On to Summer

The heat and humidity really seem to have moved in this week, so it's feeling a lot like summer around here. Following the Tour de La, I skipped riding on Monday and got most of the post-event stuff taken care of, so by Wednesday everything was closed out. Say what you will about the soon to be updated USAC website, but for people who have to deal with more than one or two events a year, the system for all its flaws is still way better than filling out paper reports, waiting for checks to arrive in the mail, writing out and mailing checks and forms, and basically taking three weeks to close out a race. The local bank made an awesome video of the Cat. 1/2/3 criterium. You can find it on their website (scroll down to June 5).

Anyway, with the Tour behind me I went out for the group ride Tuesday morning feeling like I'd been off the bike for three weeks instead of three days. It was warm and humid, like it's been all week, but other than that it seemed like a fairly subdued ride, and toward the end I finally started to feel more or less normal again. Wednesday's WeMoRi, on the other hand, just seemed inexplicably hard to me. Out on Lakeshore Drive saw the break with Jaden and Rob and jumped onto it. They were just fifteen seconds or so ahead of the rest of the group, I guess, and were going fairly hard. The leap from 16 mph to 27-28 mph seemed particularly difficult and I was still not recovered from it as we turned off of Wisner onto Harrison. I may have taken one very brief pull, but was otherwise sitting staying on the back as Jaden and Rob traded pulls. Then, Rob took what turned out to be one last hard pull toward the end of Harrison.  I should have known better, but I guess I was a little anoxic at the time and dropped back a bit to let him slide in ahead of me like I'd been doing. The only problem was that he was done for the day and eased up, leaving a shockingly fast-growing gap in front of me to Jaden. I was already on the rivet, so any effort I made to close it probably wouldn't have been discernible to the naked eye.  I watched Jaden round the corner onto Marconi, made the turn myself, and to my relief looked back and saw the group behind me. I eased up for a moment to recover and slotted back into the pack when it swallowed me up. The rest of the ride was pretty moderate until the final mile when the speed went up to 31 or 32 and kind of stayed there.  I spent a long time at Starbucks sipping a heavily sugared iced coffee after that. Thursday's ride seemed quite fast to me as well, no thanks to a relentless crosswind, but I survived it OK I guess. This morning I went out for an easy ride with the Tulane Friday Ride group, which this time of year is composed of 3-5 people on a good day.

I've never seen anything like this.

So I guess everyone has heard about the terrible car "accident" (the driver has been charged with MURDER) that happened in Kalamazoo.  Five riders killed and the rest of the group hospitalized when some guy just plowed in to a regular little group ride, apparently at a high rate of speed judging by the result and the extensive damage to the front end of the pickup truck. The group looked to be a regular fitness/social group - riders with triple chainrings and mirrors and that sort of thing - so they were probably riding well over to the right of the road at a moderate and controlled speed. As far as I know the police still aren't saying what they think caused the accident and interestingly haven't said anything about intoxication, so that seems ominous. If it was basically an intentional slaughter by some nutcase, that's pretty frightening. Even if it isn't, getting plowed down from behind by a distracted and/or drunk driver is pretty much everyone's biggest fear nowadays.  When I started riding, that sort of thing just never seemed to happen. Maybe it's just because there were a lot fewer of us out on the roads, but I suspect otherwise.

This weekend will be just training rides for me. Some of the Palmer guys are up in OK for Tulsa Tough, and hopefully I'll be able to catch some of the live-stream of their races. Although I may have had some slight delusions about my own racing capabilities in my younger days, I've never ever had any doubt that I lacked sufficient toughness for Crybaby Hill.

What it Takes

The weather forecast for the 45th Tour de Louisiane had been looking pretty bad all week, and I was expecting the worst. Apparently a lot of riders were too, because pre-registration was below 100 riders when it closed at midnight on Thursday. I had taken Friday off of work in order to get things ready for the trip across the lake that afternoon for Friday night registration and the ensuing weekend. It really takes a small army to make this event happen. I try to limit my own role to handling the website, race bible development and printing, bib numbers and pins, event announcement, USAC permitting, course selection and control, pre-registration, race-day registration, race-day finish line setup, officiating, race communications, and related activities. Bob and Roberta and Mignon had spent months trying to piece together enough sponsorship to make the event feasible. Feasible, in this case, means that for a year like this with threatening weather the club loses a few thousand dollars.

On Friday Robin came by and picked up our course signage so he and Fred could set up all three courses. That task involves literally hours of work prior to each stage, not to mention marking all of the turns and bad sections of road, and repairing some of them with cold-patch asphalt, in the days leading up to the event. Bob and Fred had made all of the arrangements with two Sheriff's offices, the Covington Police and Fire (first responders) Departments, along with the Mayor's office. There were also lots of little things that go into the event like portable toilets and podiums and sponsor banners and arrangements with food vendors, in this case McAllister's, the local brewhouse, in-kind sponsors for primes and goody bags, etc., etc. All of this is done by volunteers, in their spare time.

By Friday night registration the forecast was still looking bad, but there looked like a chance we might at least get race-day registration done before any serious rain moved in. We had a few new registrations during the evening, which was encouraging, but some of the categories were still really, really low.  The Cat. 1/2/3 race field looked relatively normal with some strong teams represented that promised a good competitive race.  The Cat. 4 field was smaller than normal, but the big hit was the Cat. 5 field, which was super small. Even by race day we had only 13 riders in the Cat. 5s. Normal for that field should be 40-50 riders.  By the time race-day registration was over we were up to just over 100 riders.  Normal would be more like 160-180. I was very thankful to see a number of the local guys sign up, albeit at the last minute to bolster the Masters and Cat. 4 race numbers. Even so, the missing 50 riders meant around $3,000 in revenue that the race needs to even approach breaking even in a typical year. You'd think that the $85 entry fee would provide enough to at least cover the $6k prizelist, but you have to realize that the race doesn't see a lot of that.  First, there's the per-rider per-day insurance cost. For a 2-day race that's $7.50. Then there's the online registration fee that we absorb. That's another $4.85 or so. Then there are the free registrations for club members which was $500. Plus there's the LAMBRA pre-rider fee of $2. So basically, of those riders who pay an $85 entry fee, we see about $70. To support a $6k prizelist, we basically need to raise around $6-7k in event sponsorship, which is a pretty heavy lift for an event with 100 participants. So anyway, the bottom line is that what it takes is a ton of sponsorship that we are rarely able to attract in order to do things right.

So back to the race.  Saturday morning looked surprisingly good. I can't even begin to describe the huge sense of relief once we got all five groups on the road and there was still no sign of an imminent thunderstorm. With races that would be going on for nearly four hours, though, we were still expecting rain, possibly heavy rain. We had even moved the finish line a little farther up where there was less of a roadside ditch. Somehow, Bob and Fred had rounded up enough follow cars for the road race, and along with three moto-refs we had everyone on the road right on schedule. Mike set up one of the magnetic mount antennas atop the road sign to which we had tied the officiating tent (expecting of course a torrential thunderstorm to hit at some point) and I was very impressed at how well the LAMBRA radios worked on the course. As the follow cars came around the last turn, which was at least two miles from the finish, we could hear them very clearly. We were also using the LAMBRA Zello channel, which allowed for race communications among everyone even when they were out on the back side of the 16-mile circuit. I think there was one minor crash during the road race, along with a number of flat tires (and remarkably few spare wheels in the follow cars), but in general the road races went very smoothly and, incredibly, without any significant rain.  What a relief.

