Hot Times on the Tarmac

After a nice Saturday Giro that pretty much squeezed me dry of fluids, I spent much of the day in front of the television trying to rehydrate.  I was planning on driving up to Alexandria for the district Criterium Championships, and since I had to be there early in order to deliver the LAMBRA generator and race clock, along with the USAC championship medals, that meant a departure time on Sunday no later than 4:00 am.  So I spent some time down in the basement sorting out medals and pulling out everything I needed to bring with me:  sound system, generator, pop-up tent, NOBC flag, race clock (fully charged), my own race bag with jersey, shorts, etc., a clean bike with race wheels and spares all pumped up, and a little ice chest for some cold cokes that I knew I'd need.

Somehow I actually hit the road Sunday morning more or less on time, although I was certainly missing my morning cup of coffee.  Traffic was light, of course, so it was an easy drive, and I arrived at the LSU-Alexandria campus right on time and got started setting up the officials' tent and unloading stuff from the car.  I had raced on this course so long ago I could hardly remember the details.  I guess it was around 1985 or so the last time we used it, and I at least remembered that some of the turns were fairly tight, the road was bumpy in places, and there was a long straight drag to the finish line.  When I arrived, I could see that little had changed, but I never got a chance to go around the course since I was busy helping with setting up and judging for the first couple of races.  When the second one finished, I had barely enough time to run back to the car, pull on my shorts and jersey, and ride to the start line.  I didn't even have enough time to pin on my number.  In fact, I didn't even have time to pick it up in the first place.  I told Ricky, the Chief Referee, I would be the one without a number.  Since I'd electronically signed the USAC release form, at least I knew they were covered.

The Masters race, like most of the races that day, was rather sparsely attended.  It was a combination of things, I guess.  Although the location was somewhat closer than last year's race in Lake Charles, it was still a 3-hour drive from New Orleans. The race promoter had had some disagreements with a couple of local clubs over the past year or so, and perhaps there were some riders who didn't attend for reasons related to that.  And then there was the fact that it was now mid-summer and there was no avoiding the fact that it would be hot.  I think the biggest disappointment, albeit a totally predictable one, was that the decision to have a separate Cat. 1-2 race resulted in a virtual boycott by those riders since they knew that the best they could expect was a field of maybe ten.  The Herring team instead headed up to Alabama for the Southeastern Regional Series road race and criterium that had a Cat. 1-2 field of close to 90 riders.  As it turned out, our little Cat. 1-2 championship criterium had an embarrassing turnout of four, including me.

So the Masters race, despite its small field of only twelve, turned out to be a fairly interesting race.  Unfortunately, like a number of races this year, it was dominated by the Acadiana team that had four competent riders.  The result was fairly predictable, of course.  You can watch the entire thing on youtube.  Basically, an Acadiana rider attacked early and stayed out there for a few laps before being gradually reeled in by the one or two riders able and willing to be on the front.  Once he was caught the next Acadiana rider attacked.  I think John Dias sat on the front pulling the entire field along for at least five or six laps.  I was actually hoping we would not catch this rider very quickly since that would do nothing but guarantee another attack.  John was thinking the same thing, so that rider kind of lingered up there at about ten seconds for what seemed like forever.  I went up to give John a break a couple of times and was surprised at how bad I felt. It seemed like I just had no power at all.  Maybe it was the drive or the lack of sleep or the fact that I hadn't gotten a warmup or food.  Anyway, I ended up basically sucking wheels for most of the race.  Eventually that rider was caught, after which there was another hard attack to which Donald Davis, who had been uncharacteristically passive up to that point, responded.  That attack very nearly split the pack and I felt pretty lucky to be able to make contact half a lap later.  Then, with three laps to go another Acadiana rider launched and there just wasn't much of a response.  He ended up staying off the front for the win.  I wasn't feeling very aggressive and came around the last turn way too far back in the paceline, and then I ended up backing off in the last 50 meters when things got a little too close for comfort.  Later, I decided to make a donation to the promoter and enter the Cat. 1/2 race since there were only three other riders signed up, one of whom was John Dias who had also ridden the Masters race.  The others were Tracy Martin, his teammate, and Grady Hodge, a recent transplant to Shreveport from Austin.  Grady was already bummed out because of the turnout.  We started out with a few relatively sedate laps before John attacked hard.  I jumped for his wheel as we flew through a couple of the turns and when he looked back and saw me there I thought maybe he was ease up to try again later.  Instead he just put the hammer down a little harder and within a few seconds I was coming off of his wheel.  Not long after that Tracy attacked and bridged up to him.  I was hoping that Grady and I could work together and chase since they weren't going so fast that it catching was out of the question, so I was surprised when Grady attacked me about a lap later.  I stayed with him pretty easily, we worked together for another lap or so and then he just sat up in disgust, I think.  So I ended up riding the rest of the race at a nice steady pace and at least getting in a little workout. There was a pretty spectacular single-rider crash right at the finish line in the Cat. 4 race that I happened to get on my iPad since I was using it as a backup finish line camera.  I uploaded the clip to the NOBC Facebook page.

So I think that the experiment with having a separate Cat. 1-2 criterium no matter what was a dismal failure.  I think if the Cat. 1/2 riders had known that it would be a combined Cat. 1/2/3 race, more would have showed up.  I know that the Herring guys were not interested in making a three-hour drive to do a criterium with only a handful of riders, especially when there was full weekend of racing with big competitive fields that was five hours away.  There are 31 Cat. 1/2 riders in Louisiana and Mississippi combined, and of those I would say that only about 20 are actively racing right now, and of those 20, nine are on the Herring team and five or six race mainly masters races, so do the math.  There were only 11 in the Cat. 3 race.  The other experiment was having both an open Women's race and a separate Cat. 4 Women's race.  The open women's race had seven riders with the Cat. 4s in that race finishing 5th, 6th and 7th.  Later in the Cat. 4 women's race, those same three Cat. 4s finished in the same order in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, so the net result was basically the same except that three more women rode in the Cat. 4 women's race.  I suspect that all three of them would have ridden the open women's race if there hadn't been the separate Cat. 4 race, which would have made for a field of ten and basically the same results.  On the plus side, the Cat. 4 women got to win some money, although that could also have been done if it had been a single combined race.

Tuesday's levee ride seemed really fast on the way out, but much easier on the way back, and then today's ride was a nice steady Wednesday paceline at 22-23 mph.  Thinking I'll head out to the lakefront soon if it's not raining.

Smooth and Steady

For a few miles it actually felt cool this morning, and by "cool" I mean "not oppressively hot and humid."  It didn't last, of course.  There was the usual small group for the Friday ride today -- four in all -- and once we got up to 22-23 mph the pace just stayed there as riders took long pulls with a light wind at their backs.  The ride back was much the same, but toward the end the wind, which by then was more or less a headwind, really started to pick up.

This afternoon I went in for an eye exam, largely to talk about options for riding.  After explaining my desire to read my computer while at the same time be able to tell the difference between a pothole and a shadow, I was a little surprised that the recommendation was for multifocal contact lenses.  I guess it's worth a try.  I'm going in for a fitting in about a week. Personally, I'm giving it a 50/50 chance of success, but the other options aren't all that great either.  On the plus side, my vision hasn't gotten a whole lot worse over the last two years so I'll hold off on getting new glasses for a while.

