Cold and Wet Weekend Off the Bike

Grayson excited about finishing up his time at Tulane

Things were already looking bad for Saturday when Wes came by on Wednesday to pick up medals for the LAMBRA Cyclocross Championship. Although the championship races themselves were scheduled for Sunday, there was also a full slate of races planned for Saturday. The venue had already been moved at the last minute from Audubon Park to Behrman Park across the river. The latter was sure to be considerably sloppier, but tearing it up with knobby cyclocross tires would cause considerably less of a problem. We talked about the predicted 100% chance of rain and 20-30 mph winds and decided that if it still looked hopeless in the morning, the Saturday races would be cancelled. It did. They were.

I'd gone out Friday morning with the Tulane coffee ride group for the last coffee ride before final exams and Grayson's last coffee ride before graduating. The weather was still pretty nice. The cold front wasn't supposed to come through until Friday night. I wasn't holding out much hope for the Saturday Giro Ride, but it was looking like maybe a 20% chance it might be slipped in before the rain started. When I awoke on Saturday morning the streets were still dry. I looked at the radar for a long time and ultimately came to the unavoidable realization that it would definitely be raining by 7:30 or 8:00, and with the strong winds already blowing I figured that even riding over to Harrison Avenue for coffee would be futile. As it turned out, a few riders did show up. They even got in a few miles before, of course, it started raining. For myself, I figured it had been a good call. The rest of the day was wet and chilly as the cold front moved through.

Finish line all ready to go

By Sunday morning the rain was gone but I was scheduled to officiate the cyclocross races with Michelle. The temperature had dropped down to the low 40s and it was overcast and I knew it would be staying that way for most of the day. I also knew I was going to freeze my ass off sitting under a tent at the park where the ground was going to be just barely above the definition of swampland. I wore my warm cycling baselayer and slightly water-resistant boots. On the plus side, the races didn't start until 10:00 and the course was just 20 minutes away, so I had the luxury of making coffee, cooking a couple of eggs, and loading up the car in daylight.

Sloppy cyclocross on Sunday

I arrived at the course about two hours early to find just Wes and a lot of muck. He'd situated the start/finish on the opposite side of the course from the road since that was basically the only relatively dry ground. That was good, but it meant dragging all of the tents and assorted equipment through the muck. Three trips later, I set up the fence posts for the USAC snowfence, put up the tent and tabled, and camera, and got the computers ready. The night before I'd set up CrossMgr with the details for the five races, so everything was pretty much configured and ready to go. All I'd need to do is copy the registration data into Excel files so that the software could associate the bib numbers with the riders names. We got the first race lined up and ready and that's when I heard Wes telling them that the first lap was going to be a little shorter than the others. That was, I think, to avoid having the group encounter the barriers within the first 500 feet. As it turned out, the first lap was a minute and a half shorter than the rest, which totally messed up the software. CrossMgr uses the lap times to determine what the lap cards should read. It also uses them to predict when the leader(s) will be approaching the finish line on each lap. Well, the short first lap times completely screwed all of that up. We ended up starting the next races on the computer 1:30 earlier than the actual starts in order to compensate, which worked out reasonably well.

Anyway, by the time the second race was starting I was already shivering enough to make hitting the right keys on the computer kind of a hit-of-miss proposition. Fortunately the fields were fairly small, thanks no doubt to the weather, so it all worked out OK and we got the results done very quickly after each race. I didn't get home until around 4:30 or so, and got the results up on the website after grabbing something to eat. Bottom line: no bike riding for me last weekend.

The last couple of mornings have been around 40 degrees and windy. I rode on Monday mostly alone until I ran into Pat on the way back. This morning was a little less windy but felt at least as cold as Monday had. There were just three of us up on the levee, so we shortened the ride, turning around at the little dip. I think the temperatures will be generally warming up from here on out, although a little cold front coming through on Thursday has the forecast for that day showing 100% chance of rain with thunderstorms.