Three-day Weekend before Next

Lining up in St. Francisville - some came to race, some to ride

The alarm went off at 4:30 am. It was Saturday morning, barely, and I was picking Joey up from campus for 4:50. I'd gotten everything together the night before, so I pulled on a pair of bib shorts, straps hanging down, and a t-shirt, clamped the bike to the roof of the car, threw my bag and front wheel in the back and headed over to Tulane. We were riding the Gran Fondo St. Francisville, put on by Bill Burke and Premier Event Management, that started at 7:30. It was the first cycling event over there in a few years. The parish council had enacted some insane anti-cycling laws after a car ran down a couple of cyclists (totally the driver's fault, not the cyclists') but eventually those people got voted out and more sane people voted in and the rules changed. As Gran Fondos go, this one was a bit less grand than most, with the long ride just 58 miles, but I was looking forward to the ride anyway. I'd ridden most of the course many times in the past as part of various races and training rides, so I knew the roads pretty well, and I knew Bill's crew would be well organized. We made good time and arrived well before our target time of 7:00, so there was lots of time to pick up numbers and gear up. They were using passive disposable stick-on timing chip numbers from Chronotrack that consisted basically of a big sticker that went around your seatpost with the number part kind of flapping in the breeze behind. As those things go, these were pretty good - much better and easier to deal with than the ones that you have to somehow affix to your handlebar. Turnout was a little disappointing, but that didn't mean there wasn't enough horsepower on hand to turn it into a race. I can never really get in to race mode on these kinds of things, and was planning to stay out of trouble like I'd done for the Tour de Jefferson. There were around 90 riders for the long ride but of course at least that many additional who would be turning off along the way for shorter loops.

Things started off fairly calmly for the first ten miles or so, then the pace just gradually increased. 4D had a bunch of riders, mostly up at the front, and every now and then there'd be a brief surge. I was just following wheels toward the back and feeling a little nervous about the unfamiliar riders, some of whom were on tri bikes. Eventually, most of the more sketchy riders drifted off the back. We weren't too far into the ride when what I gather was a 4-rider break that included Dustin and Chris Brown went off the front. If there was a surge and attempt to chase, it wasn't apparent to me at the back, and indeed I didn't realize they were gone until probably ten miles later when I looked over at Barry and said something about the pace, to which he replied that he thought it wouldn't be as erratic now that the break was gone. I replied, "well, at least not until we hit those two climbs near Red Bug hill." I was feeling quite comfortable but wasn't really wanting to have to sprint up those climbs. Well of course when we got to them there was an attack and by the time we got to the top there were riders scattered all over the place. I could see a group coming together up ahead but didn't really want to put in the time trial it would have taken to catch it. Looking back, there was nothing resembling a group at all. No-man's land, indeed. So I kept pressure on the pedals and eventually a few riders caught up. I took some long pulls hoping we could work together to make the bridge because the group ahead wasn't going all that terribly fast, but twice when I pulled off there was a big gap behind me and nobody to pull through, so I eased up until we had a nice little group of seven. After a while a few of them kind of recovered so we had a nice little paceline for the last 12 miles or so, which was really the only part of the ride during which I did much work, which is to say an average heart rate of 157 and average speed of 24 or so. A few of the group sprinted at the end, but between the lead break and the second group there were 14 riders up the road. We were about a minute forty-five behind that second group, and averaged 23.8 for the whole ride, which was fine for this non-race race. I finished up feeling pretty good about the ride, and not particularly tired despite Strava tagging it as "Massive" relative effort. Strava apparently doesn't know how efficiently I can suck wheels. Results are at https://trinitytiming.com/results/#/race/NlBt02/G/. 

Sunday was the usual Giro Ride. An unexpected cool front had come though overnight and I was surprised to find it so cool and breezy as I rode out to Starbucks in the morning. There was a pretty good sized group on hand, but not many people seemed interested in pushing the pace, so it was only got fast in a few places, mostly when there was a good tailwind. It's so nice to be able to ride out to the Giro without needing a headlight now that the sun is coming up early enough. 

