Westbank Speed - Eastbank Blood

Good turnout for the Westbank Speed Festival

It's been a few weeks since I've logged anything here, so I'll be doing a bit of catch-up ... in reverse. Some months ago Michelle Ginsburg and John Crosby called to see if the club might be interested in putting on a race at the NOLA Motorsports Park.

Michelle has raced on and off for at least a couple of decades and John races cars and is somehow connected with the Motorsports Park over on the westbank, which is what everyone in New Orleans calls the "other" side of the river, which is actually mainly to the south. So one day Mignon and I went over there to meet up with John and Michelle to see what might or might not be feasible. We had done a few informal training type races there a fairly long time ago, but they were done on weekday evenings and the traffic difficulties involved in getting over there after work proved to be their undoing. Since then, the park has been somewhat improved and better marketed, and seems to get a fair amount of use. It isn't just some small local track. This is a full-fledged multi-million dollar facility with multiple course options, the shortest of which is 1.8 miles.

So we checked out the facilities and talked it over, and I made up a rough budget that included the per-rider track fee, USAC insurance fee, LAMBRA per-rider fee, officiating costs, etc., and concluded that we might possibly break even if we could generate at least $1,500 in cash sponsorship. With a typical local-level entry fee of around $35, the club would net $9 per rider, not including reduced entries to club members, lower fees for a couple of categories, etc., to help cover a reasonable prizelist and related expenses.

Car Trophy!

Frankly, I thought we wouldn't be able to do it, but on the other hand we have a recently growing group of riders on the westbank, a number of whom own businesses there and have been sponsoring their own clubs. So we put the word out, and right away Joe Amadee offered to shake the bushes over there. By mid-February we had the necessary sponsorship in hand, all from westbank businesses, and the event was officially a "go" for April 27, the only day we could get the track because they don't run anything on it that day because of the nearby Zurich Golf Classic and the noise issue. Never mind that we were already scheduled to put on the LAMBRA Time Trial championship the following week, and had barely scratched the surface for sponsorship for the June Tour de Louisiane, and by "we" I mean Mignon, Pat, Christian, and me. Joe kicked in a couple hundred extra so that I could get ten big trophies with cars on top for the winners, and we started promoting the Westbank Speed Festival at NOLA Motorsports Park as best we could. By Wednesday of last week I knew we would have a good turnout. The weather was going to be great, riders were anxiously talking about it, and pre-registrations were starting to come in. By the time pre-reg closed on Friday night we had 80-something riders registered, with many of them signed up for more than one of the overlapping-category races.

We got out to the track on Sunday around 7 am to set up and were surprised to find that the track crew had already placed pylons marking off the course for us, which saved us a lot of time. We had a lot of race-day registrations too, so we ended up with 126 riders registered for 172 races. The first race was the Cat. 4/5 race with 58 riders on the line, which was probably the biggest field we've seen for anything in a while. Anyway, the races went off great despite a few crashes, and everyone really enjoyed the course and venue that included a restaurant, go-cart racing, and real bathrooms. John, Michelle, and Joe deserve a ton of credit because the race would not have happened without them. Mignon, Pat and Christian did a lot of legwork on race day and also spearheaded pre-race promotion. Ricky Dunn came down to officiate, and along with Michelle, and thanks to the long course that minimized lapped riders, results were fast and accurate and everything stayed right on schedule. I was pretty exhausted by the time I got home, unloaded everything, cleaned up and posted results, etc. I'd brought my bike to the race but the Masters race was immediately after the big Cat. 4/5 race and I probably wouldn't have had enough warm-up time, if any, anyway.

Matt hit hard on Wednesday morning

The WeMoRi the Wednesday prior to the race had a little excitement when Matt and a city bus tried to concurrently occupy the same space on Wisner Blvd. and Matt, who was on his TT bike, went down pretty hard when the bus closed the door on him and he ran out of road. As usual, I had ridden out to the WeMoRi and since I was running a couple of minutes early I turned right on Lakeshore Drive and went over the Bayou St. John bridge, planning to loop around the traffic circle. Coming over the top of the bridge I saw two riders, who turned out to be Matt and Rob, flying by the other way, so fearing that the pack was right on their heels I went around the traffic circle backwards and right back over the bridge, fully expecting to be swallowed up by the group at any moment. That moment, however, didn't come until I was nearly to Marconi. Matt and Rob must have been at least a minute ahead, maybe more. So anyway, I get into the group and suffer at the back for a while as I adjust to the abrupt increase in effort level as we make the right turn onto Wisner and the pace starts to ramp up again. We come through the light at Elysian Fields and there's Matt on the grass with his bike still in the street and Rob hovering over him. Most of the group stopped, of course, and someone took off to go get a car because it was clear that Matt wouldn't be riding home that day. He had gone right over the bars on his TT bike, whacked his helmeted forehead on the concrete enough to suffer a concussion, and landed on his right shoulder and back. Could've been worse, I guess, but he was obviously a little disoriented and definitely in a lot of pain. (He showed up on his bike the following Sunday during the Giro Ride cool-down.)

