I have always had mixed feelings about time trials. On the one hand, they are without a doubt an objective undeniable measure of your current aerobic fitness, or lack thereof, in relation to the other riders that day. For me, aerobic fitness is more about not getting dropped before the sprint rather than launching a successful long-distance breakaway. On the other hand, a 40 km time trial is an hour-long (if you're lucky) solitary test of mental toughness, determination, and suffering - not necessarily in that order. My strategy for avoiding doing time trials without becoming the subject of ridicule has been to instead put them on, thus providing credible cover for leaving the bike at home. Last Sunday we put on the LAMBRA Time Trial Championship, aka the "Race of Truth" out on the LaPlace course where we have done it every year since 2009, which would be 14 years for the arithmetically challenged. The weekend before I'd driven out to the course with a couple of cans of road-marking paint in order to find the three turnaround marks at roughly (the start and finish are offset) 5 km, 10 km, and 20 km for the 10, 20, and 40 km time trial distances respectively. A new wrinkle was that I was going to add a turnaround for a 15 km time trial. That was for the two handcycle riders who were planning to come. The U.S. Paralympics Cycling event for them is a 15 km time trial.
Although it had been a bit less than a year since I'd freshened up the course markings, they were remarkably difficult to find from the seat of a car even though I'd started Strava, set to metric, on my phone. I think that Hurricane Ida had probably scoured the road surface a bit last fall. I had to backtrack at one point before I found the old badly faded mark. From the turnaround at 5 km I needed to go another 2.5 km to add the new marks for the 15 km turnaround. So now there were four turnaround marks and I was a little worried that it would get confusing, mainly for our turnaround marshals who would have to drive out ahead of the race and find them. So the Saturday before the race, after riding part of a shortened Giro and getting pretty well rain-soaked on the way home, I drove out to LaPlace again, this time with four fenceposts. I put one over on the shoulder at each turnaround with a bit of orange survey tape to make it easy for the turn marshals to find. I already had turnaround signs for the three usual turnarounds, so I made a new sign for the one for the 15 km riders (actually only one of them was able to come as it turned out). I had already assigned bib numbers and start times, and posted all of that to the website, so in the afternoon it was just a matter of getting everything together for race day. Branden came over with his pickup and got the awards podium, cooler, signage, and traffic cones, which would leave me lots of room in the station wagon for the tent, generator, clock, tables, computers, etc. Robert would be coming down in the morning from Jackson with the big caution signs and safety vests that had been used for the Hattiesburg race. Over the prior week we had signed up enough volunteers to keep things more or less on track, so at least we wouldn't be begging for help on race day, which sometimes happens.
Sunday morning I was out there in the dark getting things set up. All of the volunteers showed up, and things went pretty smoothly. We had two young Juniors doing the 10 km TT, then a 5 minute gap, then the handcycle rider doing the 15 km TT, then a two minute gap, then seven riders toing the 20 km TT, another five minute gap, and finally all of the 40 km riders. It seemed like a plan. Of course there are always unpredictable things at races, and this race was no exception. After starting everyone I walked back to the tent to start doing results (by then the young Juniors had finished). Quite a while later I heard from the turnaround marshal for the 15 km TT that he had never seen the handcycle rider. I had a result for him and his time looked quite reasonable, so that was mystery. After some detective work later that day we discovered that someone had put a random traffic come in the middle of the road somewhere between the turnaround for 10 km and 15 km. It may have been where the kayak people like to park and put in. The handcycle rider, knowing that his was the second turnaround, saw it, and although there was no sign or turn marshal, assumed it was his turnaround. I guess he wasn't more than a kilometer short of the actual 15 km. Meanwhile, one of the first 20 km riders somehow turned early, possibly at the sign for the 15 km rather than the sign for the 20 km, resulting in an average speed of something like 29 mph which was obviously wrong. Fortunately she was the only rider in her age group so it didn't affect any of the placings. The only other problem we had was with bib numbers that were unreadable from the side of the road, especially when multiple riders were finishing almost together. That required a process of elimination that delayed results a bit. I'm still not convinced that the finish times for a couple of those riders were accurate, even though we had two separate timers and multiple other people assisting at the finish line. I need to remember to tell people exactly where to put their numbers next year because putting them in the middle of your back is no bueno.
The weather this year was pretty nice. There was a significant northeast breeze, but it must not have been too bad because Matt Govero set a new course record of 50:48! Brett Reagan rode Merckx style and still did a 57:35 and that wasn't even the fastest Merckx style time. Sam Leblanc rode a 57:08. The fastest woman on the day was Jessica Jones who did a 58:17. I had been told a couple of months earlier by USAC that we would have official USAC championship medals in time for the race. Well of course when I asked about it again a couple of weeks before the race I was told the in fact would not be ready. Luckily we had enough leftover LAMBRA medals we'd made last year for the Road and Crit championships (USAC didn't provide medals in 2020 or 2021) to cover everyone, but it would have been nice to have had the nicer official medals.
After the TT most of the race volunteers went half a mile down the road to the Frenier Landing restaurant where we had a surprisingly nice lunch. Although that restaurant had been there for at least a decade I'd never been there and was quite happy to find it to be quite nice.
So all-in-all the TT went pretty well. There were really just four or five people that we had problems with - either wrong turnarounds or bib number problems - which isn't really all that unusual. I was a little disappointed with the turnout. We had just over 50 riders this year. For many years we would get about 100, so I have no idea why the turnout suffered this year except that there were a lot of things going on - festivals, Final Four in New Orleans, etc.
Now it's time to get moving for the 51st annual Tour de Louisiane.
No comments:
Post a Comment