on the little break. My group, however, wasn't really chasing at all even though it wouldn't have taken much of a group effort to get us all back into the race. I swear, this happens every year on this course. A mile or two later I saw the two groups come together and fan out across the road, so I knew they had slowed down. It was a prime opportunity for our group to close the gap, which at the time couldn't have been more than 40 seconds, but no such effort was made. Once the road curved back to the west and the front group got to the hillier part of the course the front group started racing again and by the end of the first lap they were essentially out of sight. Woody told me later that Frank had started pushing the pace and they had gone through the feed zone at something like 28 mph. I guess we were left racing for about 7th place at that point, so my motivation was lagging. Up at the front, though, Woody and Alex broke away, I think shortly before the turn onto Highway 10, and started putting time into that group. Meanwhile, back in the grupetto, not much was happening. Halfway through the second lap VJ came back to our group, and then around the end of that lap we saw Alex on the side of the road holding his flatted wheel in the air. Although I didn't know it at the time, that left Woody out there on his own with a 22 mile lap to finish ahead of the pack, which he ultimately did. Our little group was going slowly enough by then that Alex caught  up to us after getting a wheel change. Toward the end of the final lap I figured I'd better put in a sprint in order to keep up appearances. There's a decent little climb about a mile from the finish, and of course we went fairly hard up it. That kind of strung things out but I think it mostly came back together before the final kilometer. At that point, though, I wasn't looking back. We came around the last bend about 500 meters from the finish fairly slowly with me maybe third or fourth wheel, behind Butch who I knew would sprint. Finally, right at the 200 meter flag, Butch jumped. I was barely able to stay in his draft from there to the finish, so that gave me an unimpressive 7th place, or equally unimpressive 4th in the 55+ geriatric age group. I guess I was riding too defensively that day because I never felt like I'd made any really huge efforts. Sometimes, missing that break that you know you should have been in kind of takes all the wind out of your sails.

So the weather around here has just been getting hotter and hotter this week. On the plus side, I'm not seeing any major bad weather through the Tour de Louisiane weekend of June 9-10, which is good. I still have a lot of stuff to take of before that race weekend, but most of it seems to be coming together in its usual last-minute fashion typical of anything being organized by a bunch of volunteers with real jobs. Last Monday was Memorial Day, which meant I was off from work. There were multiple people proposing various of Memorial Day rides, which led to some confusion, but eventually I decided I was going to do a ride on the levee out to the Spillway with Pat and Mignon and whoever might show up along the way. My legs were a little bit tired from the prior day's racing, so I didn't want to go for the Holiday Giro Ride option anyway.

Meanwhile, at work I've had a little free time to start learning the new content management system, Drupal, that Tulane is using. I have to move, or really completely re-create, our departmental website under the new system, so I have been slowly working on that. Then I discovered that the Tulane Cycling website, had disappeared. That was because Student Activities, which housed it, switched over to Drupal and just kind of abandoned it without telling anyone. So I got authorization to rebuild that site as well and decided it would be a good simple site to learn the ins and outs of Drupal with before tackling our regular departmental site. So I spent most of yesterday doing that and got it pretty much wrapped up early this morning. I think that I'll dive into the departmental site head-first tomorrow now that I have at least a little bit of experience. 

First Named

Its name is Alberto

The "tropical disturbance" in the Gulf finally graduated to a "subtropical storm" and thereby acquired a name - the first of this hurricane season. As seems to always be the case, the long-range consensus storm track has it aimed squarely at New Orleans, which at this point practically guarantees it won't hit here. On the plus side, it doesn't look like much but a continuation of the scattered random thunderstorms we've been having lately, at least through Sunday, so I think the road race in St. Francisville this weekend should be OK, albeit perhaps a little wet, or not. It's still too early to bank on much other than the fact that some significant weather is moving generally north out of the Gulf of Mexico and should get here around Monday.

Trying to take a photo while riding, over my shoulder

Earlier in the week I'd thought for sure that my morning ride would be rained out at least one day, and probably two, but although there was rain here and there, the morning rides weren't really affected unless you count the guys who stayed in bed on Thursday because they could hear thunder.  I heard it too, around 5:30 am, and of course checked the weather radar immediately. There were some big thunderstorms around, but the weren't moving much at all. One of them was just barely skirting the southern-most section of the morning levee ride, but just barely, or not quite, or something like that. I decided to go out anyway because I was assuming there would be rain on Friday morning (there wasn't). When I got to the levee there were a couple of guys there, so we headed out, picking up Woody. As soon as the pace picked up we lost David who is still slowly recovering from a crash, and then one of the others turned back at the pipes, leaving just Woody and me. That put us into a kind of mild 2-man time trial mode, with Woody taking longer pulls and me shorter ones. Out around River Ridge we saw a coyote standing in the middle of the bike path ahead of us. Naturally he ran down the levee when we got close, watching us carefully as if trying to figure out if we were suitable for breakfast. Then, out at The Dip there were a few roseate spoonbills mixed in with the white egrets who have been hanging around a little pool of water that has been slowly drying up since the river went back down to normal levels. It's pretty rare to see any of those along the levee.