New Tatoo

My own injuries from the crash a few weeks ago are all pretty much healed up, and I never lost much riding time at all, although I now have a tatoo on my left kneecap from three teeth of Keith's chainring as I road-surfed on top of his bike. I never could get all of the grease out of the wounds without doing a lot of painful additional tissue damage. The knee still  hurts a little bit, but that seems to be improving, albeit slowly. Otherwise, it's been a lot of routine levee rides with Giro Rides on the weekend and the  usual commute to and from work. The next opportunity for me to race will be in a couple of weeks, again on the westbank, at the Federal City criterium. That may be complicated by some officiating duties and also the fact that Danielle's graduation ceremony is the week before and she will be leaving that afternoon and will definitely need a ride to the airport, so basically it's all a bit up in the air at the moment. Situation normal.....

The Chainring Massacre, Detective Work, and Defense

Mystery Canyon bike hit from behind on LSD

So last Tuesday evening we, and by "we" I mean the local cycling community, learned that a rider had been hit from behind on Lakeshore Drive, presumably in the right lane with the big bicycles painted on it and the signs that say "Bicycles may use full lane." The driver had stopped and said he'd been blinded by the sun, which wasn't unreasonable considering the time of day and direction, not that it was an excuse for continuing to drive without being able to see what was in front of his car. Strangely, in fact extremely strangely, nobody seemed to know who the rider was. A couple of riders had happened upon the scene as the police were about to leave, and all they knew was that (a) the rider had been taken away in an ambulance and was "stable," and (b) the police were going to leave what was left of the carbon fiber Canyon with carbon Mavic wheels and Garmin and Speedplay pedals on the side of the road like it was a piece of debris. Kristina, who arrived as the police were leaving, got Matt to come pick up the broken bike. Thus began a week-long detective story to identify the rider and get the bike back to him. Once word went out on FB, everyone with a Canyon bike was identified and contacted and none of them had been in a crash. The plot thickened. The Garmin was investigated to see where and when the mystery rider rode, and it turned out that most of the rides started downtown near Poydras, probably at a Condo. I searched Strava but couldn't turn up anything solid. That nobody in the competitive cycling community had a clue was rather shocking, since the bike wasn't exactly some department store junk, but a fairly legit racing bike.

Found him!

It wasn't until Monday that Matthew J got the Garmin files from Charlie T and tediously created short Strava segments along the route the mystery rider had taken until he finally got a name - Miguel Solano - who nobody seemed to know. Using resources that will remain confidential, I was able to track down the rider's contact information and ultimately his FB page. Surprisingly, we had three mutual friends, all in Texas, all cyclists. The phone number was called and by Monday afternoon he'd been contacted. He had been at University Medical Center with a fractured L1 vertebra, had surgery, and was recovering. I felt so relieved that we had finally solved the mystery. It had been bothering me for a week!

Danielle preparing for her presentation

On Friday Danielle did her dissertation defense, cleanly jumping the last major hurdle for her PhD in Epidemiology from LSUHSC. I sat in for the presentation but then had to run (almost literally) back to my office for an important conference call, then went to the LSU Dental School for their School of Public Health crawfish boil, the back to work for a meeting. Danielle will be heading back to Olympia at the end of the week, then returning for graduation for a few days. In the interim she will be starting a new job at the Washington State Department of Health in Tumwater, which is basically part of the Olympia metro area. We are very proud of her.

Fog and wet roads on Saturday, but a solid training ride anyway.

