Up in Tupelo

Easy officiating with small fields

A 5-hour drive, a new race with a new promoter, painfully low pre-registrations, unfamiliar officials, and a sketchy plan to both officiate and race. Typical weekend nowadays, it seems. I was just south of Hattiesburg when I looked up to see a very impressive wall cloud between me and Tupelo. Well, no road trip is complete without at least one stretch of white-knuckle driving, right? A few minutes later I drove right into the storm, wipers on high, staring at the red tail lights of the truck ahead of me. When I saw an exit, it took it. Since I wasn't in a hurry, there was no reason not to wait it out. Half an hour later the sky was clearing and wall cloud had been replaced by a rainbow. Mixed messages.

The other half of the 40+ race

Saturday morning I left the hotel around 5:30 or so, drove down to the local Starbucks for coffee, and headed back to set up the finish line. By then it was raining and the radar looked bad. Really bad. I met up with Jeffrey and Morris, both officials from Tennessee who I had run into someplace before, and we got the tent and camera and everything set up. Half an hour before the first race was supposed to start the rain went from bad to worse. Looking at the radar, we decided to delay everything by an hour and combine some of the races in order to make up the time. Since turnout was extremely low for most of those races, combining races wasn't going to be much of a problem. The first few races went off just fine and we were pretty close to being back on schedule, more or less. Then, with just a couple of races left, the computer running the finish camera suddenly froze up. I restarted it and was greeted with a message indicating that it couldn't find a boot drive. Not good. It wasn't until much later when we were packing up to leave, that I discovered that the laptop had been sitting in a slightly low spot on the table, so pretty much all of the rain that was getting blown onto the table had accumulated immediately underneath the laptop, more specifically underneath the hard drive. It was dead. Anyway, by the time the last couple of races went off the weather was much improved and we were even able to put down an actual finish line. That evening I got the link from Ricky for the software and downloaded a copy to my personal laptop that I had been using for registration and results. It seemed to work at the hotel but I was a little cautious about it because it's pretty flaky software that uses an Ethernet port and can be affected by things like anti-virus software.

Sunday's weather was looking to be hot and dry. They were using a different course in the same general vicinity with the start/finish directly in front of the hotel parking lot. We got set up early and thanks to there being no rain, everything started right on time. After the first couple of races, I pulled the bike out of the car, rode one lap of the course, and lined up at the back of the 6-rider 40+ group. This switching from official to racer thing never goes well, so from the start I was just in it for the exercise. For some reason the race started out really slowly, which was nice since it allowed me to at least get a little warmed up. After a couple of easy laps there were a couple of attacks. I came off the back after one of them, but they slowed down and I rolled back up to them. It wasn't long before another attack and I found myself in-between a 3-rider group ahead and two riders behind. I probably could have dug deep and gotten onto the break but I guess I was a little short of both motivation and power, so I waited for the two behind me. We rode a number of laps together, but one of the guys had two teammates in the break and understandable didn't seem willing to work much. Our pace slowed down again, so I went ahead and took a pull, fully expecting him to launch an attack, which he did. I didn't even try to get on them as they flew past me, and just rode out the remaining five or six laps.

Back at the official's tent, things were going fine until, at some point in the middle of the Cat. 1/2/3 race, the camera software refused to allow me to record images. I have not idea why, but fortunately the finish was easy to judge by eye. Anyway, other than the low turnout the races went off pretty well. Even with all of the rain on Saturday, there wasn't a single crash all weekend. I loaded the software onto my old laptop and will give it a try at the Wednesday night criterium after I disable the anti-virus software. Hope it works.

This afternoon we drove up to Baton Rouge to watch them demolish Candy's family house on Harrell's Ferry Road. I guess it took about 45 minutes for one guy to turn it into a pile of rubble. Hopefully, that will help them sell the property.