Brandon Weekend

The Cat. 1/2/3 road race winners - a race is a race even it it's small!

Last weekend was the Brandon Grand Prix that included the LAMBRA road championship in Saturday and a criterium on Sunday. Since my brother recently bought a house up in Madison (basically the other side of the Jackson MS area), and was going to be there over the weekend painting walls and stuff, I figured I'd camp out at the empty house over Saturday night to save on the hotel cost. With gas running at around $5/gallon, the road trip costs were already adding up, so I was glad to have that opportunity. A final check of pre-registrations on Friday night left me wondering, "Where are all the bike racers?" I hadn't seen numbers that low since the 70s when everyone started together, the road race was 110 miles, there was no course control, jerseys were made out of wool, and the race had to be done within a 2-week period in July. Back then we considered a field size of 20 to be big. No field last Saturday achieved half that size. This kind of thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Potential riders look at the start list, find it to be small, and so they don't sign up themselves. Some races have stopped showing the "Who's Registered" page on BikeReg lately, probably for the same reason. Anyway, I was going regardless and looking forward to riding both the road course and the criterium course, both of which I'd ridden the year before when the event was held in September. With the scarcity of nearby races lately, it would be the first criterium for me since that same race last year.

The Saturday morning alarm went off at 3:30 am and I stumbled down to the basement to load up the car, not just with my bike and bag, but also with the radio equipment, a big ice chest that I almost never bring, my new Jackery power supply (just in case), the laptop, spare wheels, and a bottle of merlot. By 4 am I was on the road for the 3-hour drive up to Brandon, Mississippi with an ETA of 7:00. We have been in the middle of a pretty significant heat wave down here lately, and I was expecting the race temperature to get up in to the 90s, so I had a bag of Scratch electrolyte mix and some HammerGel on hand. The masters race was to start at 8 am and would be under 60 miles, so I wasn't too worried about it, but better to play it safe rather than end up with heat exhaustion on the side of the road somewhere. Turnout at the race itself was, to put it mildly, pitiful. Those who were there were excited to be racing but everyone was asking what the hell happened to the bike racers. This was an event that should have attracted at least 100 riders. As it was, there were, I think, a total of 30 riders on hand, and some of those were from outside of LAMBRA. We had riders from Texas and Tennessee and Alabama but I think nobody from Lafayette, four or five from the New Orleans area, and about that many from the Jackson area.

Frank and I finishing up the road race

Of course, every cloud has its silver lining, and it this case it was that the Masters race was slow, unlike last year when it was quite the opposite. So this time I made it up and over the "big" hill on the way to the loop without any problem and settled in to the back of the dozen rider combined Master and Women's field. Of note was the fact that we had on hand Frank Moak, Woody Boudreaux, and Julia Simpson. My guess would be that Frank had twisted Woody's arm to get him to come! So as I said, the pace was pretty slow. I guess everybody was a little worried about the heat combined with the small number of people to share the work. I doubt we were halfway through the distance when the Cat. 4/5 breakaway (apparently the rest of the race was already shattered) caught us. The front of our group sped up when that happened and we were all mixed together for a number of miles. I chatted with a couple of the riders to let them know it was technically illegal for us to be working together, and also that it probably wouldn't matter since there was apparently no chance of anyone else from their race catching them. Eventually one of the Masters drifted back to ask what we should do and I told him that the Masters should neutralize until the 4/5s had a significant gap. He went up to the front and made that happen, so everything was back to normal after that. 

Somewhere on the back stretch one rider had hit a pothole and flatted. Later, I saw Woody looking down at his front wheel which was rapidly deflating (he'd hit a big chunk of gravel that was in the road). Julia also flatted, although I'm not sure if it was before Woody or after. Woody ended up changing his tube - he has a newish bike with disc brakes and didn't have spare wheels - and finishing. Our race really started about ten miles before the finish when a few of the stronger riders started launching attacks. I survived the first big one, but there was a quick counter-attack and a little gap opened up that I just couldn't close. That left five riders ahead of me and just two, including Woody, behind me. It also left me all alone, so I just resigned myself to a long time trial. Fortunately the last 8 or 9 miles of the course is relatively flat and probably a net downhill, so it wasn't all that bad. I could see the group up ahead the whole time, and about a mile from the finish I saw one rider come off the back. I was Frank who looked fairly spent. He had been one of the riders doing all of the work. He latched on when I came past and we rode in the last bit together. So actually I was not all that unhappy with myself under the circumstances. Granted, I had avoided putting my nose into the wind like the plague, but I wasn't feeling too bad and with a bit more motivation might very well have been able to survive one or two more attacks. 

After the race I waited around until things were packed up and had a nice lunch with the officials at some place near the hospitals in Jackson before continuing a few miles north to Madison where my brother was busy painting walls. It was really the first day he'd been able to get into the house and unfortunately one discover was that the air-conditioner was barely functioning. I looked up at the wildly oscillating ceiling fan and soon realized that one of the five blades had the wrong bracket installed and was blowing air up while the others were blowing air down. I installed a couple of shower heads and a toilet seat and took a cool shower (the gas hadn't been turned on yet so no hot water). Luckily one of my brother's daughters lives nearby so we left the hot house for a nice dinner where we polished off the bottle of wine and spent the night in fully functional a/c. 

Finish camera image of Julia and Zion finishing the criterium

The next morning I headed back down to Brandon for the criterium where the turnout was no better than it had been the day before and I discovered my rear tire was flat. It's a fun little course that includes a short but steep rise from the road up into a parking lot that makes things interesting. It's probably about 8 percent, but just for five or six pedal strokes. Anyway, the Masters race was a good workout even if I ended up off the back. By then it was starting to get pretty hot, especially since we were basically in the middle of an asphalt parking lot. A little while later I decided to jump into the Cat. 1/2/3/4 race to provide a little pack fodder. For that one we also had Julia and Zion from NOLA. That one started out pretty fast and I found myself feeling a little out of practice on the fast downhill sweeper which of course resulted in me being off the back. There was a 2-rider break by then and, as is my usual MO, I continued until they caught me and then jumped onto the back. By then I was nicely warmed up and it wasn't too difficult to sit on the back of the duo (would have been illegal for me to lead, anyway) until they lapped more riders. So, long story short, I ended up riding with Zion and Julia, dropping off on the last lap when we were about to be lapped again and I didn't want to be in the way of the finish sprint. I hung around until everything was packed up and was back home by 4:30 or so. Robert was using just pencil and paper for registration and results, so I still haven't seen the official criterium results, although I did take photos of what was posted for the road race. 

Despite the tiny turnout I had a pretty nice time at the races and by the time I got home I was feeling that good kind of soreness in my quads that I only seem to get when I race. I'm hoping it will go away by Wednesday!