Reconnaissance Ride

The Tour road course has some really nice sections and even a bit of shade. This definitely isn't central Texas.

With the 47th annual Tour de Louisiane festivities looming just a week away, it was time for a trip up to the road race course at Stoney Point. I had been kind of dreading the task of riding from one intersection to another with road-marking paint in my bottle cage instead of water, stopping, painting, waddling up the road a bit farther in cycling shoes, painting again, etc., etc., so I was quite happy when Robin texted me that he'd gone ahead and spend a day freshening up the turn markings, sweeping the corners and patching a few of the patchable road surface problems. The TDL road course is an hour and a half drive from home, and although the original plan was for an 8 am start, most of the guys had subsequently decided to arrive early enough to ride an extra 16-mile lap beforehand. On the one hand, that was appealing because it would be a bit cooler. On the other hand, that would mean a very early wake-up call. I was kind of on the fence about it until Mignon texted suggesting we drive up together rather than needlessly burn all that extra gas, so I compromised. We timed it so that we'd get there while the early group was still out on the course, ride backwards until we met them, stop again at Stoney Point for 8 am to see who else showed up, and then take off on some undetermined number of additional laps, which, as it always turns out to be, is one less than originally planned. The Tour de La road course is best described as "death by a thousand cuts." There are really only a couple of places that you could legitimately call climbs, but on the other hand there are essentially no places that you could call flat. It can be very deceiving, with the difficulty of each succeeding lap seemingly increasing exponentially.

Anyway, the early group had gotten a late start so as we were getting ready to go we saw them come sprinting up the road, finishing their first lap. It was still well before 8 am, so we rode with them for a few miles into their second lap and then turned around to get back to the start by 8 to pick up any others. Then we rode backwards on the course and met them about a third of a lap around. For the most part, the pace was moderate and mostly everyone stayed together, which was good. The road surface on this course is about 90% good, 5% OK, and 5% pinch-flat territory where sections of asphalt overlay have broken out, leaving nice sharp inch-high cracks (for lack of a better word). It looked only marginally worse than last year. I ended up with only 47 miles, but when Mignon asked if we were doing another lap I wimped out. Everyone else was ready to head home. I probably would have done another lap if most of the group was doing it too, but it was getting pretty hot and I was feeling pretty tired, so I decided to call it a day.

Right now it's Wednesday afternoon. The forecast for the weekend is looking pretty good, although of course there's always the chance of a thunder storm popping up at random this time of year. A 20% chance of rain Saturday and Sunday with highs of around 90 is about the best one can hope for this time of year, so I'll take it for sure. Other than volunteer assignments and recruiting, most of the key arrangement for the races are pretty well nailed down, so that's good. Online registrations are at 50, which is OK for the Wednesday afternoon before a race weekend, not that I wouldn't like it to be closer to 70. Lots of work to do tonight since I kind of took yesterday evening "off" from Tour de La stuff. I felt like I needed a break.