Teamwork

Tuesday on the levee

It's finally the first day of May when there's a bit of light in the sky at 6 a.m. and I need to charge my headlight battery only once every few days rather than practically every day. We put on the LAMBRA Time Trial Championship yesterday for what I think was the twelfth consecutive year out on Highway 51 near LaPlace. This morning as I rolled the commuting bike out the door I sighed as I glanced around the basement that is littered with post-event stuff - water coolers, tents, podium, traffic cones, P/A system, stopwatches, clipboards, caution signs, tables, chairs, etc., etc. It will probably be a few days before I get that all sorted and put back into some semblance of order so it's ready for the 52nd annual Tour de La that is now only a month away. It will be only the third road event in LAMBRA this year, which is kind of weak. 

Anyway, the Time Trial went off remarkably well this year, not that we set any records for participation. I had gone out the weekend before to re-mark the turnarounds, and then spend much of Saturday setting up the start list and results workbook, and generally organizing what I would need to pack into the car in the dark on Sunday morning. Most of the LAMBRA equipment, and some of the NOBC equipment, was in the trailer up in Jackson, so I was missing the nice digital race clock and, as I discovered at the last minute, my collection of safety vests. One little surprise was that when Robert dropped off the USAC championship medals on Thursday I discovered that there were not enough gold ones to cover what we needed. They were just the leftover medals from 2022. I called USAC and they promised to send our 2023 allocation this week, so I will be mailing medals to a few riders after those arrive. On the plus side, participation was up a bit from last year, when it was quite low, but it was still a far cry from its peak years when we would regularly expect about 100 riders (there were 66 registered this year). In the weeks before the race I had been worried about having enough volunteers. Branden would be racing mountain bikes up in Ruston, and Mark would be out of town. Fortunately, after a few pleas for help on various platforms, enough people stepped up. On race day we had Mignon, Pat, Ty, Christian, David, Boyd, Randy, Kale, and Charles, so all of the key positions were easily covered and there was lots of backup for the timing over at the finish line. I was up that morning around 4:45 am, in time to make some coffee, eat a somewhat stale scone, and load stuff into the car. Josiah rode over from campus for 5:30 so I could give him a ride to the race. I'd lent him a pair of aerobars and Russell Bernard's old Campi Bora time trial wheels for his first-ever time trial. We arrived right at 6 am, unloaded the car, and set about putting up the tent, flags, caution signage, etc. The weather forecast was predicting a strong northwest wind so I wasn't expecting to see a lot of very fast times, even though some of the fastest riders in the area were on the start list.

The one good thing about having a smaller turnout was that the last rider was on the road by 9:15 and therefore back before 10:15, and with Mignon shuttling back and forth between the finish and the results tent we were able to get the results and awards for the earlier categories and age groups taken care of relatively quickly. Most years we have a little bit of confusion about one or two or three riders. Maybe the times don't look correct, or there were a few whose numbers couldn't be read, but this year there were no problems there and results went remarkable smoothly. 

It turned out that I was quite wrong in my prediction about the times being heavily influenced by the wind. In fact, Matt Govero turned in a new LAMBRA and course record of 49:32, besting his own LAMBRA record for the prior year by a healthy margin and putting his name in the record book as our first rider to go sub-50. He wasn't the only one with a fast time, either. In all, there were 21 riders who went sub-hour on this windy day - 34% of the 61 riders who raced. I was impressed. 

Afterward, our hard-working race crew headed down the road to Frenier Landing for a nice lunch before making the short drive back to town. I was happy to have Pat and Josiah to help unload the car(s), which probably saved my back quite a bit of strain.

So next I will start trying to promote the Tour de La, for which we currently have no actual sponsorship outside of the regular club funds. We will be doing everything here on the southshore this year, substituting a Lakefront circuit race for the usual long road race, and following it with a short 3 km time trial immediately afterward. Then we'll finish up with a criterium over in Chalmette around Torres Park. So basically everything is new this year, which has entailed quite a bit more work than usual. We'll be doing the stage race on points rather than time this year, so I'll have to set up an entirely new results workbook, and I'll need to write up a new race bible of some sort as well. I'd hoped to have the circuit race go up and over the levee at Franklin Avenue like we did a couple of years ago for the Lakeshore Scramble criterium and the weekday summer series, but for some reason the Levee district insisted that I needed a City permit in order to use that 900 feet or so of Franklin Avenue, which was kind of ridiculous. I ended up keeping the route on Lakeshore Drive and making a somewhat inconvenient U-turn just before the Elysian Fields traffic circle (to avoid the flexpost obstacle course the city installed last year). They'll still need to race over the levee each lap, just in a different location, so we'll see how that goes. I think the ultimate cost should be a little bit lower than usual since we won't need as many police as we do for the road race, but on the other hand we will need the ones we have for longer. 

Looks like I will have to miss the evening criterium in Hattiesburg on the 12th since we will be doing the memorial service for my father the following morning and family will be in town. There are no other actual races currently on the calendar in Louisiana or Mississippi, so I'm thinking about signing up for the Cheaha Challenge fondo on May 21. After the Tour de La I guess I'll have to think about doing some travelling if I want to actually race bikes!