Next weekend is the 50th Tour de Louisiane. I have a lot of loose ends to tie up, but fortunately Mignon has picked up a whole lot of the slack. We're still trying to figure out who we can get to pick up something soft like wood chip bags to cushion some of the things alongside the criterium course. It's always hard to find someone willing to handle that since it's a fair bit of work. I still need to print out race bibles, etc., etc. Online registration stands at around 40, which is about normal since most people wait until like Wednesday to register. We'll probably do race-day registration, although the flyer says pre-registration is required, since the COVID situation has improved significantly, at least for the moment. At any rate I'll probably wait until Wednesday to make any announcement about that. Tomorrow Kenny B is leading a Memorial Day ride, which I think I'll do even though there is apparently also going to be a holiday Giro at the same time, starting from the same place. I feel like I could use an easier ride tomorrow.

Under the Weather

It's been a very wet week around here, which happened to coincide with me getting some sort of mild but nagging stomach virus. I suppose that as COVID restrictions continue to be relaxed we'll all be catching up on those little infections that we've missed out on over the past year. Anyway, it seems like every morning this week it's been either raining or threatening to rain. I went out early Wednesday to ride the WeMoRi, where I felt less than great but not terrible. I'd skipped riding on Tuesday between the rain and the stomach queasiness, and then likewise skipped riding Thursday as well since there was a high wind and flash flood warning essentially all day. I could have gotten in a ride in the evening without getting wet but battling the 15-18 mph wind on the levee just didn't seem like a good idea under the circumstances. This morning I was feeling more back to normal, so naturally it was raining when I looked out the window at 5:30. I may try to get out for a few miles later in the day if the weather cooperates.

I did finally get my little internet range-extender set up as an access point so I now have much more solid wireless in the front of the house. That involved running Cat 6 ethernet cable from the back room to the living room, through the basement, and then a whole new learning experience about correctly wiring up the connectors. Turns out that how the pairs are set up is more important than I thought. It took me a few tries, some head-scratching, and some Googling to get that properly sorted out.

In the meantime, in-between rainstorms, the city's contractor has been tearing up the street right in front of the house. They're putting in the huge new concrete storm drain lines and related connections, which has not been without substantial collateral damage to, well, everything in the vicinity - curbs, sidewalks, trees, etc. This will be ongoing for probably another full year by the time the underground work is finished, the curbs and storm drains are replaced, sidewalks repaired or replaced, and finally the road re-paved.

With the Tour de Louisiane coming up in a couple of weeks, I'm planning on spending much of Saturday out on the road race course, marking turns, checking out the course, and hopefully patching some of the worst of the pinch-flat inducing potholes on the back side. Bill Burke is holding his Gran Fondo St. Francisville event this Saturday that I'd like to do, but I think the TdL course reconnaissance is going to have to take precedence and I don't think I can do both. 

Last week I experimented with some cold-patch asphalt on a pothole near the house and was a little surprised to find that a 50-pound bag didn't even fill what was not really a huge pothole. On the plus side, the tamper worked well and it's at least better than it was. I have a couple more bags in the basement, but for the Tour de La road course I'm thinking I'll need quite a few more just to soften the worst of the sharp edges. It would be a shame to have to find another road course just because of on particularly bad segment of asphalt out there. I can think of one or two other possibilities but they aren't really any closer or more challenging. It's too bad we can't realistically use the old 20-mile loop near Covington, but there's just been too much traffic around there since it all started to get built up a couple of decades ago.