Somewhere out around Destrehan we saw the other Dave go by in the opposite direction on his TT bike. After turning around we continued trading pulls into a steadily increasing headwind. It was a long time before we caught up to Dave, who the got into the paceline with us. For some reason I was really starting to fade toward the end of the ride and got home pretty tired.

The Preseason

Early morning clouds - may be getting a jump on hurricane season this year

Hurricane season around here doesn't officially start until June 1, and even then we don't generally see much until late July. It seems that this year, however, we'll have a little pre-season action starting this week. Although it's looking like the little disturbance down in the Gulf will be nowhere close to hurricane strength, and probably not even up to tropical storm levels, we may be seeing a bit more rain than normal, at least through the weekend. Hopefully it won't have much of an impact on the road race scheduled for Sunday up in St. Francisville. In fact, the weather is likely to be better there than here. This morning up on the levee I could see some big clouds building up - the kind you usually don't see until later in the day. The 6 am levee rides are now starting with enough daylight to make blinky lights unnecessary, and although I know it won't last much longer, the air still feels pretty comfortable for the first half hour or so until the sun gets farther above the horizon. Today we started out with, I think, four, but picked up four more along the way, then one turned back early, then on the return trip we picked up Scott. There was practically no wind at all, so the pace was smooth and steady at a comfortable 22-25 mph for the most part. I was a little surprised to be feeling my quads so much toward the ends of my pulls since Sunday's ride was an easy one and Monday's easier yet. Go figure. Old legs take a long time to recover, I guess. Anyway, the forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday is looking pretty normal, but for Friday through Monday they're putting the rain chances at 80%. It's still way too early to put much faith in that, however, and I'd say there's a decent chance that riding and racing won't be affected significantly. We'll see.

Acadiana Action

Early in the race, coming into the u-turn

Last weekend's Vuelta d' Acadiana criterium over in Lafayette went well. This event has morphed over the years from a traditional 2-day stage race to just a road race and criterium to, this year, just a criterium. I always like the road race, so I was a little disappointed that it couldn't happen this year, but it was still worth the 2.5 hour drive for the criterium. The crit course and I have a kind of love-hate relationship. On the plus side, it features a left-hand U-turn followed by a right-hand corner and moderate uphill to the next left. I really like that part because the U-turn keeps the speeds down a bit and requires some skills that I apparently have. Coming out of the U-turn requires some acceleration and it immediately followed by a little climb, both of which tend to benefit the smaller guys a bit. On the minus side, the other half of the course can get pretty fast, which means gaps open up, and the finish straight after the last turn is just a tad longer than I can usually handle well. The end result is that a small break usually gets away without me, and then I struggle to finish in the top 3 or 4 in the pack sprint.

I drove up early since I had most of the necessary LAMBRA equipment in my basement, arriving with plenty of time to help set up. The first race wasn't until 11:15 am, so I didn't even have to get up early. The first race, which was a combined Women/Junior race, also didn't happen. I don't really know why, but only one Junior and one Woman showed up for that one. Go figure. Granted, there was a lot going on that weekend, including a big mountain bike race in Brookhaven, a festival in New Orleans, and some rather early summer temperatures.

As the Cat. 5 race started to wind down, I went over to the car to get my act together for the 1:00 pm Master-40 race. I was expecting this race to be pretty fast and wasn't getting my hopes up, but at least I was feeling like I was in reasonable shape for it considering it would be my first real race of the year. Like most of the races lately, turnout was a little below what wheelsuckers like me would prefer, but I knew I'd get a workout anyway. As I'd been expecting, the race started out with a bunch of attacks and counter-attacks. My teammate Jim Booth was up near the front and put in a ton of work closing down a bunch of the resulting gaps, but with the smallish field I knew that eventually we'd run out of workhorses up there and something would get away. We were probably about half way into the race when two, and then three riders opened a gap. At the time I was practically at the back and so I don't really know exactly how it all transpired, but as we approached the U-turn, I saw the trio already on the other side and heard Woody yell across the neutral ground to his teammate Frank, "go! I knew that would be the race, and it was. Jim and a couple others made an effort for a few laps, but the gap went out really quickly and most of the rest of the bunch seemed uninterested in chasing. Even so, I was surprised that the break didn't but more distance on the pack by the end.