The La./Ms. criterium championship is this Sunday and for some reason the pre-registration numbers are looking really weak even though the location is more centrally located than it's been in a few years.  I really don't understand why so many people are content to ride the weekend group rides rather than going to actual bike races.  It's almost like using the word "race" automatically discourages a bunch of people.  If it's a charity ride or gran fondo type of ride they all turn out and basically race anyway, albeit under considerably more hazardous conditions.  Anyway, I'll probably be driving up to Alexandria around 4 am or something since I have to bring some of the necessary equipment, in particular the race clock and generator, both of which seem to have somehow recovered from their near-death experiences in the rain at the Tour de Louisiane.

Unwanted Intervals

We had a great training race out on the lakefront Wednesday evening.  Sometimes the pace is just too brutal, and sometimes there aren't enough people there to make it fun, but yesterday's training race turned out to have just the right combination, at least for me.  For reasons I cannot even begin to explain, I was feeling pretty good after rushing down S. Claiborne Avenue during rush-hour traffic, risking my live through the Palmetto Gauntlet, and finally locking up the rear wheel when some ahole tried to take me out with an unannounced right turn.  After that I decided that I was probably going to be late for the start anyway, so I may as well back off a notch, enjoy the ride, and get to the lakefront alive.  So I met up with the group as they were on the second half of the first lap, around Franklin Avenue, where I made a very quick U-turn and sprinted to catch them.  For the next few laps there were a number of attacks, a couple of which were mine, that kept things interesting. 

It is probably no coincidence that I sometimes oversleep the morning after those two-ride days like yesterday.  This morning when I awoke, after falling back asleep when the alarm went off, it was already 6 am, which is when I am usually leaving the house.  Somehow I made it out to the levee in time to meet the group.  Once things got rolling the group settled into a consensus pace of around 24 mph.  Unfortunately, Howard was in the paceline on his time trial bike.  Every time he would come to the front he would up the pace to 28 or so, so every now and then we would have an unwanted interval, usually followed by a slow-down below the speed we had been going in the first place until things settled back down to the 24 mph pace. I did manage to try out my new Nikon Coolpix AW110 camera, although I do need to change some of the defaults and figure out what will work best for those photos taken while riding.  I don't really know yet if using the combined motion detection/ vibration detection is a good idea or if it will mess with image resolution enough to irritate me.  Anyway it's a fun new toy, compliments of The Daughter, and since it's waterproof and shock resistant I can dispense with the ziplock bags.

Mid-week Summer

It was anything but cool this morning as I rode out to meet the Wednesday ride group up on the levee.  I'd had to turn back early on Tuesday in order to comfortably make a morning meeting over at Gibson Hall, although by the time I dropped off of the group we'd already been dropped like a rock when a gap suddenly opened up a few bikes ahead of me.  It was just as well, I thought, as I peeled off my soaking wet jersey and stinky gloves.  Cycling gloves certainly do develop their own unique smell in the summer, don't they?  The morning meeting that disrupted my training ride was kind of a mixture of frustration and depression.  There were a couple of Google Fusion maps I wanted to show and discuss, but for some reason the data wasn't loading for one of them.  Together with the increasingly depressing federal and state funding situation and various other problematic issues, I can't say I left the meeting in much of a good mood.

We are in one of those "summer pattern" cycles right now, and around here that means it's around 80F in the morning, rising into the low-mid 90s during the day, with a 30% chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Status quo for summer. Down in the basement at home I keep a fan running most of the time in order to keep things from getting moldy.  There are other sure signs of summer.  Last night I went downstairs to lube the chain on the bike and noticed a big cockroach strolling along a nylon bag I had on the floor.  I grabbed the bag and gave it a shake but didn't see the roach fall to the floor.  A moment later I felt him walking across the back of my neck. After a little impromptu break-dancing I got him off of me and onto the floor where he met his demise.  I spent a little time after that spraying bug spray in the basement.

Tour de La

It was warm and humid this morning, but there was actually a pretty good-sized group up on the levee for the Wednesday training ride. The Wednesday ride is really quite relaxing.  The speed generally stays in the 22-24 mph range, but everyone takes really long pulls.  Often I get in only one pull on the way out, which is around 11 miles, I think.  The whole time I was irritated with my sunglasses which had fogged up the minute I had slowed down at the start and never really cleared up.  Speaking of glasses, I finally broke down and made an appointment for the end of the week for an eye exam and especially to talk about my options for prescription riding glasses.  When Kenny wrote on Facebook the other day that he'd pinch-flatted both tires on a pothole that he thought was just a patch of sand, it reminded me that I'm liable to do the same, or worse. So I guess we'll see, literally and figuratively, how that goes.  I'm thinking bifocal sport glasses of some type that will sit high enough on my face that the top frame won't be in my line of sight. My Oakley M-frames are the only glasses I've ever had that really worked for that, and I don't know what the possibilities are for prescription glasses like those. The "district" championship criterium, aka LAMBRA criterium championship, is next Sunday up in Alexandria on a course at the university there that I last rode some time in the 80s.  I have been feeling pretty sluggish on the bike lately, so I'm planning on heading out to the lakefront this evening to see if we can do a little training race. I could use the intensity.  I have been fooling around with Google Fusion lately in order to create some maps for work, and took a few minutes this morning to make a quick interactive map that shows where the Tour de La pre-registered riders came from.

After the Tour

I'd rather be riding.

The 42nd annual Tour de Louisiane went pretty well.  Turnout was a little low, as I had expected, maybe 35 entries short of what I'd call a very good field.  The races, however, were all very competitive and generally had big enough fields to make for good racing.  A couple of days before the race, the weather forecast was looking great with nothing higher than a 30% chance of rain.  That all changed the day before the race when the Sunday forecast went up to about 80% depending on whose forecast you checked.  I was confident that the road races on Saturday morning, and probably the evening time trial, would be dry, but I was worried about the criterium.

The Road Races were pretty good.  That course can be pretty deceptive and usually is just enough to make a selection in many of the categories.  At then end of the first lap we were surprised to find that the Cat. 5 race turned in the fastest lap by about a minute.  Of course, that shelled a number of riders from that group.  After the races Ricky and I sat there under the tent and got all of the results and times entered, then we stopped at a McDonald's on the way back to Covington where I uploaded the preliminary results to the website.  We hung around there for a while, but when I saw the sky starting to darken I told Mark we'd better get over to the TT course early so we could get the tent set up.  When we arrived there we pulled it out of the trailer right away and got it set up just before a big thunderstorm came through.  There was enough lightning and thunder that if it had happened an hour later the time trial would definitely have been in jeopardy.  Fortunately it passed over and cleared up nicely by the time the first riders took off at 5:30.  We started plugging in the results on-site, but decided to finish up at Jason's house when the insect repellent started to wear off and we were attacked by deer flies.

So Sunday morning started out looking pretty bad.  I had just gotten up around 6 am when the phone rang.  It was the Covington police captain calling to see if we were going to cancel. Once again, we arrived just in time to get the tent set up before the sky opened up above us.  It was still about 45 minutes before the first race.  Unfortunately the big race clock got wet enough that it later freaked out, so we didn't have it for the races.  Even worse, the generator suddenly stopped and we couldn't get it started again. Clearly water had gotten into it somehow. The rain had eased up a bit and it was looking like we'd be able to have the races, but without power we would not have the finish line camera which was definitely going to present a bit of a problem.  Luckily there was an electrical outlet in front of a nearby building so we pulled out the 100' extension cord and were back in action.  The first couple of races were held in a light drizzle on very wet streets, resulting in a couple of crashes.  Things were just beginning to dry up a bit when the Masters race got underway, and by the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race started it was mostly dry.  I had been worried about the possibility of cars getting onto the course, since we were in the middle of downtown Covington and there would certainly be some cars that were trapped inside the course.  Sure enough, at one point the Cat. 1/2/3s came flying around the fastest corner on the course at around 30 mph to meet face-to-face with the front grill of a pickup truck.  Luckily they are all very experienced riders and although a couple of riders flatted when they had to hop the curb, they all handled it well.  They neutralized themselves and we stopped the race until the course was cleared.  Since it was still pretty early in their 60-minute criterium, it didn't cause a big problem. We got the final results done quickly, stopped for lunch at Buster's on the course, and headed home to unload the trailer and get the results up on the website.