Watching Crashes

Tour de Jeff, neutral roll-out

Things are heating up in more ways than one as COVID concerns wane and people envision a late but active road race season. With that we are seeing more riders on the group rides, which by the way seem to be multiplying weekly. Tulane has outdoor graduation ceremonies this week, so most students have already gone back home. The university's COVID testing has therefore dropped dramatically, with just faculty and staff being tested once every two weeks. Positive tests had been running between zero and two for weeks anyway, so at the moment things are looking pretty good in the city where mask requirements for vaccinated people have been essentially discontinued. I expect the Tulane COVID dashboard will be suspended soon, although I'll continue to monitor city and state numbers in case we see a surge from one of the variants. Louisiana is lagging behind most states in per-capita vaccinations, so I'm still a little uncomfortable about sounding the "all clear."

Deciding if the bike is rideable after the crash

On Saturday I headed out to the Giro Ride start around 6 am, leaving the headlight at home for the first time in a long time. As riders started to filter in to Starbucks a long-lost Bill Short walked up to say hello. He had contacted me via Strava a few days earlier to confirm the Giro details because he was going to be in town for, I think, his daughter's graduation from Loyola. Bill had attended Loyola and was part of the Loyola collegiate cycling team while there. With Dee Harper as its advisor, that small team had survived for many years, and was probably the first official collegiate cycling team in the state. Bill and I spent some time catching up during the warm-up along Lakeshore Drive, and once things picked up I was glad to see he was having no difficulty at all with the pace. He's lives in the D.C. area. Anyway, Saturday's Giro wasn't quite as fast as normal, although it had its moments, probably because the Tour de Jefferson "ride" was the following day. For some reason the Tour de Jefferson has gotten to be an annual de facto race for the Giro Ride crowd, and is sometimes referred to as the city championship. This is despite the fact that the route involves lots of turns and u-turns and is generally not set up as a race. Anyway, the Giro Ride was going along nicely - fast but not super-fast - until after the Goodyear Sign sprint on Chef Menteur. For a year or so there has been this little "bump" in the asphalt over on the right side of the road as we approach the entrance to the interstate. The asphalt there is not broken up or anything, and it extends only about two feet into the right lane, so it's really hard to see, and even if you see it, it's really hard to tell just how much of a bump it is. There had already been a couple of crashes there when riders hit it unexpectedly. People do call it out as we approach it, but even that doesn't always work. Indeed, it didn't work on Saturday. I was toward the back of the group there and had just warned people about it when, up ahead, someone hit it and crashed. Fortunately the rider looked OK, which is  more than could be said for the bike. A bunch of us stopped, of course, but at the time someone had already been off the front with a string of riders chasing, so the front part of the group never knew what happened. Anyway, he ended up calling to get someone to come out and pick him up, so we continued on. Later, someone who had been behind it posted video of the crash.

I was up early on Sunday to drive across the river to the Tour de Jefferson start. Parking was a little bit limited so I wanted to get there early enough to get a spot in the park parking lot rather than the roadside. This was a 50 mile route with, I think, six U-turns, so I was expecting it to feel like either Intervals or a Criterium, or both. Either way, I knew it was get fast. Lining up for the start I looked around and could see that almost everyone near the front was a regular Giro rider, as expected, so this was clearly going to be a fast Giro Ride on an unfamiliar course with enhanced bragging rights. To make things more interesting, there were a few miles of the course with traffic cones separating the left lane from the right lane. If you've ever ridden in a group on a road where there are traffic cones you know that unless you're in the front five or over seven feet tall, you can't see traffic cones. Being one of the smaller riders in the group just makes that situation worse, and stressful. The whole time I was just waiting for someone to hit one of the traffic cones and launch it into the middle of the group. In fact, Jeff did hit one of them that fortunately went in the right direction rather than the wrong direction.

As expected, things started out pretty fast after the 2-mile neutral section behind Bill Burke's car as a handful of riders at the front alternated attacks and chases. Within a couple of miles the entire front group was basically the Giro Ride group. Despite all of the attacking going on up front I was kind of surprised it didn't seem harder. There were occasional lulls that brought the speed down into the lower 20s (we averaged 24.5 mph), so the fast segments were never quite long enough to split the group, and with so many riders still around, there was ample draft at the back. I had loaded the route into my new Garmin, but for some reason I wasn't getting all of the turn notifications and it occasionally thought I was off course, so perhaps I loaded the prior year's route by mistake. Anyway, I never really knew where the hell I was or where the next U-turn would be. What I did know was how far we'd gone, so I wasn't surprised when we turned back onto the highway with the traffic cones and the speed started to ramp up again. 