So with four or five laps to go I started pushing my way into what looked like a 3-man Acadiana leadout that was forming up near the front. With two laps to go I was hovering around 3rd wheel, about where I wanted to be, and was looking forward the the pack sprint since I hadn't actually done on in a long time. So we're coming up to the U-turn just after the start of the bell lap and I'm in a good position behind two or three of the Acadiana guys, expecting things to explode right after the turn. Just as we enter the U-turn the rider in front of me suddenly slows down dramatically. As I found out later, his chain had skipped. Anyway, I had to touch the brakes and it put me on the outside, which is where I really didn't want to be at that point. By the time I took the long way around and got going again two riders, I think, had gone past me and there was already big gap to three riders. I pushed it up the hill, but kind of blew up, ending up a few wheels back. So I think the situation with half a lap to go was that there was the original 3-man break with Bronson, Frank and Todd from Texas way up the road sprinting it out for the top places, then Woody, Kevin and I think Alex with a solid gap on the rest of us. That was a really disappointing development and I was already losing my motivation since it was clear we'd be sprinting for, at best, 6th place. Anyway, I dove through the last turn, hitting a bump that launched my rear wheel a foot or two, and stood on the pedals. Right before the finish I eased up a bit and one or two of the guys went past me. On the plus side, when I looked at my Garmin data later that evening I was kind of pleased to see that my heart rate had hit 187, which is about as high as it's ever gotten in the past couple of years since I've been using a heart rate monitor. So, other than the U-turn complication on the last lap I felt like I had an OK race. If things had gone a little differently on the last lap I think I would have placed a little better, but as they say, "live by the sprint, die by the sprint."  

The pack sprint showing the gap that happened on the last lap - we're so far back we're not even in focus!

The rest of the races went pretty well, although I wisely decided not to enter the 1/2/3 race. That one was been pretty fast and thanks to that and the heat there were a number of surprising DNFs. They had a fixed gear criterium and also an unknown distance criterium after the Cat. 1/2/3 race, so by the time we tore everything down and I grabbed something to eat and hit the road it was after 7 pm. Thankfully Waze rerouted me around major traffic jam just outside of Baton Rouge, so I got home around 9:30, I think. I'd forgotten to take the results file with me, so I stayed up until 10:30 or so until Ricky emailed it to me after he got home to Monroe. It was almost midnight before I finally got to bed.

The weather toward the end of next week is already looking rather uncertain. There's a little disturbance in the Gulf that will be bringing a higher than normal chance of rain all week and through the weekend. Next weekend's race is the Feliciana Road Race over in St. Francisville that I'll be riding. A little rain won't be much of a problem for that one, and the chances of rain will probably be lower there than in New Orleans anyway.

Thursday on the Levee

Regrouping after the turnaround

It felt pretty warm, but I knew it wasn't really summer because there wasn't sweat dripping off of Ray's shoes with every pedal stroke ... yet. We had a good-sized group on Thursday morning, unlike Tuesday that for some reason was practically just Rich and me. We are finally at that time of year when there are no wardrobe decisions to make. All that matters is how much water to bring and how far down your jersey zipper will go.

Today there was a west northwest breeze that seemed to be keeping the speed down a bit on the way out. Since I'm planning on racing on Saturday, and my legs have felt kind of achy all week, I'd already decided to take it easy this morning. That meant short pulls and careful drafting and low gears. I kind of worked, I guess. As we passed the playground on the way out I heard someone call out and, looking around, saw Keith down in the parking lot with his bike in pieces, changing a flat. He told us to just go on and he'd catch us later on the return trip. Woody and Jeff were doing most of the work keeping the pace up, although it would kind of sag a bit when one of them wasn't on the front. I was trying to maintain the speed, but was taking much shorter pulls. It was good to see that the part of the bike path around the green pipes that had been under re-construction recently was open this morning. That was nice, but I feel a little worried about how quickly it was done. I guess we'll know pretty soon if the road is going to crumble again.

After the turnaround we picked up a bit of a tailwind pretty much all the way back that had the speeds into the upper 20s, even at the same effort levels we'd had on the way out when we were going more like 22. I think the wind was increasing the whole ride. Anyway, we hadn't gotten very far from the turnaround when we came upon Keith standing on the side of the road with another flat. Someone gave him a tube and I gave him a CO2. He had a big slash in the tire that he booted with something like an energy bar wrapper and then put maybe 50 psi into the tube to keep it from blowing through. He made it all the way back, so that worked out pretty well.

