Knobby Ridgeland Weekend

A little cyclocross race up in Ridgeland the weekend before Halloween was looking like perhaps a chance to get the 'Cross bike dirty and work on improving sadly lacking skills. The fly in that ointment, however, was a consistent forecast calling for rain, first on Sunday and then on Saturday, that had me teetering on the fence. I was thinking I'd go up for just one of the two days, ride the masters race, and head back, but then my brother called. He moved recently to Madison and had been planning on retrieving some of my mother's old furniture that has been languishing in my basement for the past 12 or so years to use for one of his daughters, also in Madison, but he'd been super busy repainting the interiors of two houses and basically starting a remodeling of one, so when he heard I was planning on driving up it presented an opportunity. So I went ahead and registered for both days, and on Friday afternoon picked up a rental minivan that could easily accommodate the furniture and my bike. Pre-registration for the race was extremely low, no doubt due to some degree to the forecast. Even so, you'd think there would have been more local riders signed up. I'd ridden the Friendly Friday ride that morning. Earlier in the week I'd gone out to meet the Tulane Wednesday evening ride on the 'cross bike, mainly to make sure everything was working since I'd barely spent any time on it at all and had changed the saddle and made a slight adjustment to the saddle height too.

TUCA riders at Williams Blvd. levee turnaround

The forecast for Saturday was still looking like rain, but at least the temperature would be mostly in the low 60s, and what's a cyclocross race without a little rain and mud anyway. Actually, neither my skill level or motivational level was really consistent with a successful wet CX race, but, you know, what the hell. Indeed, I had no intention of being competitive, and was focusing only on breaking in the "new" bike and not crashing - too much. I drove up Saturday evening and we unloaded the furniture, leaving me with a spectacularly voluminous space for my little bike. The house was only five minutes from the course, and with a 9 am start time I had the rare luxury of heading out the door in actual daylight. My morning training rides have mostly been finishing right around sunrise lately. The weather radar was looking surprisingly encouraging with most of the rain well off to the west and moving eastward at only a snail's pace. It was entirely possible there would be no rain until the afternoon. 

The course for this race was just under a mile around, located at the local BMX park. It was almost all grass, still just a bit damp from the morning dew. I had around 35-40 psi in my 32mm tires, which turned out to be about twice what I needed for this course, but my roadie fears of pinch-flatting were very difficult to fully dispel, even on this relatively gentle terrain that was devoid of roots and sharp edges. I rode a really slow couple of laps to check out the course and found a few rather sketchy (to me) off-camber turns, a couple of very short but steep uphills (no problem), and of course a couple of artificial barriers apparently designed, as they all are, to discriminate against short people. As planned, I started the race pretty much at the back of the very small field that included all of the masters age groups plus some of the juniors. I rode the first couple of laps quite gingerly, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to get used to the SRAM shifters and mountain bike pedals. It wasn't that they weren't working fine, of course, just that I was having difficulty convincing my brain that has been conditioned to Campi shifters for two or three decades to shift (pun intended) to SRAM shifting. As a result there were a number of times when I was going for a lower gear but actually shifted into a higher one. The other issue was that my roadie instincts had me using the front brake way too much, which at one point resulted in me sliding out on an off-camber turn and falling, dropping the chain, hitting my head, and doing something to the CMC joint on my right hand, which still hurts. Fortunately I was way off the back of the real race, and frankly wasn't in all that big of a hurry. I did notice that the front of my shoe was hitting the front tire if I wasn't careful about that going around sharp turns at like 2 mph. It didn't cause any problems, fortunately. As expected, I was lapped at some point which provided the added bonus of having to do one fewer lap! It was a good learning experience and I came away mostly unscathed, earning the dubious honor of winning the 60+ age group by virtue of being the only rider in it. I found that I was really enjoying the flatter more technical parts of the course, and also the sharp uphill sections, but still  had virtually no confidence on the downhills and off-camber grassy turns.  All of the races went off without rain that day, and I hung around for almost all of them. Later that evening the rain finally arrived, but it was looking like it would be all gone by Sunday morning.

The other old guy.

Sunday's races were essentially the same as Saturday's but in the opposite direction. The grass was still fairly damp when my 9 am race got started, but fortunately the prior day's races had at least bedded in a bit of a path on the course that didn't seem quite as slick as it had on Saturday. Considering the fact that there was no place on the entire course where I might reasonably expect to pinch-flat, I dropped my tire pressures down to around 20-25 psi for this one, which turned out to be about right. One other precaution I took was to back off the front brake cable a few clicks to keep my road instincts from locking up the front wheel. I was one of the few riders with actual Cross-legal tire widths, and in fact a lot of people were riding mountain bikes. I started out at the back again so as not to interfere with the two or three riders who were actually good at this. Doing the course in the opposite direction didn't seem all that much different except for that one off-camber turn where I'd fallen the previous day. There was also a steep drop down to a sharp left turn that was a little concerning, at least to me. For that drop I was basically dragging my rear wheel until just before the bottom when I'd finally let go of the brake. I could probably have taken it a lot faster if properly motivated. For that off-camber turn, I was crawling around it, often with my rear wheel sliding a bit here and there, but I felt like I was handling it a lot better than I had on Saturday, probably because I was trying hard not to touch the front brake. Anyway, I ended up finishing second in the 60+, which was also second-to-last in the 60+. I hung around for an hour or so afterward until a brief bit of rain started to fall, which I took to be my cue to load up and head back to New Orleans. So I actually enjoyed riding this course and maybe learned a little bit in the process despite the blazing average speed of like 9 mph over the 40-minute races. Even so, pushing a bike through grass and mud did keep my heart rate up pretty high the whole time.

Monday was Halloween, and as usual my street was fully engaged. I didn't get to rush home from work until about 4:30 or so, and of course the younger kids start showing up around 5:30, so there wasn't a whole lot of time left to make final preparations like lighting candles and setting up fog machines and strobe lights (both of which were underwhelming). 

It always amazes me how many people show up between 6 and 7:30 every year. Then around 8:00 everybody suddenly disappears. Candy had made a huge pot of gumbo, even though we just had a few people coming over to eat. At one point I had to chase the dog down the sidewalk when he snuck out the porch door as I was sliding candy down the "candy chute" to the trick-or-treaters. We had decided to keep the COVID candy chute this year since it would keep the little kids from having to climb up and down the steps, which always worries me a bit. Otherwise, things went fine and the dog was reasonably well-behaved considering all of the action going on around him. Although we gave out a ton of candy, I'm pretty sure there's enough left over for another entire Halloween, which should come as no surprise if you know Candy (the person not the junk food).