This was a "ride" and not a "race" and so now unsurprisingly there wasn't a 200-meter flag or 1-km banner, or anything like that, just orange duct tape arrows on the pavement. The finish was on the park road about 100 meters after a hard right turn that I don't think a lot of riders saw until the last second. The combination of a flat course with a big group, a course set up as a ride rather than a race, and riders, may of whom had little actual race experience, riding as a race rather than a ride, made this particular situation a little sketchy, to say the least. I was happy to stay at the back where I could watch. 

Well, we approached the turn at around 30 mph. The first couple of riders flew through criterium-style, and then one rider decided to go straight rather than try to make the turn. This is always a disaster. Even in criteriums where riders are told to go straight after the finish sprint, there's always someone who forgets and turns and causes a crash. So Lane decided to just go straight. Dustin was trapped to his left so Dustin also had to go straight. Sean, I think, was anticipating the turn behind Dustin and crossed wheels with him, going down pretty hard and taking one or two others behind him down too. By the time I coasted through the turn Sean was already getting up, so I knew he was basically OK. Later that day someone posted a video of the crash from behind. Interestingly, the rider with the camera overcooked the turn himself and hit the outside curb, going down in the grass pretty softly.  

So I had a nice enough weekend with two good training rides plus the bonus entertainment of watching two quite unexpected crashes, neither of which should have happened, from behind, complete with post-crash video analysis. Sean crash resulted in some road rash, a cracked helmet, broken seat, broken pedal, and somewhat torn-up shifter, but fortunately no ambulance rides. I hung around for a while for a plate of jambalaya and was back home around noon.

This morning at 6 am I looked at the radar and figured I'd better try to get in a ride right away. There was rain all around and the promise of lots more. I made the right call. As I turned around into a bit of a headwind at Williams Blvd. on the levee bike path I felt the first little sprinkles of rain. That continued all the way back home but fortunately never quite turned into a proper "rain," so I arrived back home just a little damp but far from soaking wet. A few minutes later the rain got heavier, and it's looking like it will stay that way for a while, with scattered thunderstorms in the forecast through Thursday.

Race of Truth 2011

Setting up for the Time Trial

Last Saturday we put on the "Race of Truth" LAMBRA Time Trial Championship over on the LaPlace course that we've now been using for over a decade. A couple of months ago we were pleasantly surprised to find that the first 10 k or so had been re-paved with nice new asphalt. The second half of the 40 k course, of course, wasn't re-paved. Although it's not a terrible road surface - older asphalt - by comparison I'm sure it felt rough. I'd gone out a few weeks earlier and re-marked the three turnarounds at 5, 10, and 20 km, riding mostly on the shoulder of the road with a backpack and a couple of cans of road marking paint. Fortunately my Garmin 520 plus was still working at that point (more on that later). 

This year the weather for the time trial was pretty great, except for a steady SSE wind that made the return trip considerably more challenging. I'd scheduled the race for a Saturday this year, a result of trying to avoid the Cheaha Challenge the following weekend and of course Mother's Day last Sunday. Turnout was only 78, so I think the Saturday date cost us about twenty riders. Typically we get around 100 if the weather forecast is good, which it was. As usual we required pre-registration so that we could seed riders ahead of time. I ended up using mostly the 2019 USAC time trial ranking points this year since most people didn't have any 2020 points, for obvious reasons. I guess it all worked out OK. With both Pat and Mignon unavailable because of graduation date conflicts, I had been worried I wouldn't have enough volunteers this year, and had even recruited Candy to handle check-in and number pick-up. As it turned out we had a good volunteer turnout, so things went really smoothly in that regard. We didn't even have anyone who missed his or her start this year, which was nice, and there were no issues with results or timing either (although I did get some reports a day or two later about some drafting out on the course here and there). Anyway, despite the wind we had one rider who was within fifteen seconds of breaking the course record of 51:12. We used up the last of the leftover USAC gold medals for this event, so although we still have a lot of silver ones from prior years, and a ton of bronze ones, we may need to have some made ourselves for other championships this year. USAC stopped providing them for free two years ago and I've been asking them to at least set something up so we could order "official" ones, but nothing has happened on that front yet.