After Ricky and Mike finished up entering the road race results into the computer (while the rest of the crew was taking down signage, cleaning up the venue, packing stuff into trucks, etc.) we finally headed out around 2 pm, stopping at a roadside McDonalds for food and internet where I uploaded results to the website and sent out notifications to everyone via email and Facebook. I stopped at Starbucks on the way to the TT site, arriving around 4:15 to unlock the school gate.  Robin and Fred had already starting setting up the course with caution signs and about a million traffic cones. The police officers arrived around 5:00, just before a big thunderstorm came through. I sat in my car responding to the many texts and messages asking if the TT was going to be cancelled. We had been looking at the radar and it looked like we would be in the clear by 5:15 so we delayed the start by around twenty minutes. Of course our already-posted TT start times kind of went out the window as a result, but it was too late to try and re-do those and somehow inform the riders of it, there being no dry place to even post a revised list.  The current list taped to the LAMBRA trailer was, of course, soaked anyway.  Amazingly, the rain stopped and we got all of the riders started and finished without a drop of rain falling on them. Afterward we again tore everything down, loaded up trucks, cars and trailers, and hit the road back to the hotel to do the results. I was behind Ian, one of our motorefs who had volunteered to stay for the TT and Criterium to help out. The trip to the hotel was only around four miles, but halfway there the sky opened up on I-12. I was glad I was behind him in the car to give him a little protection from any inattentive drivers coming up from behind. We got the TT results done and posted to the website and finally headed over to Acme Oyster House for some dinner, the first actual meal I'd had all day.  That night there were more thunderstorms.

Sunday morning the sky was cloudy but the forecast was looking better. When I arrived at the criterium about an hour before the first scheduled race at 6:20 or so Robin and Fred and Bob and Roberta were already hard at work setting up the barricades, hay bales, signage, etc.  We got the finish line officiating tents set up, set up the P/A system, finish line cameras, generator, radios, etc. and were ready to go before 7:30, but with only two Juniors for the first race, they both requested that they be allowed to race with the Women, which was the second race on the schedule, so we had a little breather before things got started. The streets were, amazingly, dry except for what I assumed to be some water draining across the street just before the first turn.  I kept wondering why it wasn't drying up. Once the second race started, I was occupied mostly with entering the results in to the computer and printing out results while Ricky and Mike scored whichever the next race was that was going on. I got a little time during the Masters race to walk down to the corner to investigate the water situation and discovered that there was a sump pump on the other side of the building that was literally pumping water onto the course. Luckily, it was plugged into an outlet on the underside of the old rail car that was part of the restaurant, so I unplugged it for the duration of the race. By the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race was underway the street was dry. Again, the LAMBRA radios were a huge help for the criterium. I'd given one to one of the police officers, and then another to a course marshal on the far side of the course. Robin had one as well. There were a couple of crashes, but the only serious one was when Will got into the gravel on the outside of the very fast Cat. 1/2/3 race and hit a pole with his thigh.  They drained about 50 cc of blood and fluid out of his knee this morning. Anyway, results went pretty well and after tearing down the venue and loading up cars and trailers once again I guess I was on the way back home by 3:00 or so. I unloaded everything one last time and settled down to post results to the website, send out announcements, upload the few photos I was able to take, fill out the Report of Occurrence for Will's crash, send that and the 1-day waivers to Ricky who was the Chief Ref this year, and then, finally opened up a bottle of wine.

It was a long weekend, and I think the riders had some good racing, so in that sense it was pretty satisfying. It was truly amazing that we had somehow managed to put on all three stages wihout anyone having to race in the rain on a weekend when the forecast really offered zero hope of that being a possibility. Now we just need to figure out how to keep the race going for another year, because there's no way we can go more than a year or two without at least coming close to breaking even, and I'm pretty sure we were a very, very long way from breaking even this year. Of course, there are a lot of things we could to do save money, but they would all tend to lessen the quality and fun of the event. We could cut back on the number of toilets, not pay for motorefs and hotel rooms, move the criterium to a parking lot or someplace that didn't require half of the Covington police force, move the road race to a course with fewer intersections needing police, etc.  I hope we don't have to do any of that.

One More Week

The Giro Ride taking an alternate route back through Gentilly

There's been a lot going on lately, the unfortunate consequence of which is that I don't find the time or energy to write about it much. There seems to be an inverse relationship between blog quality and potential blog content.

Last week went pretty well from a riding perspective. I logged nearly 300 miles, rode the Giro on Saturday, and did the Feliciana Road Race on Sunday. That was followed up with an easy group Memorial Day ride, apparently the 7th annual one, on Monday.

The Saturday Giro Ride had a reasonable turnout despite conflicting with a local triathlon that was being held along sections of Lakeshore Drive and Hayne Blvd. that the ride uses. As we headed out in the morning there were police stationed at the intersections, but the race hadn't yet started so we were allowed to take our usual route. Like me, I guess a number of riders in the group were planning on racing the following day, so the pace never got too much out of hand, which is to say it was a little slower than you'd otherwise expect this time of year. On the way back along Hayne Blvd. we could see a police car blocking the Casino overpass, and when we got there we weren't allowed over it.  Likewise with the Seabrook bridge, so we had to ride up Jordan road and cross the Industrial Canal at Chef Menteur. Knowing that we probably wouldn't be allowed on Lakeshore Drive, we just continued down Chef to DeSaix to Wisner, so I just headed home from there.

Sunday morning I was up before 5 am, since I  had to load some of the LAMBRA equipment into the car and get up to the race north of St. Francisville at least an hour ahead of the 9 am start time. The night before I'd installed a nice new cassette on my race wheel. Although I had a new chain on hand, I hadn't installed it because if something had gone wrong that evening when I was doing all of that I'd be stuck without access to a bike shop. The chain didn't look to be stretched, and I knew, or thought I knew, from my Garmin Connect equipment reminder that it had just a little over 3,000 miles on it, so I didn't really think twice about that. As it turned out, it actually had more like 3,800 miles on it by then and as a result two or three of the smaller cassette cogs were worn. Anyway, I arrived at the race after a nice 2-hour drive, helped Mike with the camera software, and picked up my number with lots of time to spare.  The Masters race would be starting third, so that meant 20 minutes after the Cat. 1/2/3s at 9 am. I dropped off my spare wheels at the wheel truck and went out for a little warmup. Immediately I could feel and hear the old chain not meshing very well with the new cassette. I decided right away that racing 64 miles like that wasn't worth whatever small weight savings there might be between my venerable old Rolf wheels and those Mavic wheels sitting in the follow car, so I rushed back and swapped them out, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that those heavy Continental Gatorskin tires might be a liability at some point.