So all-in-all it was a successful race unless you measure success in dollars because we lost over $4,000 on the event since we were lacking our usual stage sponsors this year.  On the plus side, the Covington folks were very happy and we are already on their calendar for last year with plans to do some expanded pre-race publicity and better course contol planning.  After the race a number of videos showed up on Facebook from riders in a few of the races.  I posted most of them to the LAMBRA Facebook page. 

On Monday the streets were wet so I decided to spend my usual riding time doing online post-event paperwork.  At this point I have the results up on the website, they have been uploaded to the USAC database, all of the post-event reports have been submitted, all of the wet race equipment has been dried out and stored (the clock seems to have survived after I disassembled it and left it in front of a fan overnight).  No word yet on the generator.  I still have to update the LAMBRA LCCS rankings.

So after four days of the bike I jumped back into the Tuesday levee ride, following that up with a Wednesday morning ride and the Wednesday evening training race at the lakefront.  By this morning I was feeling pretty dragged out.  The air was thick and humid, and I really had to force myself onto the bike where I struggled through the long Thursday ride. Unfortunately, it looks like my trusty Nikon Coolpix camera has died, so photos will probably be in short supply for a while.

Three Days to Go

After skipping my Monday ride to allow for a little recovery time, I was hoping to feel fresh on Tuesday morning. So I was disappointed to find that everything felt achy on the long Tuesday levee ride. I felt pretty lousy all day, so I guess perhaps it wasn't just the riding to blame. Whatever the reason, I blew off late night bike race work and hit the sack a little early.  The Tour de La is only three days away.  The race bibles are being printed and should be ready today.  We've touched base with all of the appropriate authorities for the three venues, volunteers are more or less lined up (there are never enough), we have a few motorefs coming for the larger groups, the results spreadsheets are done, etc., so there aren't too many last-minute emergency things to which to attend (yet).  I'm planning on buying a new printer tonight.  It's getting hard to find a simple printer, but I think Wal-Mart has the standard $35 HP printers. The ink cartridges cost about as much as the printer. Printers always seem to be a problem out in the field for some reason, and my old one just flat out died after the 2-Person Time Trial. 

I still need to go through all of the NOBC race stuff to sort it all out, organize the bib numbers, figure out how many and which types of batteries I need, charge the radios, and of course pick up some Turkey Bags in case of rain.  They are clear and large enough to handle a clipboard and your hand so you can write on dry paper in the rain.  The forecast is looking pretty good for Saturday and Sunday, but this time of year you can get a little thunderstorm at practically any time.

So this morning I felt a little better for the regular Wednesday ride.  One thing for sure:  It's starting to feel like summer around here, which means I get home from the morning ride pretty much soaked in sweat, even after relatively easy rides like today's. I stopped off at Zotz for a coffee after today's ride, sitting outside watching the Mississippi Kites soaring above and thinking about how they are one of the sure signs that it's summer.

Wind and Rain

A bunch of club members headed over to the Tour de Louisiane road course on Saturday to ride a few laps, sweep some corners, and have lunch in Covington.  As usual, I rode the first lap with a can of bright green road marking paint in my bottle cage stopping at each intersection to freshen up the arrows.  We regrouped at the end of that lap and then did one lap at a faster pace, regrouping again at the church.  For some reason the group got all split up after that.  I started out with a few of the guys, rolling easy and waiting or the rest to catch up, but as I looked back I could see nothing but empty asphalt, so after a couple of miles I dropped off and turned around, wondering where everyone was.  Finally a couple more riders appeared, but the road behind them was still empty, so we went ahead, not know if the others might have decided to turn back.  The front group was probably four or five minutes up the road, so we took a shortcut and as we emerged back onto the course met right up with them.  Perfect timing or random luck.  By then it was getting pretty hot and to me it felt like the first truly hot summer weekend day of the year.

So I went innocently out to meet the Giro Ride this morning, having neglected to check the radar since the forecast had been unremarkable and the sky looked find.  Arriving at Starbucks, though, Jeff said he thought we'd get wet.  Apparently the radar looked worse than ominous.  Well, when we hit Lakeshore Drive, we could see nothing but black clouds over the lake and people were already talking about where we might turn around.  From there it got worse really quickly.  I was thinking maybe we'd make it to the end of Hayne Blvd., but as we came over the Casino bridge we felt this shockingly cold downdraft and suddenly we were being buffeted by 30 mph crosswinds.  There were no dissenters when we turned around half a mile later to head back over the bridge.  By then the gusty winds were getting pretty scary, especially as we went over the bridges, but at least it was about 80% tailwind by then.  I took the shortest route back from Lakeshore Drive, stopping for a moment to chat at the off-road duathlon in progress at City Park, and arrived back home just as the big raindrops were starting to fall.

Calm Friday

Weird and unpredictable weather around here lately.  On Wednesday I had been planning on going out to the lakefront for the training race, but it was pouring rain at my office at 4:30 so I pretty much wrote it off. I left work around 5:30 on wet streets under dripping oak trees, but a couple of miles up the road at the house the street was almost dry.  I don't think it ever actually rained at the lakefront.  So I set my sights on the Thursday evening race at the NOLA motorsports track.  At 5 am that morning it was pouring rain.  An hour later the rain had stopped but the streets were wet, so I dusted off the old Rain Bike, thinking I'd probably be the only person on the levee. Not so. There was a group of seven or eight up there despite the damp asphalt. It would have been a nice ride except for Howard who was on a TT bike and insisted on pushing the pace to an unsustainable level, which of course split the pack.  I dropped off the back pretty early since both me and my 1972 Pennine with steel fenders and $9.95 tires were not quite up to the task of drafting behind Howard's random surges, even though there was a pretty significant tailwind. I think most of the group turned back early anyway.  I rode out to the Big Dip, aka LaRose, meeting up with Judd who came up from behind on his TT bike.  We both turned around at the Dip.  After taking a few pulls into the headwind, I dropped back onto Judd's wheel and he spend the next ten miles practicing his time trialing while I practiced my drafting.  It felt like a hard ride anyway.

So Thursday evening I rushed back home, changed, jumped in the car, and drove across the river to the motorsports park expecting a big crowd. Unfortunately there were all of fourteen or fifteen people total. Perhaps the still-strong wind had something to do with it.  The track over there of course has no wind protection at all, so it's basically like riding in central Texas.  We did a couple of warmup laps that were way faster than warmup speed and I remember thinking to myself, "this isn't much fun!"  Then we split into two groups for a little handicap race where Kenny, Stephen, Ryan and I gave the rest of the group a couple of minutes' head start.  I had already told them I'd be sitting on most of the time, which is exactly what I did.  It felt a lot easier this time, probably because those riders were riding consistent lines around the sweeping curves rather than the random ones that I'd experienced earlier.  Ryan somehow got out of the draft too long and came off the back, so I took a few pulls to give Kenny and Stephen some recovery, and we caught the group with a lap to go (laps are something around 2 miles, I think).  So anyway, I got in a good afternoon workout.

This morning I was happy to do a fairly easy ride on the levee, after which I stopped for a cup of organic fair-trade rocket fuel at Zotz and contemplated all of the stuff I still need to get done before the race next week.