It was a Giro Ride weekend for me, which was good considering all of the other things going on. Saturday's Giro featured a lot of heavy fog for practically the entire ride, so when I went out on Sunday morning, thankfully in summer kit, I was glad to see that there was just a little bit of actual fog, even though it felt like I was riding in a light rain on the way to Starbucks. The ride itself had a good turnout and there were a few at the front keeping the pace high, so that was good. I was planning on going to Pontchatoula right after the Giro since a number of the Tulane riders needed a ride to a end-of-season crawfish boil over at Dustin's place. I was mostly hanging out in the draft and things went nicely out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles. There was a bit of a tailwind on the way back, and just as things were picking up, Matt flatted and everyone stopped. We got going again pretty quickly and of course the speed got fairly high heading back down Chef highway and onto that little stretch of I-510 before we turned onto Lake Forest Blvd. As I've probably mentioned before, Lake Forest Blvd. is a concrete road on top of swamp mud, so it's a minefield of cracks and sharp-edged holes. So naturally whoever was at the front decided it would be a good idea to go 27 mph there. So I'm sitting in this long thin line of riders when I see a little gap opening up a couple of riders ahead. Just then, Matt comes up on the left and Keith N moves over onto his wheel and I move over onto Keith's wheel as Matt starts closing the gap at 29 mph.

After the crash. Keith on the right trying to walk it off.

Things were going just great for a little while until suddenly I see Keith's bike sliding sideways in front of me, which washes out my front wheel and dumps me basically on top of his bike. It seemed like we slid for a really long time, and I had time to roll onto my back before grinding to a halt. I picked myself up and took a quick inventory. The bike, surprisingly, seemed fine. More surprisingly, I still had most of my skin. I could feel a light burn on my right hip, there was road rash on my right lower leg, and there was blood running down my left leg from my knee to my socks, but I hadn't hit my head and I hadn't broken any bones, so I was kind of excited about that.

Keith's hip. His arm and elbow were similar.

Keith, on the other hand, looked far worse, and I surmised that I had probably surfed on top of him and his bike for a little while before making contact with the concrete. He was missing patches of skin best measured in square feet. Remarkably, his bike was also fully functional since it had been a sliding type of crash with no real sudden impact. In fact, the "incident detection" on my Garmin hadn't even been triggered (I'd set it off by accident just the day before when I dropped the front wheel to the ground after hosing it off outside). So while most of the group continued on, six or seven of us rode back the rest of the way rather slowly. I could see some nice black impressions from Keith's chain on my arm, and on my left shorts, extending all the way to my kneecap, was the impression of a chainring. I had three good puncture wounds from the chainring on my kneecap, which had bled rather profusely for a couple of minutes. Back at home I took a quick and rather stinging shower, cleaned the wounds up as much as I could (I'm sure I will still end up with a grease tattoo on my kneecap, however), closed the skin with some would closures, and rushed off to pick up people for the crawfish boil. Fortunately the injuries weren't too painful, so everything was fine until I was back in New Orleans that evening and the knee started to hurt. I was a little swollen. On Monday I went for an easy short ride on the levee with Danielle, mostly just to keep the knee moving, and then headed to work after taking a 12-hour Aleve, which worked pretty well.

Relatively minor injuries for me - relatively

This morning I headed out to meet the Tuesday levee ride, not knowing if I'd be able to make the full ride or keep up. My knee was still hurting every time I put pressure on the pedals, so I wasn't very confident. After waiting for a train, I met up with the other riders who had delayed their start for a few minutes because of the train. I told them I'd be sitting on the back and possibly turning around early. We were about fifteen minutes into the ride when my knee started feeling better. I don't know if it was just that the pedaling had loosened it up, or that the Naproxin had kicked in, but by the time we were halfway out to Ormond I was able to start taking pulls. We weren't going super fast, so that certainly helped. We picked up a few riders along the way, and on the way back one of them basically attacked when his turn came at the front, just after Pat had pulled off. Pat had slowed the pace by one or two mph, so perhaps the guy felt like he should ramp it up again, but anyway he went way overboard. I heard Rich say something, and could hear Pat also saying something as he struggled to get back on. That pushed the speed up from the 23-24 mph we'd been going to around 29 mph, at which point the rider pulled off and asked "did I do something wrong?" as he dropped back. I think the result was that he had gapped off two riders, and ultimately himself as well. Anyway, by then my knee was feeling basically normal and I was not feeling any pain, so that was kind of a relief. I'd been wondering if I'd done more damage than I'd thought, but I now think it was just the inflammation and swelling.