Our race started out on time with the temperature relatively comfortable for the end of May. With most of the Acadiana masters AWOL for this race, Kevin was left as their only representative. The combined 40+/55+ race had a pretty good turnout of around 25 riders, so I was a little surprised at how slowly things started out. The fact that I ended up on the front for an extended period of time would certainly indicate a lack of aggressiveness.  This was a 22 mile loop that I've ridden a ton of times and never really gotten right. I'm never quite sure which hill is the last hill before the finish. Anyway, after a pretty easy ride for the first 8 miles or so we came to a left turn onto Hwy. 10.  Leading up to that, I saw Kevin moving up toward the front and tightening his shoes, and remembering that there had often been successful attacks launched from that uphill turn I looked over at the rider next to me and said, "Get ready for an attack here." Sure enough, Kevin attacked the turn but the gap was small and the pack closed it up almost immediately. A couple of miles later, as the pace lagged again, Will rolled off the front completely unchallenged. We still had like 50 miles to go, so it was definitely a rather bold gamble on his part.  Complicating the entire situation was that the 55+ riders, including me, were a little reluctant to invest a lot of effort in chasing the 40+ riders. Normally I'm willing to do some work in that regard, but there were lots of 40+ riders in this group so I decided to leave that responsibility mostly to them. Anyway, Will kind of rode off into the sunset rather quickly and by the time we started the second of the three laps he was out of sight.  On the second lap Kevin repeated his attack at the same place, but this time got clear with one other rider. There was a brief and disorganized chase for a mile or two, but by the time they were thirty or forty seconds up the road the pack kind of sat back and let them go. At that point we could see Will a couple of minutes up the road, and I figured the three of them would get together and disappear, along with the podium places. Early on the third lap, however, the rider who had been with Kevin came back to the pack, and about halfway through that lap so did Will.  Will had worked for a while with Kevin when he'd been caught, but was struggling on the hills and eventually blew up. By that point we were getting close to the end of the race and surprisingly there were essentially no attacks. It really would have been the ideal time to split the group, but it seemed like everyone was either on the defensive or just waiting for the big efforts on the hills leading up to the finish. I wasn't having any difficulty at all on the little hills, and set the tempo on the second-to-last one. That was followed by a fast downhill and then another little climb onto a false flat about 400 meters from the finish. Of course there was an attack about halfway up the last climb. I got onto a someone's wheel as he came past and then waited patiently for the 200 meter flag where I finally jumped past. There were still a few riders ahead of me, and I was only barely holding my own initially, but of course that is way too long of a drag race for me once the road flattens out. For a while Butch and I were sprinting elbow to elbow, at least until I blew up about 50 meters short of the finish. I'm not sure where I ultimately finished overall, maybe around 6th or 7th, but anyway it was 2nd in the 55+ which got me a handshake and "podium" photo, the traditional podium in this case being the steps of the cabin where the race stages. I actually enjoyed the race a lot, probably because it wasn't really all that hard, plus there was beer and pastalaya afterward.

The Memorial Day Ride

So on Monday I did Kenny's annual Memorial Day ride out to Chalmette Battlefield and then to the WWII museum where one of the veterans of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam came out and told us a couple of stories. This year we met at Rouler, a new coffee shop / bike shop on Baronne street down in the CBD. The coffee was pretty good and although the location makes it unlikely I'll be there on a routine basis, it's a nice place with a nice theme.

Now, I'm focused on the Tour de La next weekend, hoping the predicted rain somehow misses us or at least isn't too bad. Everyone's done a ton of work this year to pull off the 45th annual Tour de Louisiane. I'll be officiating as usual, continuing my recent streak of putting on races rather than riding in them. On the plus side, after putting on four races so far this year, I should be more or less in the clear in one more week.  I could really use a break.

Back to LaPlace

It was a whole week out and I was already starting to feel stressed about the LAMBRA Time Trial Championship. No doubt I wouldn't have felt stressed had I been planning on actually racing. Instead, I'd be officiating and race directing. Things really started to get complicated on Monday when after I dropped Danielle off at the airport and then learned I had to make an unplanned little trip to Houston for a couple of days of meetings about  and upcoming DOE proposal for a "Modular Chemical Process Intensification Institute for Clean Energy Manufacturing." Candy was already in Atlanta at a meeting until Wednesday. So I made some quick airline and hotel reservations that had me leaving for the airport around 4:15 am on Wednesday in order to arrive in time to make the start of the workshop around 8 am. The meeting went fine, and I was back home early Wednesday evening, but it all really cut into the time I would otherwise have had to get things together for the time trial over in LaPlace on Sunday.  I had some new caution signs to pick up on Thursday, and my brother and sister in law were coming in on Friday. Online registration was set to end Friday night. Before I left work on Friday I printed out release forms for everyone who had already registered, but with another five hours of registration time left I knew there would be more. That evening my brother and his wife, came over, I drank a fair bit of wine, and periodically checked the online registration numbers. By the time registration closed around midnight we had around 108 riders. After everyone went to sleep, I was up until around 2 am seeding riders based on their USAC time trial ranking points, setting up the results workbooks, assigning bib numbers, etc.

A few hours later it was time to head out to the Giro Ride. The weather was nice and there was a good group, so it was a pretty good ride, but as soon as I got home I started sorting out release forms and stapling bib numbers to them, being careful to avoid missing any or getting them out of order. Once bib numbers were assigned, I then had to re-sort the forms with numbers into alpha order within categories so that it would be easy to find each rider's form at registration on Sunday. I think it was probably 1 pm before I finally peeled off my riding clothes and took a shower. Before it got dark I loaded the podium and tent into the car to save some time the next morning, and then grilled steak and chicken for dinner. Finally I got all of the stuff down in the basement staged for loading into the car early Sunday morning.

Arriving at the race venue around 6 am on Sunday I was relieved to find a number of volunteers already there. With a nice breeze blowing and unseasonably tolerable temperatures, it was quite pleasant for those of us working the race. For the riders, however, there were 12.5 miles of significant headwind waiting for them. With 108 riders and a couple of time gaps for the 10 km and 20 km riders, was starting riders for about two hours straight before I could switch to working on the results.  That all went fairly smoothly, even though we had a few illegible numbers on the results sheet and had to radio out to the finish line to confirm them from the backup sheets. Anyway, the TT was a success by all accounts and the club definitely came out ahead on it financially, which is good because we probably won't for the Tour de Louisiane stage race a week and a half from now.

Once I got home I spent another hour or two publishing results to the website and finishing the post-event report. By then all of the sleep deprivation from the prior week was really starting to catch up with me. I think I went to sleep around 8:30 that night.

Next weekend I'm planning on racing the Feliciana Road Race over around St. Francisville and then the next weekend is the Tour de Louisiane.  If I can just make it through that weekend, the rest of the season should be easy! Bob and Roberta and Mignon and Fred have been pretty busy making logistical arrangements for the Tour. It's really a ton of work to make sure all of the arrangements are made for three different venues over two days - police, volunteers, hay bales, portable toilets, meetings with the city, permits, sponsors, banners, goody bags, etc., etc.  Having three NOBC-promoted events in quick succession this year has definitely been a little stressful.

