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.