The Tour de Louisiane is just a week away now and the club is busy tying up loose ends.  I was rather late getting the race bible finished this year, but finally posted it yesterday.  I still have to get copies printed, of course. Entries are trickling in slowly as usual.  Tomorrow we will be riding the road race course, marking intersections and sweeping corners.

Feliciana Race Report and other Entanglements

After a couple of very busy weeks involving things like extension ladders, wedding cakes, and flight delays, I found myself driving up to the Feliciana Road Race early Sunday morning with Christian.  Considering that I had missed a lot of the more intense training that I clearly need this time of year, I figured my best shot for this race would be to ride very conservatively and hope for a pack sprint for the mostly uphill finish.  It didn't exactly work out that way.  Actually it didn't even remotely work out that way.

The Masters race had only 20 riders for the 66 mile road race through the rolling Feliciana hills near St. Francisville, although there were certainly a number of very strong ones in that number. With Mark racing Cat. 3 instead of Masters, where he would finish 4th, my only teammate was Fred.  Donald Davis was without teammates, but as usual that didn't matter one bit.  Acadiana had three, 4D Fitness had two, Midsouth had three, and Peake had two.  From the start I was expecting a number of attacks by Acadiana riders, and was not disappointed in that regard.  Considering the makeup of the field, I was trying to be very attentive near the front and had few options other than to chase anything that moved, hoping to perhaps get into a break. We were maybe five to seven miles into the race when a counter attack launched after I'd chased an earlier break.  Immediately two Acadiana riders and one 4th Dimension rider blockaded the front on the narrow road and I instinctively yelled "No!"  Behind me someone made a number of louder and more concise comments.  With those three soft-pedaling at the front, a 4-rider break that included Donald Davis, Jerry Simon (Midsouth), Kevin Landry (Acadiana) and Bennie Flores (4th Dimension) quickly formed up into team time trial mode. It was a while before I was able to squeeze past on the centerline, by which time our speed had dropped to around 20 mph despite the net downhill. The break was already a good fifteen or twenty seconds off the front and I ramped it up to 28 or so as quickly as I could. With practically every team represented I knew the window was about to slam shut.  As I started to fade, VJ came blasting past at 35 mph and I had to dig pretty deep just to catch his draft as he pushed the downhill up to 39 mph.  I looked up and could see that we'd made up a lot of ground on the break and for a moment at least entertained some hope that we might catch.  If a few more riders could come through, we might be able to close it.  Just then we had to make a left turn onto Highway 10, the pace dropped, and nobody came through.  There were really only three or four riders willing to do any work at all, along with three or four others who were doing their best to interfere with the chase, so the break quickly went up the road.  At that point I decided to make it a hard training ride and spent the next lap and a half (we were doing three laps) taking pulls, launching little attacks up the hills, and generally trying to keep the pace above the embarrassment level. I was getting some help from Chuck of S3 and the Midsouth riders, but for most of the rest of the race the same six riders were at the front either blocking or pushing the pace.  I think our average speed for the first lap was respectable at a bit over 24 mph.  The second lap was more like 23. The last lap was probably more like 21.

A couple of kilometers from the finish line were two significant hills, and as we approached the end of the second lap I was hoping for a big attack there that might split the group. The break by then was long gone. Jason attacked pretty hard on the second hill and as we came over the top the pack had split so we kept the pressure on.  For a few miles we actually had a little paceline going, but it wasn't fast enough to keep most of the group from coming back together.  At that point I pretty much threw in the towel.  This whole time I'd been thinking there were 5 or 6 in the break, so I wasn't really racing for anything.  For the last five or six miles Jorge, who along with Charles Kibbe had been very attentively monitoring the front for his teammate in the break, sat on the front and just towed everyone toward the finish at a modest 22 mph average pace.  I have to admit I'd completely lost all motivation by then and just sat in the paceline at about third wheel. 

THE CAT. 3/4 FINISH WAS PRETTY CLOSE.

The finish stretch of this race really starts about two miles from the finish with a pretty good climb, followed by a downhill, and then a final climb that starts about a kilometer before the finish and levels off with 300 meters left to go.  Someone attacked right at the bottom of the last climb and I went with that group pretty easily, but then the suddenly blew up and I got trapped with Chuck and some others as another group streamed past on the left.  By the time I got around it was pretty much over but Chuck was going pretty good so despite my general lack of motivation I latched onto his wheel until it leveled out and then took a shot at the 4th Dimension rider who was starting to blow up ahead of me.  I'd have passed him if I'd had another twenty feet of road, but I didn't and ended up 8th, which wasn't too surprising to me considering how much work I'd done earlier and my general mental attitude.  I was still feeling pretty frustrated about not having been in the breakaway as I drove home an hour later after post-race jambalaya, a lite beer and a coke. 

In the Cat. 1/2/3 race Ben Bradley and Ryan Barnes had gotten into an early break with Corey Ray and Adam Morris and ended up doing an 80-mile team time trial at an average speed of over 25 mph.  Ryan was kicking himself for letting a gap open because he thought Corey was pretending to be tired.  As it turned out, he was cramping, and when Ryan tried to force him to close the gap, Ben saw the opportunity and put the hammer down.  Ben and Adam sprinted it out for first and second, while Ryan had to TT the last couple of miles.

So on Memorial Day we had a nice city ride out to Chalmette battlefield and then to the WWII museum where one of the surviving veterans told the group stories about his experiences in Germany.  We finished up at the Morning Call in City Park with beignets and coffee.  My legs were still hurting from Sunday and after spending a couple of hours on an extension ladder painting one of the three window frames on the front of the house I decided to call it a day, and a week.

This morning I was feeling kind of achy all over and went out to meet the morning ride wondering if it was really such a good idea.  It turned out to be a pretty hard ride, and although my legs were not all there I felt OK.  I did, however, pass on the 30 mph sprint to the Huey P. Long bridge.

Doldrums

After what seemed like a solid month of unrelenting wind and otherwise irritating weather, the last couple of morning rides have been remarkably cool, dry and calm, at least with respect to the weather.  It would seem we are temporarily in the doldrums, not that I'm complaining. 

The Tuesday morning levee ride attracted a big group and once we stopped to wait for Woody to fix a flat that he got right at the start, it wasn't long before the pace worked its way up to 25, then 26, then 27 mph.  For the rest of the outgoing 18 miles the group's speed rarely dropped below 25 mph (averaged around 26).  Thanks to the lack of crosswind, it wasn't too intense as long as you didn't lose the draft, but even so it felt more like a race than a training ride.  After the turnaround I rode alone for a few miles, since I really don't much like to stop in the middle of such a short ride.  Soon enough I heard the group coming up behind me and accelerated to ease into the paceline.  A moment or two later Scott flatted after nailing the big hole at one of the grain elevator crossings, so we all stopped once again.  I thought maybe that would take the wind out of everyone's sails and we'd end up riding back downriver in conversational mode, but I think the weather was just too nice for that.  We were soon back into the 27-28 mph range and when someone took a flyer off the front to sprint for the bridge, it was no surprise that Woody immediately launched after him. Those of us who continue on to Oak Street and various points uptown got caught by a train at Oak and River Road. With that delay and the delays caused by the two flat tires I got home a good fifteen minutes later than usual despite the rapid pace. 

Regardless, it was a good training ride day for sure and I arrived back home feeling a little like I'd been ridden hard and put up wet.  You've just got to love that feeling.