Races of Truth

I have never been very good at Time Trials. When I first started racing, back in the Nixon administration, we did a lot of them.  This was before the USCF, now USAC, went from Imperial measurements to Metric measurements.  The standard TT distance back then was 25 miles, just a tad longer than 40 km, and in fact the reason we now use 40 km as the standard. Unfortunately, some years ago USAC kind of abandoned 40 km as the national time trial standard, allowing Nationals promoters to use various presumably more convenient distances for championships.  I hated that.  Still do. Up until the mid-80s the national records and national champions were published in the back of the rulebook.  I miss that too, especially after local rider Brian Roberts set national records in 1982 on the LaPlace course for 75, 100,  and 125 miles the year that they decided, after the fact, to cease publishing (or really even recognizing) such records. For the record, his 100 mile TT time was 4:16:42, and yes, that was before aero bars, time trial helmets, carbon wheels, etc. -- basically Merckx-Style.  Speaking of which, at the LAMBRA TT Championship this coming Sunday we will be awarding special medals for the top three men and top three women overall who ride Merckx-Style, which for simplicity we are defining as collegiate mass-start legal, so although there won't be any solid disk wheels, there will be aero wheels, aero helmets, and perhaps some aero frames. Should be interesting.

Back when I started racing, and indeed for nearly a decade afterward, I was generally happy with a 25 mile TT time of anything under 1:10. We used to schedule six of these time trials in the spring, and, riding with a mechanical stopwatch clamped to my handlebars, I eventually got my time down to around 1:02 or so.  Then, around 1980 or 81 or so, things started to change. First, Glenn Gulotta did the first sub-hour time trial we'd ever had. It was a watershed moment. A number of other riders, finally realizing that it was indeed possible for normal humans to go sub-hour, followed suit the very same year. I vividly remember my first sub-hour time trial, which was a 59:59. It was a hot weekend and I'd been invited to a party at a farm up in mid-Mississippi with a bunch of grad students. On Friday I loaded the bike into my old Triumph GT-6, and with the engine heat filtering through the cracks in the firewall, drove up there for the weekend party. Then, early on Sunday morning, I snuck out, drove back down to Belle Chasse (the standard TT course went from the Scarsdale ferry landing across the river from Belle Chasse to a basically non-existent town of Carlisle and back) for the TT.  I gutted out that first sub-hour TT, then jumped back into the car that had been baking in the sun and drove back up to Mississippi for more partying. On the drive back home that night I started to run a little fever. A week later I was still running a fever and eventually went to the doctor. About a week later we finally figured out I had mononucleosis, but by then it was causing some hepatitis so they sent me straight to the hospital where I was stuck in enteric isolation for about a week until my liver enzymes went back down. That little bout with EBV kept me sick off-and-on for about a year afterward, and it was fully a year and a half before I felt truly recovered, which was around when I came down with pericarditis which had me lying around eating aspirin for another month or so, which cured the pericarditis and caused a stomach ulcer. Next thing I knew we had a baby. I somehow kept up an adequate amount of riding that once I was finally back to normal I could resume some semblance of training.

For a few years, before the really aero wheels and frames and helmets started to appear, I actually developed the ability to pull of some competitive stage race prologue time trials. Those are the three and four-mile ones that require you to start fast and then accelerate the rest of the way. I was amazed how much faster I could go with my old clip-on aero bars and a skinsuit. Eventually the expensive TT bike technology surpassed my ability to compete without it and my motivation, which was never very good for time trialing anyway, started to lag. Perhaps I'll try a Merckx-Style time trial one day and see how close I can come those times I did back in the 80s.

Or maybe I'll just keep volunteering to officiate them instead.

Rain Complications

The weather's been kind of crazy all over the place, it seems. I was watching the live video of the Charlotte criterium Saturday night. This is a huge event, culminating with a $15k women's race followed by a $15k men's Pro race.  It was raining for most of the women's race but they made it through without problems. The men's race was another story. They were only ten or fifteen minutes into it when the rain started coming down in biblical proportions. It was pretty bad, but these were pros and they were handling it until the officials decided to stop the race. I can think of a lot of reasons for that, but for a big race with the big teams and all, I was a little surprised. I figured they would re-start the race once the rain let up, but the rain didn't really let up much and they ended up cancelling it. Wow. No prizes and no points for teams that must have spent tons of money to get there. I wonder if the promoters had event cancellation insurance and if that influenced the decision.

Anyway, this morning I saw the video of the huge pile-up at the Red Hook criterium that happened when one of the lead motos stalled just past the start.  Of course, the fact that this race is essentially designed to ensure the maximum number of crashes didn't help. I mean, having a big field doing a criterium on the street on track bikes is just asking for disaster. The event(s) is hugely popular, but personally, as a bike race, I think it's kind of stupid in the same way I think professional wrestling is kind of stupid.

So I ended up not going to the collegiate race in College Station since they had enough drivers and I really didn't want to miss another weekend of riding. In a way it's good that I didn't go because I think I would have gone a little crazy when the sheriff showed up at the circuit race and shut it down Saturday morning.  I guess proper arrangements hadn't been made or something.  As it was, they were really lucky that the rainstorms missed them both days for the most part.  The SCCCC road season was pretty screwy this year with the Arkansas criteriums being cancelled because the course wasn't secured, and then the MSU criteirums being cancelled because of rain, and then the Texas A&M circuit race being cancelled (all except the Cat. A). With only four races this year, the Tulane race was the only one where all three races happened, and so far it's the only one for which results have been posted. Anyway, Adrian won the Cat. B season overall, and Hannah won the Women's C overall, but I guess the relatively low participation at races this year keep them from winning the Division 2 championship.

Here in New Orleans we kind of lucked out both Saturday and Sunday mornings. I got in two pretty good Giro Rides, got back home, and watched it rain the rest of the day.  Both days. Major rain.

Feast or Famine

Last week, specifically the one before the one we're currently in, was a nice solid training week for me. The weather has been starting to feel more and more like summer, which always makes me feel better on the bike, and there weren't many issues with rain or work to interfere with the routine. On the other hand, there weren't any races within reasonable driving distance, so although I may have felt good on the training rides, I know deep down that this feast or famine race calendar wasn't really doing me any good. You would think I'd have more than one race to my credit for the month of April.

Last weekend's Giro Rides were good, and it was nice to see Traci and Gary Rodosta in town from the relatively frigid northeast. With a number of the local riders up in Arkansas at Joe Martin, and one or two others missing, the Giro Rides seemed fast but maybe a little smoother than usual. Speaking of Fayetteville, there were some pretty impressive results turned in by LAMBRA riders. Although most of "our" guys in the extremely competitive Cat. 1/2 races didn't make the first page of results, there were some promising results to be found (there were apparently a fair amount of issues with results, but that's another story). In the Cat. 3 race, Lance Abshire was 5th in the TT, 15th in the RR, and 22nd in the Crit, so ended up 6th on GC, which would be impressive for this 65-rider race even if he wasn't 14 years old and riding junior gears. There were some others in there with impressive results as well. In the Cat. 5 race one of the local guys won, although I cannot figure out why that race had only 17 riders.

