Rebound

The Sunday Giro heads out - Fred, Matt and VJ

I've mentioned it to a few people over the course of this season, and although I was never really sure if my impression was based more on wishful thinking than on reality, I think perhaps I can safely say it was the latter. I think that Road and Track racing in the U.S., which had been on a downward trajectory ever since the Lance Bubble burst back around 2012, seems to have bottomed out last year and is now showing signs of a rebound.

Ashton Lambie sets new world pursuit record

Locally, road race participation and event promotion seemed to be holding steady or even growing a bit this year, with some increasing participation in the younger age ranges. Seeing this trend, I was finally starting to feel cautiously optimistic. During a conference call with USAC a few weeks ago, the Membership folks up there seemed somewhat optimistic for the first time in a long time, reporting increases in racing licenses across almost all disciplines. Still, I was reluctant to pop open the champagne. I still am. Nonetheless, all the signs are encouraging. There are currently at least two LAMBRA events being planned for 2019 that will, if things work out as hoped, be bigger than anything in recent years aside from the 2016 event in Jackson that despite great effort failed to pull in the numbers they'd hoped for. So it seems I am seeing, for the first time in seven or eight years, positive signals on both the local and national levels.

Ben King wins his 2nd Vuelta stage

What kind of pushed my guarded optimism over the edge recently was hearing the other day that American Ashton Lambie, who I had never heard of before, had rather unexpectedly set a new world record of 4:07:25 in the individual pursuit while down at the Pan Am Games in Mexico, beating the previous record set by Jack Bobridge in 2011 by a solid three seconds, which in the world of track racing, is huge. The team had just set a new U.S. record in the Team Pursuit of 3:53.86.

As if that wasn't enough, this morning Ben King convincingly won a second stage at  the Vuelta d' España.

So, maybe there's hope.

On the local scene, things have been kind of quiet as we are in a bit of a lull between the end of the road season and the beginning of track and cyclocross seasons. People are already doing some specialized training for 'cross and gravel racing. There's still the Pensacola stage race later this month, but after that I think road and crit races will become few and far between. For me it was another double-Giro weekend. Earlier in the week I had been planning on doing some kind of ride on the northshore, but by Friday the weather forecast was calling for a high probability of rain all weekend, so I decided to set my sights a bit closer to home. As it turned out, both Giro Rides went off without rain, unless you count a little shower on the way back home on Saturday. The weather down here has been kind of all over the map lately. At the moment there is a disturbance approaching Florida that has just gotten official "invest" designation, with all of the long-range models predicting it to move into the Gulf and strengthen. It's looking like tropical storm stuff at best, but at any rate it merits watching and will probably bring more rain around mid-week. It has been remarkably quiet in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico thus far this hurricane season, so I can't complain at this point. I mean, we're already into September. The NHC is giving it an 80% chance of development as of this morning, so things may be getting interesting - hopefully not too much so.