So this morning I was happy to have the traditional Wednesday ride on tap.  Even with a fairly large group, which is to say maybe ten riders, the pace stayed extremely smooth.  Part of that was due to the lack of wind, but part is due to the evolving Wednesday levee ride tradition that calls for long steady pulls at 20-22 mph.  Each person in turn pulled for at least a mile.  In a way it felt like a recovery ride, but in another it felt like base training.  Whatever you call it, it was nice to be able to ride with my mouth closed! 

Better Late than Never

Last weekend was the annual Racing Rapides stage race up in Alexandria, Louisiana.  I have always liked this race.  For one thing, it's relatively close, which around here means just a 3-hour drive.  For another, the road race course is always interesting without being too brutal and the criterium course through the old downtown area is excellent.  This year the race coincided with the last weekend of Jazzfest, and I ended up driving up alone after work on Friday.  Fortunately a couple of other teammates were also going and we would at least be sharing a hotel room.

CAT. 123 FIELD, TURN 1

One thing that has set this race apart for the last couple of years is the road race.  It is held over a single lap (for most classes) of a 64 mile loop with enough hills to keep things interesting.  I was riding as a 55+ in the combined 40+/55+ race which should have had a much bigger turnout than the 16-rider field that lined up that morning.  Although it was the first week of May, a cold front had dropped the morning temperature down to 41F, but since it was supposed to warm up into the 70s, we were mostly freezing our asses off for the start.  Looking around at the start line I could see 5 riders from the Acadiana club so it was pretty clear what was going to happen.  Sure enough, they started the solo attacks right away. I had pretty much gotten my fill of that the weekend before in Mississippi and decided early on to stay near the front and keep the gaps under control. Back in the pack was my teammate Mark McMurry who I knew would do well if it came down to a pack sprint, assuming he didn't break a chain on the uphill finish like last year.

So I did a fair amount of work for the first half of the race but eventually needed to drop back and seek a little shelter.  Naturally another break went off the front at that point.  That gap got really big and I was thinking we might end up racing for third place when Donald Davis went to the front, put his big forearms down on the bars, and calmly towed me and the rest of the field for -- I kid you not -- ten miles, methodically reeling in the break with only occasional help by riders like Scott Gurganus who would come share the work for a minute or two.  After the catch was made another group of two went away but didn't get too far.  As the pack got close to them I rode across the gap, and for some reason the pack must have eased up.  So now I'm in an unintentional late 3-rider break with only about four miles to the finish.  What to do?  We were working together nicely but our speed in the mid to upper 20s was obviously very unlikely to keep us clear to the finish. With two or three miles to go we lost one rider on a hill, but by then the die had been cast.  Had the pack waited too long?  The last mile and a half before the finish was a long straight downhill followed by a steep 300m climb to the finish line.  We passed the 1 km to go sign and flew down the hill but the pack that had been lurking 20 seconds behind was already in hot pursuit. Just as we hit the finish climb I heard the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of wheels coming past on the left.  It was Mark going for a (very) early sprint.  I stood up and went as hard as I could expecting a long string of riders behind him, but instead there was a clear gap.  I sprinted up the hill as Mark started to fade and Donald came flying past with a couple of riders on his wheel.  A few more riders appeared alongside me as we gutted out the final 100 meters somewhere adrift of 5th place.  I think I was around 7th overall and 2nd among the 55+ riders.  Although that late breakaway came up about 300 meters short, it had been a fun and interesting race. What I didn't realize until after the race was over was that there had been a bad 4-rider crash as the pack was flying down the downhill just before the finish.  David Hesser, who had been in our 3-man break earlier and was then caught by the pack went down hard, as did Tim Dorion. Chuck remembered having his front tire glance off of Tim's head. Tim got the worst of it by far, however.  From what I heard he had a significant concussion and his helmet or glasses tore into his forehead, covering him with blood. He also had some serious knee injury, apparently.  He left in an ambulance and I don't think he was out of surgery until after dinner that night.

The afternoon time trial that started at the RR finish line and went backwards on the course for 3 miles was hard, and perhaps I rode it a little too conservatively, but at least I finished without sore legs and dropped down only one place on GC.  That one place put me something like 20+ seconds out of 2nd and 1st, but on the plus side I had a sizable gap on 4th place.  There was only one thing to do for the criterium on Sunday.

Sunday morning was again chilly and I arrived at the criterium course early to set up the big blue NOBC tent that we never actually used since standing in the sun was preferable for most of the day.  As I'd expected, the 50 minute Masters race started out fast with a lot of attacks during the first 20 minutes.  When there was finally a lull I looked around to see that I was the only 55+ rider still in the front group which meant that there was a good chance I could move up to 1st on GC just by not getting dropped.  There was a hot spot at around 25 minutes and having survived that I settled back into the group.  The pace by then had mellowed a little bit so it was pretty easy to move around and take a pull now and then. Mark flatted, and then crashed trying to ride back to the pit on a flat front, but was back in the race on the next lap with only minor injuries. There were I guess six or seven laps to go when the pace eased and I figured I would put my head down and get the speed back up along the 5-block long finish stretch.  I immediately rode away from the rest of the field since they had little motivation to chase the only 55+ rider so close to the finish.  I really had nothing to lose at that point, so I just kept on going.  It was at least safer than sitting at the back of the group, and besides, I needed the exercise.  Along the way I lapped one or both of the other 55+ riders and finished about 30 seconds ahead of the field.  That was fun even though it was a gift.  In the pack sprint Mark came in 2nd to Donald, moving  him up to 3rd on GC (his time trials are improving!!).  So it was a fun weekend for me, although I wish there had been a larger field. The promoters did a great job this year, so perhaps it was just a date that had a lot of conflicts, coming around exam week for college students, jazzfest for the New Orleanians, etc.

This week it was back to the usual routine, although I had to miss the Wednesday training race in order to do some badly needed exterior window painting on the house.  Such is life.

Wheelspray Weekend

It wasn't raining, but the radar looked ominous at 6 am Sunday morning.  I had just finished loading the car up with race equipment for the NOBC 2-Person Time Trial, and as I started the half-hour drive out to LaPlace I wondered just how much of a wash-out the race would be.  As usual, I was planning on switching from race official mode to rider mode and back during the course of the morning, and might even have been somewhat excited to be teamed up with Mark McMurry for the 40 km race since (a) we were likely to be fairly evenly matched, and (b) he is bigger than I and would provide some much-needed recover shelter between pulls.

Over at the starting location we set up the big pop-up shelter, which only "pops up" with the assistance of about four people, and got things set up to open registration at 7:30.  It wasn't raining and for a while the sky looked fairly good.  Even so, I was careful to position all of the electronics in such a way as to keep them dry in the event of rain because I knew darn good and well it was going to rain.  Registration got off to a slow start, as we were running a little low on experienced volunteers this year.  Meanwhile, Mark was trying to round up other volunteers for things like turnaround duty.  With the first rider scheduled to start at 9:00 am, it wasn't until about 8:55 that we actually started the stopwatches, and I think it was about 9:05 or so by the time we started the first team. My start time was only ten minutes after the first team's, so I jumped into the car, squeezed into my skinsuit, and emerged into a light rain.  The rain had started precisely at the start of the race.  Given the relative darkness I decided to wear my regular progressive glasses underneath the face shield built into my Giro TT helmet.  That actually worked fairly well, even though I was mostly looking right over the tops of them when I wasn't looking at the computer.