Early this week I had a visit from an old high school friend that was nice. It hardly seems like it's been over 45 years. On the other hand, we're at that age now when hearing about the death of someone you knew, either personally or as some sort of celebrity, is practically a weekly event. Late last week we learned that a former club member, Richard Beck, had died. That was around the same time I heard that Pat Fresneda had crashed on the levee bike path and broken a collarbone. I think he's supposed to have surgery next week to fix that since it was a well-displaced distal break.

This week's training has been pretty hit-and-miss. Although I got in 287 miles last week, work and other things have been getting in the way this week. I had to cut Tuesday's morning ride short, and then on Wednesday couldn't get out in the morning at all, so squeezed in a few miles after work on the levee instead. This morning I had to take Danielle to the airport in the morning, so it remains to be seen if the rain that subsequently moved in will allow for another evening ride. The Tulane team is heading over to College Station, Texas for the conference championship, so I think I will probably be driving. It looks like I'll be allowed to enter as an Alumnus and sit at the back of the A races, at least until I get gapped off, so at least I should be able to get in a few miles that way. Unfortunately it's looking like rain for the Saturday road races, but hopefully nothing like the complete wash-out they had at the last collegiate race. I think I'll be lucky to log 150 miles for the week with very little in the way of intensity.

Interestingly, and appropos to a blog by an old guy, a recent Tulane publication offers a credible explanation for why old guys like me have such a hard time dealing with sugar. The bottom line is basically that without adequate testosterone levels, blood sugar regulations goes south, which can end up clinically as diabetes. Of course, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case I figure all I need to do is become clinically diabetic and then USAC might give me a TUE for testosterone.

Wet Feet in Wichita Falls

Things started going downhill, figuratively rather than topologically speaking, on Tuesday. Leaving  uptown in the dark, the streets were dry and the air warm and muggy. Halfway there, somewhere along Marconi in City Park, the temperature suddenly dropped and the wind suddenly increased. Near Robert E. Lee the streets were wet, and then when we turned onto Lakeshore Drive we hit a brutal wind and the streets were completely soaked as if a big rainstorm had ended just moments before. We bailed out to do a lap around City Park where the wheelspray wouldn't be quite so bad, but halfway through the second lap it started raining and we headed back home. Wednesday morning it was raining, but I managed to get in a few miles in the evening after work. Then Thursday was completely rained out. I rode to work in the rain and spend the whole day with wet feet and soggy pant legs. Friday we were leaving for the 10-hour drive to Wichita Falls for the MSU races, but I was desperate enough to log a few miles before stopping at Enterprise car rental to pick up a minivan for the trip. Total mileage for Monday through Friday: 92 miles.

Wednesday afternoon

The drive to Wichita Falls was long, but the weather was fine despite the forecast. We were expecting some rain on Saturday and then a ton of rain on Sunday. The skeleton crew that was racing decided to skip the morning time trial, but I was already committed to helping to officiate in a couple of follow cars, so I headed out on the bike in the dark with a very heavy messenger bag and Dustin who wanted to ride the Open time trial. I had mapped out the route on google maps and put an earphone in my ear so I could listen to the directions as I rode, which worked out pretty well. The sky wasn't looking too good, but it wasn't raining.  Yet. The team TT start was the usual chaotic situation, caused by the fact that they didn't know which teams would be riding, or who would be on those teams, and they hadn't posted any sort of start list. So there was one official trying to line up teams roughly in order of category, and another starting them at one-minute intervals. I ended up showing the riders the TT course as they were in line, since most of them didn't know the course and didn't even know if it was out-and-back or something else (it was something else). I don't know why they don't require the teams to specify who is riding what at registration so they can post a start list, but basically registration was pretty much a hit-and-miss affair anyway. They were telling riders that if they had pre-registered online they didn't need to check in, so as a result they weren't confirming bib numbers or even actual attendance, which ultimately caused a few problems with the results. I think they may still have a couple of placings for which they have bib numbers that don't match the list they were working from, so basically they don't know who those riders were.

After the teams there were a few individual TT riders, one of which was Dustin who posted the fastest ITT time, except that they did the math wrong initially and had him two minutes slower than he was. After the TT session there was just about an hour before I had to be at the road race start which was where the TT finish had been. I rode a couple of miles back to the bike shop where they were doing registration, hung around there for a little while, then headed to the RR start.

First off, I was in the follow car for the Category D men. This was a fairly good-sized field, but as expected it started to blow apart right away. Eventually it was down to a fairly small but un-aggressive group, so it came down to a sprint. As we rounded the last bend in the road the sprint had already started, and suddenly I saw a bike fly up into the air off to the right. A rider was stretched out in the road and wasn't moving as we passed and parked the truck. There were like five officials on hand and when I got there the MSU rider was conscious again but had clearly suffered a concussion. They called an ambulance immediately as the injured rider, lacking any semblance of short-term memory, kept asking the same questions over and over again - typical of bike race concussion victims: "How did I get here?" "Why is my jersey torn?" By the time he was loaded into the ambulance he had figured out he'd been in a crash and was asking if anyone else went down. The local hospital apparently kept him for observation for a while and then released him, suggesting only that he take it easy on the bike. By the time the second wave of road races was ready to start it was raining, luckily only lightly. I piled into the Men's B follow car for what turned out to be a fairly boring race. They lost a few riders to attrition and flats, but in general the group stayed together. Tulane looked to be the only team with more than one rider in the resulting 9-rider group, but for some reason they decided to just ride tempo rather than try to get one of them off the front. The result was 3rd and 4th places, which were OK. Naturally, they had Ben's number wrong since the list they were using came from the Arkansas race where they also had Ben's number wrong, so I had to get that fixed after they posted results showing a mystery rider in 4th place. Anyway, by then my feet were pretty wet, but I'd never been really stuck in any heavy rain, so it wasn't too bad. I was glad that we hadn't had any big thunderstorms to deal with.

Making do after a cancelled criterium

That night the weather went downhill considerably with multiple thunderstorms. The first criterium was scheduled for 8 am on campus, which was just about a mile away, so I waited  until the last minute, put on my rain jacket and rode over there in jeans and regular shoes. There was a little lull in the rain, which is to say it was raining, but not "pouring" so although my feet and legs and head got quite wet it wasn't too bad. I arrived at the start after riding through a few places where the water was flowing across the road, only to find nobody but one of the officials and the MSU coach. He'd sent out a notice saying that the chief referee had cancelled criteriums a few minutes earlier. The forecast was for heavy thunderstorms all day, so there really wasn't much hope, and with a couple of corners featuring slick fake bricks I guess it might have gotten ugly for the newer riders. The Tulane riders set up trainers in the hotel fitness room and got in an hour or so of exercise before we headed back home. On the plus side, that meant we'd be home around 10:30 pm instead of 2:30 pm like we'd been expecting.