We are starting to get things together for the Tour de La on June 9-10. We really need to find some sponsorship this year. At the moment, we don't have anything nailed down in that regard other than the team sponsorship from Apolline, and we're still having trouble getting a response from the church where we always have the road race. I have a meeting next week with Covington to get the criterium arrangements set up. That should be easy since we will be doing everything just like last year.

Cluster Flats and Time Trials

NOBC riders warming up for the Time Trial

Last weekend was the annual LAMBRA Time Trial Championship that the club hosted over near LaPlace. That particular road, La-51, has been used for time trials for 40 years or so since it's easy to get to, dead flat, offers some protection from the wind, has a fairly nice road surface, and can be essentially closed to traffic without causing much of a problem to anyone. As usual, online registrations for the TT, which are required, started sluggishly with most people waiting until the last 24 hours to finally pull the trigger. Situation normal. I think we ended up with slightly over 100 riders, which was similar to last year.

Cluster Flats on the Giro Ride Saturday

Since I knew I'd be officiating rather than riding on Sunday, I was glad to see a good-sized group for the Giro Ride on Saturday. The weather around here has been pretty stable lately, which is to say we haven't had any significant rain for a couple of weeks. The temperature has, naturally, been rising as we tilt toward the sun, and we've already nudged up against the low 90s. Fortunately, the early morning temperatures have remained relatively comfortable...so far. As I sat around outside Starbucks Saturday morning, chatting with the local riders and waiting for the 7 am roll-out, Phil mentioned that he'd already had a flat that morning as he was riding over the river on the Huey P. Long bridge.

Screwed on Chef Menteur

I didn't think any more about it until he had another flat on Hayne Blvd. A number of people stopped with him, so the front part of the group that I was in decided to go ahead and continue. We'd all regroup at the turnaround anyway. I was happy with that because I needed the exercise and knew I wouldn't be getting any on Sunday. So we had a good fast ride out to Venetian Isles where everyone came back together for the trip back. I guess we were about halfway back on Chef when Phil flatted again. This time I stopped as most of the group continued. I figured he was probably going to need a tube and CO2 since he'd already flatted once. Well, it was more than that. The first tube we put in failed immediately. There was a pretty good cut in the tire that we booted with a piece of candy wrapper or something we found on the side of the road. We went over that tire with a magnifying glass and couldn't find anything in it, so we tried again and finally got rolling. Well, that didn't last long. Since we'd already taken so long fixing flats, and the guys who had stopped, besides me, were all planning on riding back across the river with Phil, we decided to just take Chef Menteur back into town rather than head out to Lakeshore Drive. Sure enough, a few miles later Phil's tire went flat again. I think we went through four or five tubes and countless CO2 cartridges, blowing the O-ring out of my inflator along the way, before we got him going again. Another couple of miles along the debris-strewn bike lane and I start hearing the whap-whap-whap of something stuck in someone's tire. This time it was a sheetrock screw that had impaled Mike's tire and carbon rim. We unscrewed that and pulled out our last remaining tubes and CO2 cartridges and started up again. Moments later, Phil's tire went flat again. He ended up having to call for extraction somewhere around Dillard University. Not a good day for tires.

Three seconds.....

Sunday morning I was out the door before dawn to meet up with our awesome crew of volunteers for the Time Trial. The weather was pretty nice, although the moderate north wind would be making it hard for the riders on their way out to the turnaround. With 102 or so riders to start, and a couple of 5-minute gaps between the 10 km, 20 km, and 40 km groups, it was almost 10:00 before we sent the final rider out onto the course. By then all of the riders doing the shorter distances had finished, so I immediately began working on the results. Everything went pretty smoothly except for three of the earlier riders that had finished close together and through some miscommunication at the finish line, we didn't know which rider went with which finish time. It took a while to track them down, but thanks to their personal computers and the process of elimination we got those figured out.

Although we didn't have any new records for the Men, Stephanie Smith broke her own LAMBRA and course record and set a new Women's 40 km record of 56:44, which was pretty impressive and not done under ideal conditions, given the wind. So the Time Trial was a pretty good success all-around. I headed home and spend a couple of hours posting results and completing the post-event report, etc. and probably should have gotten on the bike for a ride but, well, I didn't.

This week the weather for riding has been nice. On Wednesday I went out to the WeMoRi a little early and got ahead of the group. I rode all the way down Lakeshore Drive to the Seabrook loop, and then all the way back to Marconi before they finally came up from behind. I put in a few good efforts on Wednesday, and perhaps that's why I felt pretty flat on Thursday morning for the long levee ride. The first time I went to the front to take a pull my legs loaded up after about 25 pedal strokes and I knew it wasn't going to be a good day. This morning I went out for a really slow recover ride, so I hope that gives my old legs enough time to get back to normal before the weekend.