Our plan for the TT was to hold back for the first couple of miles since I hadn't had any warmup at all, and so we started out very smoothly.  Mark has been riding for along time and is as steady a wheel as you could ever hope for. A little tailwind made it easy to hold 25-26 for the first mile, and by mile 3 we were cruising along steadily at 27-28 mph.  We were about eight miles out when the wind started to shift.  Up ahead and to the west the sky was getting darker and darker, and then around mile 11 it suddenly got very gusty, the temperature dropped, and the rain picked up a bit. At that point my face shield and glasses both suddenly fogged up.  I could barely make out the numbers on my computer and was a little worried about misjudging Mark's rear wheel. Our speed dropped down to 25-26 mph.  As we started around the long curve in the road at about 12 miles I looked up ahead for the turnaround pylon and was surprised to see nothing at all.  I thought maybe I'd misjudged where we were.  Then, as I was riding behind Mark I saw a flash of green on the road to the right.  I looked back and saw the green "40k Turnaround" marker on the road that I had personally re-painted the day before.  It was deserted. I yelled something to Mark but he didn't hear me (he likes to ride TTs wearing earplugs -- very old-school trick).  I pulled up alongside him and tapped him on the shoulder and yelled that we had passed the turnaround.  I was confused.  I knew Mark had sent a volunteer down to the turnaround.  By then we could see Bob, a traffic cone, and the Manchac bridge (which you can't see if you turn around at the correct spot) up ahead.  I was flabbergasted.  We slowed down a bit as I yelled to Bob that the turnaround was half a mile behind us, but it was too late to do anything about it.  He had gotten down there in the pouring rain and missed the big green paint markings on the road (I would have thought they would be visible from space), and had then seen the police car blocking the road and set the turnaround at some random other paint marking near there (the police always block the road beyond the curve so the cars can see it coming from the bridge).  All I could hope was that everyone would ride all the way to the traffic cone.  As it turned out, some teams saw the green turnaround marker on the road, figured that for some reason the turnaround was not manned, and turned there.  Most others went all the way to the traffic cone.  As a result, some teams did a 40km time trial and most others did more like 41.5 km.  The results would be tainted for sure!

After we turned around we got back up to speed just as the rain got really heavy.  The helmet face shield was doing a fantastic job of keeping Mark's wheelspray out of my eyes, nose, ears, etc.  Unfortunately it was also so fogged up that I couldn't see very well at all.  At one point I squeezed my hand under there to clear it a bit.  It was looking like we would be about 1 mph slower for the return trip, but it was also looking like I was starting to hurt.  At around 16 miles the road turns slightly to the west and we picked up a little more headwind component.  That dropped our speed down dramatically for a while (I saw it drop to 24 mph).  Mark was going much better than I by that point, and so our speed would drop when I'd be on the front, then I'd have to dig to get onto Mark's wheel when he would go by about 1 mph faster.  This is the downward spiral of Team Time Trials with which I am quite familiar.  After a couple of rotations like that I started taking shorter pulls and Mark started taking longer ones.  For most of the rest of the ride our speed would fluctuate from 25 to 27 mph.  We finished with a time of 59:04 and a total distance on my computer of 25.8 miles. I guess we would have been just under 57 minutes for 40k.  Anyway, we placed 8th in the 40+ race but at least a couple of the teams ahead of us turned early.  Since there was nobody there, and the official at the (longer) turnaround wasn't recording the teams as they made the u-turn, it was impossible to know who had done which distance.

After finishing I changed into some dry clothes and go to work on the results.  By then it had mostly stopped raining, of course, but as you can see from the "podium" pictures, nobody was waiting around in soaking wet lycra just for the photo opp. It took quite a while to get the results finished.  There had been some strange things.  Adrian had for some reason started a lot of teams at one second past the minute, some of the finish times weren't on the first set of result sheets I got, and one or two teams had been given restarts because of flats that happened as they were lining up.  Anyway, we finally got everything sorted out, and right now there's a lot of wet  banners, tent tops, and miscellaneous other damp equipment draped all over my basement where I have a big fan blowing on them.  This morning I went out for a ride and the fact that my legs felt fine told me I could have gone harder yesterday.  Somehow I think the rain, fogged-up glasses, wheelspray and results duties kind of took their toll on my motivation.  Fortunately Mark pretty much dragged me in to the finish line for the last three miles or I might have just sat up and looked at the scenery.

Uncomfortable Weather

Yesterday a strong line of thunderstorms pushed through right as I was in the middle of a Safety and Risk Summit meeting at Tulane.  I suppose I should have been comforted to know that all of the university's safety officers were "sheltered in place" with me.  The exceptionally strong  winds caused a lot of damage and spawned at least two small tornados, taking down two big trees in my neighborhood and causing some significant, albeit short-lived, street flooding. I had gotten in a nice Wednesday morning training ride, ending with Brian who for the final couple of miles was clearly guilty of violating the Wednesday Protocol by pushing the pace up a few miles per hour.  After the meeting it looked like the rain was ending, so I got on the bike and headed to the office at University Square, standing  up the whole time to keep the seat of my pants dry, only to have it start raining harder a few minutes later and leaving me with wet pants for the next couple of hours.

I have been very busy at work this week and am falling behind a bit on LAMBRA stuff, including our 2-Person Time Trial that our club is putting on this weekend. I was up until midnight working on a budget, so it was hard to drag myself out of bed this morning, especially once I looked outside to see an overcast sky and trees rustling in the wind.  What I didn't realize was that there was a light mist falling over much of the city, which probably explained why there were only a couple of people who showed up this morning. Daniel, Tom, Mark G., and I ended up doing a shorter ride than usual for a Thursday, and by the time we were on the way back there was a steady stream of water droplets falling from the front of my helmet.  Combined with the cooler temperatures and relatively easy pace, it made for a rather uncomfortable ride, and I was more than happy to spend the "extra" half hour I had from the early start and shorter ride at Zotz sipping a cup of hot coffee.

We've got at least three race announcements in the works right now, plus some final negotiations on a joint-BAR race with Texas.  I've been trying to respond to questions as best I can, but time has been short and work is taking priority because of a Friday proposal deadline.  I'm sitting here waiting for a response to my most recent edits and hoping this whole thing doesn't come down to ten minutes before the Friday afternoon submittal deadline.  Can't say I'm particularly optimistic about that, however.

Waco Road Trip

Last weekend was the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SC⁴) road championships, hosted by Baylor over in Waco.  In the morning I picked up a big rental SUV from Enterprise that was brand new with only 15 miles on the odometer and enough room in the back, after removing those seats, for six bikes with rear wheels still on.  It also had a hitch receiver so we put the old 4-bike hitch rack onto it for the other two bikes. 

After leaving rather late on Friday afternoon, due to a Tulane van that suddenly decided it wouldn't start, we had a long but uneventful eight-hour drive to a Magnuson hotel on the Interstate.  A few hours of sleep and we were up and on our way to the road race course about half an hour away.  It was pretty chilly as we got ready for the first wave of races that included the Men and Women's Category A races and the Men's Cat. B race.  Kenny and I decided to follow the Women in order to get in a couple of laps on their 28-mile course.  The course turned out to be somewhat more hilly than I expected, and a whole lot more complicated than anyone would have expected.  There were actually two different courses, a long one (35 mi.) and a short one (28 mi.), marked only by painted arrows on the road at intersections.  There was no other signage, and as it turned out the lead vehicles were pretty unsure about the course themselves.  So within a few miles we had already followed the lead car the wrong way once and had to turn back to get onto the correct course. When that happened, a couple of the women took advantage of the confusion and it ended up splitting up the group rather badly leaving our one Tulane rider out on her own with five or six riders ahead of her. This happened a number of times with all of the groups, as we later discovered.  Anyway, there we were happily following the women's B race, when suddenly a lead vehicle comes by followed by a breakaway from the Men's B race.  The problem was that the Men's B race had started ten minutes ahead of the Women.  They had apparently gotten way off course and by the time they got back on the right road they were behind the women.  When the men's pack came past Kenny and I followed it.  A few miles later we came over a rise to see a steep downhill with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  I figured it might be a little sketchy for our Tulane rider who had attacked the hill and was flying down the road pretty fast.  Well, he got most of the way through the turn and suddenly washed out in what turned out to be a couple of inches of loose gravel covering half of the road.  We caught up to him a moment later and although he was scraped up from head to toe, nothing appeared to be broken so we encouraged him to get back on the bike since the pack was still going pretty slowly.  He did and caught back up easily. 