Today the weather here was pretty nice and I did the usual Tuesday morning group ride. The sun is starting to come up now around the time we're on Lakeshore Drive, so that's encouraging. Not so encouraging was my discovery on Monday that they have torn up a small section of the levee bike path, presumably to fix some bad work there, and haven't provided any reasonable way to go around it other than riding down the grass into River Road traffic. How all of this work on the levee bike path can take so freaking long is completely beyond me. The contractor who did the bike path work did a lousy job in my opinion, and now apparently the Corps of Engineers agrees, albeit rather late in the game.

Harbor Master Masters

Sunday wasn't just Paris-Roubaix, it was also the Harbor Master Criterium, a local race now in its third year. Originally located at South Shore Harbor in the parking lot of an abandoned casino boat operation, they had to find a new venue this year because the South Shore Harbor property was finally under development by none other than Tipitina's, which should be pretty interesting once it's done. So when they called asking about the Esplanade Mall location in Kenner that we had used for Rocktoberfest, I gave them all of our contact information and pretty soon they had everything lined up for the new venue. The Mall folks suggested moving the start/finish from the far side of the circuit to the side adjacent to the mall, and although we were a little concerned about the shortened sprint, which was down to maybe 100 meters from the last turn, we went ahead with it and it turned out to be much better all-around. Since I still had the LAMBRA computers and cameras, I arrived early to help set up and right away Ricky told me his old laptop that he was planning to use for registration and results had apparently died. I had brought my own, equally old, laptop along for just such a contingency, however, so next thing I knew I was working registration. This being an early season criterium, there were a lot of riders who had renewed their licenses at the last minute and so weren't in the database, but otherwise things went pretty well. I was registered for the masters race, so I abandoned my post just before the end of the prior race and was able to get in a few warm-up laps before rolling up to the back side of the group that had already assembled on the start line.

Talking with one of my teammates, Steve Johnson, during warm-up I told him that I was fully expecting a couple of attacks by Acadiana immediately after the start, which turned out to be on the mark. On the plus side, we had a reasonably sized field for this one that even included a few of the local guys who regularly tear up the training rides but rarely travel to races. There video of the whole race on YouTube.  At the start line I noted that Kenny was there, so naturally I expected him to clip in immediately and basically sprint the entire first lap. I was not to be disappointed. He did, and thirty seconds into the first lap we were strung out all over the place at 28-30 mph. There was some danger that this would create an immediate breakaway, but I hadn't clipped in quickly and was stuck pretty far back at the time so there wasn't much I could do but pedal and hope. Kevin Landry took advantage of the situation and rode off the front taking Tony Del Valle with him. The break hovered up there as the pack kind of re-grouped for a while. Mid-way through the third lap one of the Acadiana guys surged to the front for a bit, bringing Kenny with him, but ultimately just serving to slingshot Rob Konrad off the front who very quickly made the short bridge up to the break. So five minutes into the 40 minute race, while my lungs were still trying to figure out that they were in a race, the winning 3-rider break had been established. At the time, and for the next fifteen minutes or so, I didn't even realize that Rob had bridged up. Anyway, that put two of the teams in the pack on the defensive and took some horsepower out of any chance to pull the break back.

A couple of laps later I was finally starting to feel warmed up and started spending more time up near the front of the group, which was fun because I was really liking the course. Although there were a few lulls, the pace stayed reasonably fast, which is to say the pack wasn't lapped, and there were a few soft attacks and splits, a couple of which I ended up working pretty hard to bring back. Still, I don't think we dropped many riders.  With a few laps to go I started trying to maintain a decent position up near the front, although by then I'd realized we'd be sprinting for 4th, which was a little demotivating under the circumstances. On the plus side, I was feeling pretty good and planning on at least contesting the sprint.

With a couple of laps left to go the remaining Acadiana guys took some digs, but were pulled back pretty quickly. At the start of the last lap Lenny surged, I guess to help out Brian Baum who was on the front, but when he pulled off one of the Urban South guys attacked. He blew up on the back side of the course as I was sitting about third wheel when Matt attacked hard on the right with Kenny on his wheel. I was overlapping Brian who hesitated for a moment and then almost hit the Urban South guy who was by then going backwards through the pack, so Brian didn't catch Kenny's draft and I didn't catch Brian's, making it just a drag race through the last three turns to the finish. I think I might have caught Brian, given sufficient motivation, which was apparently lacking, so I ended up 7th which I was not too unhappy about.

After that I quickly pulled off the jersey and put my official's shirt back on and headed back to registration and results duty. There were some reasonably sized fields, and we were having a lot of difficulty reading race numbers because of the glare from the sun, especially those numbers that were placed higher on the riders' backs. It definitely slowed down the results since some of those riders had to be identified by the process of elimination, team kit, etc. The Cat. 1/2/3 race was pretty interesting with a somewhat late break involving Matt Davis and Dustin Drewes that came down to a photo finish with the pack right on their heels. There's video of that race too.

Results are on the LAMBRA website.

This morning the forecast was looking bad, but the radar looked like we'd be OK for at least an hour, so I headed out at 5:40 am to meet the uptown group for the ride out to Lakeshore Drive. It was warm and humid as we rolled through Mid-City in the dark wondering how much riding we'd get in before the rain started. Riding along Marconi I felt a sudden drop in temperature and a few light raindrops and knew we were in for trouble. It wasn't too bad, so we continued on, but as we crossed Robert E. Lee the streets went from merely damp to soaking wet. By Lakeshore Drive we were in a strong 20+ mph wind coming off the lake and it was raining. Out at West End we picked up a couple of guys, one of whom was Ray who just got married and moved to Lakeview from Kenner. We quickly made the easy decision to abandon Lakeshore Drive and do laps around City Park instead. It seemed all of the heavy rain had fallen to the north of Robert E. Lee because for our first lap around the park the street was just damp and the rain very light.  For the second lap, not so much. By the time we were on Harrison on the second lap it was raining pretty good and I could feel my feet sloshing around in the water inside my shoes.  It was time to head home.  So 20 easy miles instead of the usual 40.  The next few days seem to be up in the air as well because of rain.

Weekday Routine

Part-way to work on Lowerline Street approaching Willow on a nice Spring morning

It's been a pretty routine week around here. After what I felt was a solid week of training, I was feeling a little achy and decided to make Monday a "rest day." The night before I'd re-cabled the Bianchi, spending quite a bit of time spraying lube into the right shifter in hopes of getting it to work a little better. The sad fact is that no amount of lube is going to make up for the fact that it's just plain worn out. Anyway, I got to bed kind of late, so it wasn't hard to decide to stay in bed an extra half hour. Tuesday and Wednesday were the regular early morning group rides. Neither was particularly hard, but neither was too easy either, especially since I was trying to do a little more work than usual. This morning I was feeling a little dragged out from the start and quickly decided to spend the ride hiding from the wind at the back. The weather around here has actually been pretty nice. The early morning temperatures have been a little cooler than I like but half an hour in I'm warmed up and it's fine. I think I was the only one wearing arm-warmers this morning.