Thursday morning on the levee

Tonight I'm hosting a little end-of-season party for the Tulane riders. There's at the end of exams right now and I guess a few will be missing, but we're expecting eight or nine. I went out after work yesterday and got some stuff to make hamburgers and pasta salad, so hopefully I'll be able to get home a little early this afternoon to get that all together.

Finally Like Summertime

I love Strava's Flyby animation. This is the end of this morning's WeMoRi.

Looks like the 50s are finally gone from the long-range forecast and soon enough I'll be lugging around two full water bottles instead of one. I might even drink most of the water. It's such a relief to get out of bed in the morning and not have to have the internal debate over base layers and arm-warmers and gloves and vests and socks. Just grab a pair of shorts and a jersey and go. Of course, it's not really hot yet, and the early morning rides right now start out cool and comfortable. Hope it lasts a little longer.

With nice weather and little wind, there were a lot of survivors at the end of the Saturday Giro Ride last week.

So the training rides for the past week or so have been pretty routine. The weather has been quite nice, there are more and more riders on the road, and a nice string of area races are rapidly approaching. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, they recently began tearing up the levee bike path where it goes around the green "pump to the lake" pipes. That little bypass was a pretty spectacular engineering fiasco (assuming there was actually any engineering involved at all, which is questionable). They created it in record time less maybe a year and a half ago and almost immediately it began to crumble under the weight of the police SUVs and whatever other "official" vehicles were driving up and down the path. Eventually they came and did some asphalt patchwork, which held up for practically no time at all.

About to tear up the asphalt and try again.

By spring there was a narrow 6" line that we'd navigate, in the dark, to avoid the holes and mud and broken asphalt. It was down to about 3" a week ago when we finally saw some signs that they were preparing to fix it, again. A couple of days ago they closed it off and completely removed the road surface. We can only hope that they think this through this time and put something there that will hold up. In the meantime it's not too difficult to drop down to River Road and then climb back up on the existing access roads, so it could be worse. The real question is whether the work will take two weeks or six months.

Last weekend I rode both the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides. It's Jazz Fest season around here, so there are always a few people who don't show up or leave early. Priorities, you know. The group was a good size both days anyway, and I thought that Saturday's ride was particularly fast. We were back onto Lakeshore Drive before 9 am, so maybe five to ten minutes earlier than average. Sunday also had its moments, but like Saturday the wind was light so it was easy for people to stay with the group even when the pace heated up.

Lots of people, not a lot of staff.

Candy is leaving for a conference in New York on Friday morning and so yesterday she decided to go down to the local DMV to get her "Real ID" driver's license since hers expires about now. I figured I'd go with her and get mine at the same time. Mine doesn't expire until November, so this would just basically swap my existing license for the new version until I renew for real later in the year. So we collected up the required documentation - social security cards, birth certificates, two bills showing your name and home address, etc., and headed over there from work around 11:30 or so. There were over 100 people sitting in the room full of plastic chairs -- waiting. Of the 25 desks lining the periphery of the room, only three or four were staffed. Two long hours later, they finally called her number, followed immediately by mine. Well, they wouldn't give her the license because her social security card, which I would estimate to be 50-60 years old, had been laminated. Really? Luckily she has a valid passport, because she wouldn't be able to get on the airplane in New York without it. My own transaction went fine and I had a freshly minted driver's license with the little star in the corner within ten minutes.

This year we lost a couple of LAMBRA races, and I had been worried about the big mid-summer lull in the season, but fortunately the Semi-tough guys stepped up and will be putting on a 4-race weekday series on the Lakefront. Also, Dustin and 4D will be putting on a 3-criterium weekend in July right over in Hammond on a fairly non-technical course in the local park. Hopefully I'll be able to make most of those. In the meantime, though, I'm focused on putting on the Time Trial Championships this coming Sunday, and then the Tour de Louisiane a few weeks later. After that, we have the Vuelta over in Alexandria that is just a criterium this year, followed by the Feliciana Road Race the following weekend. There's supposed to be a road race in Jackson the next weekend but I haven't seen any details on that one yet.  It looks like the TT is in good shape. The weather forecast is good, a number of people have volunteered to help, and Eddie is providing enough sponsorship cash to pay for most of the police detail. I'll be spending some time Friday night and Saturday morning setting up the start list and preparing event waivers and bib numbers, and then once again packing a ton of stuff into the Volvo early Sunday morning for the short trip over to the Swamp Tour place near LaPlace. Hoping everything goes smoothly despite not having Robin or Mignon on hand this year.