USAC is in the midst of finally transitioning to the new post-event reporting system, so when I went to do my post-event I kind of ran into a brick wall. First, I tried the new system. It looked nice but none of the links were there so I couldn't actually do anything. So then I went to the old system. That looked normal but after entering everything it wanted to charge $15 for one-day licenses instead of $10 and then marked the post-event as "Paid" even though I hadn't actually paid anything. I emailed Stuart at USAC and he got everything fixed right away. I guess I was a default beta-tester for this. One other problem was that BikeReg didn't default to charging anything for one-day licenses, which I didn't discover until a few days before the event, so a lot of people got free one-days this year (for which we had to pay anyway, of course). Not a big deal in this case, but you'd think that if you tell them it's a USAC event then the default situation would be to collect the $10 per rider per day. 

A week or so ago when I set up the Tour de La event permit I ran into similar issues. I had to have Valecia at USAC correct an incorrect date I'd put in (can't make a date change online after submitting it) and then the system tried to charge me three additional permit fees, so I had to get Stuart to fix that. I hope that eventually the folks at USAC will be able to stop putting out fires once the legacy system is officially killed off!

We've started getting a few early registrations for the Tour de La already. It's the first weekend in June, so coming up quick. Bill Burke has his ride in St. Francisville the weekend before and, being more familiar with triathlons he's worried because he doesn't have a ton of pre-registrations yet. My experience with races has been that most people register the week before the event, with about half not registering until two or three days before the event. Of course we've never offered incentives to register early, like discounts for early registration.

The Sunday Giro

This morning's levee ride was interesting. The weather forecast has been sketchy for the early part of this week. Yesterday morning was rained out, but I was able to go out around 4:30 and got in a nice ride on the levee, so that worked out. This morning the radar looked good so we met up as usual at 6 am, and waited a few minutes for a train, which I had barely missed getting held up by, to pass in case anyone had gotten caught by it. Those few minutes would later turn out to have been important. We had a nice ride out to the turnaround, picking up a few riders along the way, and then losing a few who had to turn back early. Heading back with a slight headwind the sky kept getting darker and darker, which is the opposite of what should have been happening. By the time we were around River Ridge we could hear distant thunder and see some lightning. A few little sprinkles of rain fell, but nothing significant. I reached into my pocket for the ziplock bag I'd put there in case of rain and put my antique Garmin into it. My regular 520 had died last Friday after randomly trying to reboot itself a few times during a ride. It then just faded away to black and is now basically a brick. I found a 520 plus on sale online and went ahead and ordered one. The new 530s look nice but I know I'd never use any of the new features, so the only advantage there would be the longer battery life and faster processor. Not quite worth the extra hundred dollars for me a the moment, though. I'll call Garmin later and see if there's anything I can do with the dead one at a reasonable cost. It's a bit over two years old, so we'll see. Anyway, my old, old one that has electrical tape holding the buttons in place and water marks on the inside of the screen is somehow still working, so hopefully it will survive until the new one arrives.  

For a while it looked like we had somehow missed most of the rain. Then, as we exited the levee onto Oak Street, the rain drops got larger and more frequent and I knew we'd about run out of time. I got home just a little wet a minute or two before the sky opened up after barely avoiding getting doored by someone exiting a passenger-side door while stopped in traffic as I approached in the bike lane. I hit the brakes and locked up the rear wheel while screaming "take a look!" as I skidded past with inches to spare.