Closer to St. Charles and the River you see lots of houses that
were built around 1890-1915 or so - wooden shutters, some
with Victorian accents, built on brick piers three or four
steps up from the ground.

Since it's been so dark in the morning and the rides have been so routine, I haven't been taking any photos lately, so I decided I'd instead take some on my commute to work. My regular route is a very relaxing two miles or so that I traverse at an average speed of maybe 10 mph. I ride down Lowerline Street, which is so named because it was the lower, or downriver, border of the town of Carrollton that was eventually annexed to New Orleans as it expanded. Carrollton is laid out in a fairly consistent grid, although the streets on the upriver and downriver sides aren't quite parallel. As a result, a number of streets that start out at the river end at some point before reaching South Claiborne. The original layout had large squares with the streets in one direction being named after trees (Maple, Oak, Willow, Elm, Sycamore, Birch, Hickory, Spruce, etc.) and those in the other direction named for people. Later the large squares were split up into four smaller squares, so the new streets generally got named after people from the town. After Carrollton was annexed to New Orleans, some of the streets got re-named to inherit the names of the city streets that they connected with.

A small shotgun near Black Pearl with a large, recently added
Camelback addition.

Since it's springtime down here everything is bright green and there are all sorts of flowers all over the place. Today there were a lot of bright yellow Cat's Claw flowers in the road here and there. Although their flowers are pretty, the vine itself is pure evil. It's practically impossible to get rid of, so the best you can hope for is to establish a stalemate.

Office Parking

Weekend at Home

Small Saturday Giro Group

With a bit of a lull in the local racing calendar, I spent a lot of time at home this weekend. Mostly, I was wishing I was at a race somewhere else. For me, the one thing that consistently gets me in shape is a steady diet of weekend races, and even though I'd raced just the weekend before, it felt like it was ages ago. So once the Friday deluge and associated flooding abated, I was more than ready for some weekend training rides. A rider from Bermuda was meeting me at 6 am Saturday to borrow a bike for the Giro, so at least that was something to break up the routine. Unfortunately, it was also the weekend of the Alabama Cycling Classic, aka Sunny King weekend, so a number of local riders were over in Alabama. Some would be kicking ass, but for others it would be mostly a learning experience. Regardless, it was going to take a few of the regular Giro riders out of the mix.  That, however, wasn't the biggest problem for the Saturday Giro Ride. The real problem was the sudden drop in temperature and corresponding increase in wind speed. We had had a couple of weeks of nice spring-like weather, but the cold front that had brought all of the rain had also dropped the temperature. I went out Saturday morning wearing two jerseys and arm-warmers, and was still a little chilly as we rode straight into the 20 mph north wind. I knew a lot of riders were going to skip the Giro because of that. Indeed, we rolled out from Starbucks with maybe a dozen riders. Sarah, the visiting rider, had been with her team in Greenville but had shipped all of her riding stuff back with the team in order to make a quick visit to New Orleans. Luckily, she was able to fit my old Orbea pretty well, and her 38.5 feet weren't too small for my old size 40 shoes. The only thing she was really missing were shorts. She ended up riding the 50+ miles in, basically, gym shorts.

Lance won the Jr. 15-16 race

Saturday's Giro was really a strange one. Aside from the freakishly low turnout and gusting north wind that threatened to blow me right off of the Seabrook bridge, there were other complications. When we turned off of Hayne onto Paris Road and caught the tailwind the pace ramped up dramatically and Sarah was caught off-guard. Going over the I-10 overpass I looked around and saw her off the back, so I eased up to wait for her and to make sure she didn't get killed crossing over the two lanes of interstate traffic on I-610. Once I picked her up we had a really nice steady pace down the service road and Chef Highway. Of course I was expecting to make a U-turn a mile or so before Venetian Isles to pick up the group on its way back. We were only about halfway out, however, when I saw a small group coming toward us and figured it was the 5:45 group. Then, as they went by, I looked over and saw Matt and some of the other guys from our group. They had turned around early. We made a quick u-turn but it was really too late to catch them. David and another rider who had apparently turned around too late caught up to us right away, so at least we had a little group. We took the Bullard short-cut and eventually met back up with the group on Hayne where I discovered that a couple of people, including Taco, had continued on to Venetian Isles.

Palmer Racing's first legit Pro/1 race as
an official Domestic Elite Team 

Anyway, it was a pretty good ride but I was short about ten miles by the time I got home. I spent a lot of time that afternoon and evening watching the live video from the Sunny King criteriums, and was impressed with Lance Abshire who won his 15-16 junior crit and then took 5th in the Cat. 3 criterium that was won by Bryan Mutell. The Cat. 2 crit was interesting but Dustin was stuck at the back basically the whole time. The Pro/1 criterium was pretty interesting. I could occasionally make out a couple of the Palmer guys in the huge pack. A 3-rider break was off the front for a long time until one of them attacked and went off solo. It was a noble effort but he got swallowed up by the pack just a couple of corners before the finish on the last lap thanks to the UHC riders who went to the front for probably ten laps and towed the entire field up to him. After that questionable tactic, the best they did was, I think, 5th.

Sunday's Giro was chilly but otherwise totally different from Saturday's. The turnout was back to normal and the pace was pretty good, so coming home from that one I felt like I'd gotten a good workout. I ended up spending hours in front of the computer later in the day watching the Women's and Men's road races from Alabama. I was mostly impressed with Debbie Milne who made the break in the women's race and ended up 6th. At 46, she was probably twenty years older than most of the other riders in the break. The Men's race turned out to be kind of boring as the Citadel riders really controlled things and most of the coverage was just showing the small breakaway trading pulls. They finished a couple of minutes ahead of what was left of the main pack. The Palmer guys did OK with Andrew in 36th and Ed in 40th, but still something like eight minutes back.

Rain Day

Some riders really relish riding under adverse conditions. Rain, cold, snow, gravel roads, wet cobblestones - these are all defining features of the "hard men" of cycling.  I am not exactly one of those.  Although I'll endure some pretty uncomfortable conditions in order to avoid resorting to riding a stationary bike, I do draw the line when the big raindrops start to fall, and at any rate I most certainly get no enjoyment out of riding in the rain or freezing cold or on gravel roads or any combination of the aforementioned. Since Monday I'd been expecting to miss some saddle time because of rain. The forecast had initially been calling for rain from Wednesday through Friday, so to accommodate, I rode a little harder on Tuesday. When Wednesday morning arrived and the promised rain hadn't arrived, I rode a little harder on Wednesday because surely it would be raining Thursday.

Then on Thursday there was still no rain in sight so I went out into the humid 20 mph south wind. Only Rick was waiting at the end of Nashville, and when we got out to West End we picked up only one other rider. Along Lakeshore Drive we picked up a few more, but after the lap of Lakeshore Drive all but one turned back or went home rather than fight the wind along the lake. By the time I was coming back from Kenner I was all alone, but at least I'd gotten in yet another morning ride I'd been expecting to miss.