A little while later we came to another similar downhill, also with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  Up ahead we saw one of the women who had crashed climbing up out of the ditch. The turn was so sketchy that the entire Men's B race stopped for a few minutes to make sure she was OK before continuing on at an easy pace until the road conditions got better.  At one point both the men and the women who were still very close together took yet another wrong turn.  We saw the mistake and yelled, and the result was that the people who had been off the back were suddenly off the front.  Anyway, we did part of the second lap before turning around so we could be back at the finish for the end of the B race.  Later that morning our other woman, who was racing in the B/C race, crashed in a turn and hurt her wrist badly enough that she couldn't race the rest of the weekend.  In-between I drove to the nearest drug store and picked about $80 worth of Tegaderm, saline, tape and gauze to stock the first-aid kit.

The afternoon's team time trials didn't go as planned for us, or for the organizers. We didn't have enough women left to make a TTT team, and it was only after some begging that I convinced David to ride the men's TTT so we could get a few points.  There were only five teams in that category so they could ride easy and still get some points.  Baylor was nipping at our heels on points and since we were down to only four healthy riders we didn't want to take any chances.  The TTT started late and in a slightly different location because of some local redneck who was threatening the riders.

Sunday morning's criteriums were on a nice course on Baylor's campus and went pretty smoothly.  Although we didn't get any individual podiums, we managed to extend our points lead and won the Conference team title for Division II.  Considering how many of our best riders were unable to make the conference championships because of injury or school, we were pretty happy with that.

The drive home didn't get underway until around 3:30 or so, which meant that we didn't arrive back in town until around 1 am.  It was a long drive but the traffic was light, so it wasn't too bad.  Even so, I was completely worthless at work on Monday and was asleep by 9 pm that night.

Midweek Modicum

It wasn't until well past dinner time when I finally sat down to find hotel rooms and a rental van for the Tulane cycling team's upcoming road trip to Baylor for the SCCCC conference road championship. It seems that my credit card has become an integral member of the team this year.  There has to be a better way!  I ended up reserving three rooms at a EconoLodge (aka Magnuson Hotel) that I think is near campus, and then also reserving a large minivan.  Between the 7-passenger minivan and the Tulane 7-passenger van we hope to get ten people and ten bikes to Waco, Texas some time Friday night.  I decided to tag along to help with driving and logistics, and I am hoping to get in a good 60 mile ride following the Saturday morning "A" race.

So this morning was another breezy and overcast one up on the levee.  The Wednesday morning levee ride has evolved into the week's most civilized group ride.  The unwritten rule for Wednesday is that the pace stays in the 20-23 mph range and everyone takes nice smooth pulls at the front.  It's a little faster than a recovery ride pace, but definitely easier than a hard training ride pace.  The fact that we have the Wednesday evening training races out on the lakefront makes it easy to chill out during this ride without stirring up feelings of training level paranoia.  It also tends to attract a few riders who we don't often see for the faster rides on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Bob Perrin joined us this morning.  Bob was already racing bikes when I started, and I remember standing there next to his typewriter during a club meeting where he filled in my very first racing license, signed it at the bottom, and handed it over to me.  Considering the current controversy about the UCI requiring the USAC to enforce the rule about UCI licensed riders riding in unsanctioned events, you can see on that old license that the ABL of A had a similar rule back in the 70s that was rarely enforced and eventually dropped.  Some things never change.

So now we have OBRA trying to go national by sanctioning races outside of Oregon.  Of course that means that if you want to race both OBRA and USAC races you'd need two licenses.  The expensive one would help support Local Associations, national teams, international rider development, national coaching and officiating programs, affiliations with UCI and the IOC for professional and Olympic racing, etc.  The cheaper one would support the promoters who don't really care about that stuff.  I'd like to see the USAC develop a grassroots program for promoters of smaller events so their event costs would be lower. I'd also like to see them offer a much lower racing license fee for Cat. 5 (and Cat. 4 women) licenses.  The $30 collegiate license has been very successful at bringing new riders into the sport and would make a good model.  The bottom line for the small promoters, clubs and weekend warriors is that we need a cheap way to hold reasonably organized, easy to deal with, and safe local events like weekday training races.  At any rate, the last thing I'd want would be to have the USAC flounder and have to deal with OBRA, which, should such a thing happen, would eventually end up either like the present-day USAC, or some sort of upgraded version of the old Amateur Bicycle League of America.  I almost fear for OBRA as much as USAC because they may be biting off more than they can chew.  Their rulebook still looks like it was written by a 7th grader, IMHO, not to say that the USAC rulebook is a work of fine literature by any means, but at least the grammar has improved over the years.

Mississippi Gran Prix 2013

If there's such a thing as a LAMBRA classic, the annual Mississippi Gran Prix stage race is one.  The event's main promoter, even if he generally refuses to acknowledge the role, was one of the key organizers of its predecessor, the Natchez Classic stage race that started back in the early 80s.  As the DS of the Herring Gas team, Frank always works hard to attract a competitive field for the Cat. 1/2/3 race.  With fairly generous prizes for both stage placings and GC, it is usually one of the best attended events in the area.  Around here, that means something in excess of 200 riders.  For reasons I cannot fathom, the turnout for the Master 40+ race was rather thin this year, attracting only 21 riders.  Granted, most of those 21 were quite capable, but the lack of depth certainly had some effect on the road and circuit races.

Saturday's weather was nearly perfect by most standards, which is to say that it started out a little chilly by mine.  The Masters road race seemed a bit on the slow side to me this year.  We were doing two laps of a long 27-mile loop that was unchallenging for the first ten miles before getting into another ten mile section that was hillier and presented a few opportunities.  I was not really quite in shape for this race, but figured I'd be able to at least stay with the main group.  Early in the first lap a 2-rider break that included one rider from Midsouth Masters and one from Acadiana.  Of the 21-rider field, that took 7 MSM and 3 Acadiana riders out of the picture, chasing-wise.  So despite the fact that the break wasn't going all that fast, the pack seemed uninterested and their gap went out to at least a minute or more.  Donald Davis was riding without teammates and wasn't quite willing to fall for the trap, and a number of other riders were probably keying off of him, so the gap went out disturbingly quickly.  After a while Mark (who had crashed last weekend and was riding with four stitches in his elbow, among other injuries) and I went to the front and started working to keep the gap within reason. Ordinarily I wouldn't have given that break much of a chance, but with such a large percentage of the pack not willing to chase, it might have gotten out of hand.  At one point I rolled off the front pretty much by accident and decided to just keep going in hopes that it would inject a little more urgency into the rest of the group.  I guess I hung out there 30 or 40 seconds off the front for a few miles before one of the riders finally got to the front and pulled them up to me, so I guess it was somewhat successful.  Eventually we caught that break, and a couple of miles later another 2-man break rolled off the front with the same configuration and of course the same result.  I guess their gap was well over a minute as we started the second lap.  All this time I was thinking that we were going so slow we were bound to get caught by the Cat. 3/4 field of 61 riders that had started a mere 5 minutes behind us.  Sure enough, a few miles in their small break went past us and a few minutes later the motorefs neutralized us so the field could pass.  This was a bit of chaos, of course, since the masters weren't too thrilled about putting on the brakes with a breakaway off the front.  Right after we were passed by the 3/4 field, our own pace picked up a lot as Donald and some others caught sight of that 2-man break up the road.  Now we came up on the back of the 3/4 field and had to stream past them on the left. Naturally they weren't willing to slow down too much because they were in the process of chasing down their own breakaway.  Somewhere around the long climb 10 miles into the loop we caught the 2-rider break and then, of course, the 3/4 pack caught back up to us.  This time the masters slowed down to let the 3/4s past, but in the confusion a number of 3/4 riders got stuck behind the masters as they bunched up and weren't able to get back to their own group which was now in full chase mode.  Yeah, they got screwed.

