Swamp

Tuesday heading back down the river

It was another low-volume week for me, mainly because of some self-inflicted weekend officiating. Other than that, though, it wasn't too bad. As all of my rides have been lately, Tuesday morning's ride started out in the dark, and although there was a slight hint of Fall in the pre-dawn air, it was still feeling mostly like summer around here. After the ride I had an ad-hoc visit to the dentist again so he could have a look and see if there was anything amiss with that pulled tooth because it was still hurting more than it should have. The consensus was that the clot that normally protects the nerve had gotten dislodged. He changed me from Penicillin to Clindamycin to be on the safe side but it wasn't really until the end of the week that I was able to make it through the day without Ibuprofin.

Slimed

The WeMoRi is now entirely in the dark, start to finish, so as we do our cool-down on Lakeshore Drive we see the sun coming up over the horizon. It seemed like a particularly fast one last Wednesday. Somewhere toward the end I suddenly noticed what felt like raindrops, but looking up at the dark sky it didn't look like it was cloudy. As it turned out, the rider in front of me had punctured his tubeless tire and sealant was spraying out of the hole for a little while until it sealed. I ended up with spots of blue sealant everywhere, but mostly on my helmet. Fortunately, the leak sealed and he didn't even realize he'd punctured until afterward. Of course the back of his bike was splattered with sealant, though.

Thursday morning there was some slight threat of rain which kept the regular group from showing up. We started out with just two and by Williams Blvd. it was just me. The levee trail was a bit damp past there but I never got rained on. In fact, it had been over a month since there had been a drop of rain at my house (we finally got a little rain shower this weekend).

So this weekend was the Swamp Otter Classic over in Chalmette. It's kind of half cyclocross and half gravel with the course running along the levee and floodwall of the 40 Arpent Canal. I was scheduled to officiate, solo, both Saturday and Sunday. For reasons I cannot fathom turnout was very, very low this year. I think that while the larger bike racing areas are bouncing back fairly well from the COVID disruption, the smaller ones like LAMBRA are having a really hard time getting people back into the racing scene. At any rate, I think we had maybe 20 people altogether for each day. Considering how much work goes into setting up even a simple cyclocross course like this one, and then putting on the event, it is getting hard for the clubs and race directors to justify putting on races. Classic self-fulfilling prophecy stuff. Because of the low turnout a lot of the races and categories were combined, so the start was pushed back by an hour or so and it went from I think five separate races to three (and then only two on Sunday).

Anyway, the riders who did race had a pretty good time, I think, and of course the combination of the relatively long lap length and the small fields made officiating pretty easy. For Saturday's race I loaded the generator into the car, along with the tent, chair, table, camera, computer, clock, etc., etc., but planned on using my Jackery 300 power station to see how it would handle running the camera, laptop, and clock. The latter two have their own batteries, so I was pretty confident it would make it through the four hours, but wanted to have the generator on hand just in case. I'm sure that if I had to also run a P/A system it would have been a problem, but I'll save that for another day. As it turned out, I still had about 70% at the end of the day, so it handled everything easily. I should probably spring for the solar panels as well, but they are kind of expensive. As a result, I left the generator home for Sunday's race. For such a small race, neither the camera or clock were really essential anyway, and Townsend was transferring my hand-written results into the results workbook way over at the registration table anyway (where they did have a P/A system and generator). Later that evening I ran into all sorts of trouble uploading results and completing the post-event report on the USAC site. Parts of the system think the event was a single day while other parts know it was two days. They are still running both their Legacy and New systems and the two are increasingly out of sync as they are finally, after four years, nearing the end of the transition.

For this event I brought my new-to-me cyclocross bike, mainly so I could get around because the finish line and registration table aren't close to each other and the bathroom is even farther away. Although I didn't bring any cycling clothes or shoes or anything I did ride around a bit on the bike just for fun. Along the way I noticed that one of the jockey wheels was cracked all the way through, so I ended up ordering a new set and while I was at it a pair of 40mm gravel tires in case I get a chance to do some of that. The tires on the bike right now are "cross-legal" 32s. 40 is probably overkill for me but they were on sale.

The weather forecast is saying that Winter will be arriving down here tomorrow with a low in the upper 40s, although that's probably what they'll see on the northshore and it will be ten degrees warmer down here on the south side of the lake. Of course this means we'll have a strong north wind to deal with for a few days, and I guess I'll have to dig out the knee-warmers and arm-warmers and gloves and stuff for a couple of days, after which it will be summer again.