The forecast for today was looking pretty bleak and it was clear my luck was running out, but when I checked the radar around 6 am it looked like I had a brief window before the rain would arrive. The streets were wet and for all practical purposes there was a very light rain falling, but the air was still warm so I went out for a short spin, arriving back home about ten miles later pretty wet but not cold.

So earlier this week I got one of those emails I routinely receive from someone visiting town who is looking for information on local rides, or rental bikes, or both. Sometimes these are recreational riders who would clearly be out of place on the weekday training rides or weekend Giro Rides, and I'm probably not a lot of help for those people. I usually check to see of the visiting riders have USAC licenses or Facebook pages that might give me a clue as to their cycling experience and fitness. The person this weekend looked like she might survive the Giro Ride, so I'll be lending her a bike Saturday. Hopefully she won't get dropped right away and will get the kind of training ride she's looking for. Some of the local riders will be up in Alabama at what we used to call Sunny King, now the Alabama Cycling Classic, which might, maybe, make the Giro very slightly less intense. A couple of the Tulane riders are going up there for the Cat. 4 races. I hope they survive. This year the Palmer Cycling riders will be competing as a USAC Domestic Elite Team, which essentially means that the Cat. 1 riders get to accumulate NRC Team points. The criterium is supposed to be streamed on Saturday so perhaps I'll be able to watch some of it.

Yesterday I ordered a set of six new stopwatches for the LAMBRA officials. The stopwatches you usually see at the local sporting goods stores don't always work so well for things like stage races or time trials because they typically stop showing tenths of seconds after something like 40 minutes. Since stage race ties on GC are broken by tenths of seconds in the time trial stages, that's a problem, so you have to be sure to get watches that will maintain a 1/100 second display for at least a few hours, preferably 24. The ability to go back and review splits is also useful for those time trials where two or three riders come across the line so close together that you only have time to hit the split button repeatedly without being able to write down each time. Anyway, we've had a few of the Robic watches in use for a few years, so these should hold us for a while. I remember back in the 70s having to go to a local clock and watch shop any paying over $100 for a mechanical stopwatch that would register hours. Wish I knew what happened to that watch!

Spring Mileage

The Giro Ride rolls out along Marconi on Saturday.

It's the end of March, which means it's time to put away the long tights and winter jackets and winter gloves and all that other stuff. Unfortunately, it's also that time when I always seem to have entire days off the bike. If it's not officiating, or travelling, or holidays, it's rain or work. Seems I've had a little of all of that in the past month. I have to go all the way back to mid-February to find the last time I had a full, solid week of riding. Granted, the riding I have been doing the last few weeks has been getting progressively harder, partially because I'm intentionally doing more work on the group rides, but also because the group rides have been getting a little faster and more competitive. That's normal, of course, and I guess if I was using a power meter I might not have this nagging feeling I'm missing out on some important training. Compared to prior years, thanks to the neat Stravistix plug-in, it looks like I'm pretty close to where I've been the last two years at 2,581 miles, but a couple hundred shy of where I was at this time back in 2013 and probably even farther behind where I was a couple of years before that.

Last week was going pretty well training-wise until Easter hit. I got in a good Giro Ride on Saturday and was hoping to sneak in some miles on Sunday morning but of course it was raining during my only open window and the rest of the day was already booked.

After Saturday's ride we had some family over for crawfish and stuff, so I had to run out and get a new pop-up shelter since my old one hadn't quite made it through last year's racing and officiating season. On the plus side, Saturday's weather was great, which meant we could sit outside and eat tons of crawfish, drink a lot of sangria and beer, and eat way more cookies, cupcakes and pie than advised by the healthcare community. After some impressive thunderstorms on Sunday, Monday turned out to be so nice that I not only got in a ride in the morning, but I went back out after work for a few more miles. This morning the temperature was around 70F with a pretty significant southeast wind blowing. I overslept and had to rush out the door about fifteen mintues late, racing down Carrollton and Marconi to try and catch the group on Lakeshore Drive.  When I turned off of Marconi onto Lakeshore I could see the flickering lights of the group about 40 seconds up the road, but I was riding into a strong headwind and once they put the hammer down after the Bayou St. John bridge any hope of catching them quickly evaporated. They were probably close to two minutes ahead of me by the time I made a u-turn and inserted myself into the paceline somewhere out past Harrison. By then they had picked up a nice tailwind and it stayed fast all they way down Lakeshore Drive and along the bike path all the way out to the casino boat in Kenner. The average speed from Causeway all the way out to the casio was a bit over 28 mph despite a fairly sedate average heart rate of 144. So it seemed like a hard stretch but really wasn't as hard as it seemed.

I was really sad to hear about a fatality at the University of Washington collegiate race last Saturday. I went and looked at some of the course with Google Maps and then tracked down the Strava data from some of the riders to try and figure out what happened. The reports said that the rider had lost control and hit a guardrail in the Category D race. It looks like the speeds on that curving downhill section of the road course were in the 48-51 mph range, which could be a little scary for some new riders. I don't know any details about what precipitated the crash, but hitting anything at that speed would be terrible. I'll be helping with officiating at the Midwestern State collegiate race in a couple of weeks, but that course should be pretty flat. Even so, it's scary to consider what could happen at pretty much any race. Nobody ever said bicycle racing was the safest activity, of course. Even worse, this came in the same week as two fatalities (a crash where a race moto ran over a rider, and a heart attack at Criterium International) in the Pro ranks, and not long since the near-fatality involving ex-pro Phil Zajicek who literally had his arm ripped off in a downhill collision with a truck and is still fighting for his life.

So another masters racer got suspended, and this one's a real classic. The guy was on a public forum saying he was a 40 year old Cat. 1 masters rider and asking for advice about a doping regemin he'd gotten from an "Age Doctor" who had prescribed the following for him:  ".5ml depo-test 200mg/ml 1x per week, .1ml HCG - human chorionic gonadotropin - /arginine 6x per week, .2ml sermorelin 6x per week, .5mg arimidex 2x per week, 25mg DHEA daily, 25mg pregnenolone daily, 5g d-ribose before training daily, 500mg microhydrin 1x daily before training daily."  Holy crap. His stated goal was Masters Nationals. Well, fortunately somebody must have contacted USADA because they showed up at his door for an out of competition (OCC) test where he tested positive for a number of things indicating anabolic steroid use. At 40 or 41 years old, there's really no excuse for this kind of stuff. I can almost see it for somebody in his mid-60s and up, but even then, if you're being advised to do this kind of hormone supplementation it's time to stop racing against people who aren't. This is going to be a continuing problem for masters racing in all endurance sports, I think. I don't know what the answer is, though. If it turns out to be the standard of practice to put older men on these kinds of programs in order to improve their general health and longevity, there's going to be a big conflict between the perfectly valid goal of staying healthy and the equally desirable goal of being able to compete.