So I guess we were about halfway through the second lap where there are a number of steep little hills when the attacks started.  After one particularly painful one that I just barely survived, I knew the group had split without even having to look back.  This resulted in a 6-rider break that included Donald Davis, Jerry Simon, Bennie Flores, Tim Doiron, Kevin Landry, and myself.  Almost every team in the race was represented.  I was pretty happy to have made the split and hoping that this group would work together smoothly, at least until the last mile or two, to extend the time gap because I knew I'd be giving up 30-40 seconds in the afternoon time trial to pretty much all of them.  Unfortunately, it was anything but smooth paceline.  There were lots of surges where the group would come apart, then we would get a little rotation going again, then a couple of people would skip pulls -- you get the picture.  With a few miles left to go the attacks started, mostly courtesy of Jerry who seemed to be in good form.  Tim and I were struggling a bit with the attacks, and when the sprint started I was all the way at the back and came across in 5th place.  On the plus side, we had put nearly three minutes on the pack, a gap that even my notoriously poor time trialing ability would not be able to completely erase.

The TT that evening went as I'd expected.  From the start I wound it up to about 25 mph and decided to back off and hold it there because I knew there was a significant little climb coming up.  That strategy worked pretty well in that I was able to go over that hill without going completely anaerobic, which is more than I can say about the next hill.  Anyway, I managed to do an even worse time than last year but thanks to having been in the break dropped down to only 6th.

Around 1 am on Sunday I was awakened by the sound of rain and thunder.  The forecast had been looking pretty bad and unfortunately it would prove to have been right on the money.  The first of the Circuit Races that had been scheduled for 7 am were pushed back to 8 am, but even so it was still raining and cold.  I watched the first few shortened races go off in the rain rather dreading the moment when I'd have to pull off the warm clothes and step out into the rain wearing lycra.  Our race was shortened by one lap, from four to three, as the officials tried to make up for the lost hour earlier in the morning, and by the time we started around 10:30 or so the rain had eased up considerably.  Still, I rolled out wearing arm-warmers since I had gotten pretty chilled.  The Circuit Race turned out to be kind of like the Road Race had been.  I knew that Midsouth was planning on sending one of their riders who hadn't made Saturday's break off the front, knowing that the top six riders on GC would probably let him go as long as the gap didn't go over a couple of minutes. The first rider to try it got pulled back, but then around the start of the last lap Jay went without much of a challenge.  With only around six miles left, there wasn't much of a chance he could get enough of a gap to threaten the leaders (although it was entirely possible he could threaten my 6th place).  Things finally started to ramp up along the rough section a few miles from the finish and at one point I was seriously at risk of being dropped in the crosswind.  It all came back together, though, and I started looking forward to the nice uphill sprint to the finish line.  My legs were feeling pretty good and I was in a good spot with about a mile to go when I felt my rear tire go squishy and then almost immediately bottom out. I quietly cursed my bad luck and raised my hand as I dropped back along the right side of the road.  A wheel change at this point could easily erase my time gap on 7th place, but one can only ride on a flat clincher so long before it comes completely off the wheel and locks up, or you crash.  Wes, who was driving the follow car came up and said he didn't have any wheels for me (they had been in a wheel bag because of the rain and so he hadn't put them in the car).  I was still just a few bike lengths off the back of the pack at that point and we were only half a kilo from the finish, so I decided to go ahead and  ride the rim in to the finish and hope for the best.  Fortunately everything stayed in place, and although it was a difficult slog up the finish hill I lost only 40 second or so on the pack, and later the officials gave me pack time anyway since the mishap had happened within the final 3 km.  So I was happy to have salvaged 6th place and done some fun racing, but pretty disappointed to have missed out on that sprint after having been looking forward to it for the whole race!

The Reason

There's a reason why I don't have many photos this time of year -- actually a couple of them.  For one, it's still fairly dark for most of the morning ride and the little pocket camera's automatic exposure setting doesn't handle that very well unless nothing is moving.  The other reason, however, is related more to the racing cycle than the diurnal one.  The average intensity of the training rides increases, sometimes rather erratically, this time of year. This morning was a case in point.  It was cloudy and very windy for the early Tuesday morning levee ride.  If it had been February, I wouldn't have expected more than a handful of riders to show up in the dark.  However, it's not February and there's a whole calendar of races coming up, starting with the Mississippi Gran Prix this weekend.  So naturally there was a fairly big group up there today.  To make matters worse, the ride started out with a nice quartering tailwind for the first ten miles or so. 

Robert started pushing the pace early in the ride.  At one point he opened a big gap and Richard, who had been behind him, eased over to the side and just said, "Really?" as I went past him.  After a mile or two of that I think Woody and Daniel must have started feeling irritated about the pace and that's about when it turned into a little race at the front.  Next thing I know I'm hanging on for dear life going 32 mph behind Robert with Woody and Daniel already five seconds up the road and nothing but silence behind me. We finally settled down a bit and started making up a little ground, but then Robert blew up.  I made one last effort as Woody and Daniel started to ease their pace approaching The Dip where I figured they were planning on turning around.  The rest of the group was at least 30 seconds behind us as we coasted down the dip and looped back around. I was perfectly content to turn back early under the circumstances.  It would have been a very long and windy ride back from Ormond. Robert continued on alone, but the rest of the group, like me, didn't relish the idea of battling that wind all the way back from Ormond, so they turned around and joined us. 

The camaraderie didn't last long, however.  When we got to that long stretch heading east, the south crosswind hit the group full-force.  I happened to be near the back at that point, sitting on Tom's wheel three inches from the edge, thinking, "I am getting zero draft here!"  It was one of those situations where the front five guys were getting a nice draft in their eschelon, the sixth guy was riding the edge of the road getting just enough draft to stay where he was but not enough to recover and get into the rotation.  Everyone behind him was essentially unprotected and stuck in position and already too tired to get out in the crosswind and ride up to the front to join the rotating eschelon. 

So soon I started to see Tom struggling and a gap ahead of him beginning to stretch.  I was balancing precariously on the edge of the asphalt myself, so I hesitated to go around him on the windward side, hoping that the group might ease up for a moment so we could make contact again.  The group didn't ease up, though, and Tom finally pulled over to the right and said, "Sorry!" as I went past.  For the next thirty seconds or so I was full-gas trying to close what would ordinarily have been a minor gap, but today was better described as a gaping chasm. I was probably going only 23 mph, but the effort level made it feel more like 30.  I finally made contact as the levee curved to the south, slowing the front of the group a bit and making it easier to get a draft.  I spent the next few miles on Judd's wheel.  His legs were bad today and he was just sitting on the back trying to minimize the accelerations, which, considering the effect the wind was having, was none too easy.  So anyway, although it was a shorter than normal Tuesday ride, it felt plenty hard enough to dispell any feelings of disappointment. 

I never once considered trying to take my hands off the bars to take a photo.