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.