As I Watched It - Tour de Gulfport

"What the F*@#??" I'm pretty sure I said that out loud as I glanced down to see my left foot flailing in the air, suddenly unattached to the pedal. It was the start of the Tour de Gulfport criterium. I'd gotten in a decent enough warm-up, was adequately hydrated, and was fully expecting to be in the race rather than behind the race. For reasons I cannot even begin to guess, and although I am quite sure I heard my cleat clip into the pedal, the moment I stood up to accelerate, it pulled right out. I was incredulous, and hesitated for a moment thinking, "What just happened?" Well, I got clipped back in as riders streamed past and caught up to the tail end of the Masters pack fairly quickly. The problem was that they were going pretty fast.  Quite a bit faster, in fact, than the first lap of the Cat. 1/2/3 race into which I would jump later in the day. Even so, I was now kind of stuck on the wrong end of the criterium whip, braking into turns and sprinting out of them just to stay in contact. I think I just automatically switched into survival mode at that point as the actual race played out up ahead. 

So here's how it went:

From the word GO, Alex (Acadiana) takes off at full speed, stringing out the pack while I watch my left pedal spin around in the air. Woody is right up there and this continues at full gas until Keith (Acadiana) takes over for the third lap. Meanwhile I'm hanging onto the wrong end of the paceline for dear life. An Acadiana rider attacks and gets a good gap, then Tim, Donald and Woody or Tim start drilling it. A gap opens up behind the trio of Donald, Woody (Palmer) and Randy D (Acadiana).  Mark McMurry (Midsouth) tries to bridge up to them, then Brian B. (Peake) jumps.  Now there are three off the front working together, and the pace back in the pack sags since Acadiana and Palmer won't pull. Brian is on the front and attacks to up the pace. He eases up but nobody comes though and he takes the front again. He is getting practically no help and has been on the front for at least a full lap. Finally, someone comes through and we're on lap 8, all strung out, as the pace slows again with an Acadiana rider coasting at the front.  Brian pulls through again, and then Mike Lew attacks, lifting the pack's pace significantly. We can see the 3-rider break still not too far ahead.

Mike drills it for a full lap, then Brian comes through, and the gap is suddenly down to maybe then seconds.  Kevin from Acadiana jumps as Randy D. is getting dropped from the break. He bridges up quickly with little response from the pack, so the break pulls away again.  Brian is soon on the front again, then McMurry attacks, but the pack chases and he is soon pulled back. Brian is on the front yet again, and another rider attacks the pack but is pulled back quickly.  Mike Lew counter-attacks and gets a big gap with one other rider, but that too is eventually pulled back and the pace slows as we approach the 30-minute mark of the 45-minute race. The break is well out of sight by now.  There are more attacks by Mark McMurry, but he is brought back quickly and, for the first time in the race, I find my way to the front. Brian goes to the front again as McMurry attacks, then Mike Lew takes a shot at it, is pulled back, and Brian counter-attacks.  As he is pulled back, Mark McMcurry counters and gets a gap as the 5-to-go card goes up. The break is long goine and now Mark is up the road and things are starting to come apart in the pack.  Another rider attacks and gets a gap.  I've lost track of how many are actually off the front now.

With three to go Alex Habbit attacks, taking Butch Sims (Palmer) with him as the rest of the pack hesitates. The pack starts catching lapped riders in the turns and more little gaps open up. The pack is racing for 7th place, but I am finally starting to feel like I am in the race as I put in a big effort for the long drag race to the finish line, ending up in a disappointing 8th place, which is 3rd in the 55+ age group.

It was a strange race for me. Getting stuck at the back on the first lap really took the wind out of my sails, maybe more psychologically than physically. I should have just put it behind me and made the effort to get up to the front, but instead I pretty much just hung around near the back of the pack watching the show up ahead.

By the time the Cat. 1/2/3 race started it was getting really warm. My Garmin, which had been in the sun, started out showing 104F, and had dropped down to only 100 degrees 25 minutes later when I finally threw in the towel.  I probably shouldn't have entered the 1/2/3 race, but there was a decent sized field and I figured it would be cooler than standing around in the sun.  The 1/2/3 race actually started out fairly slowly, at least for the first couple of laps. After that it got faster as the attacks started to fly. I tried to shift to a higher gear and nothing happened. I finally looked down and realized I was still in the small chainring! Obviously I had not been taking this race seriously enough.  There was another attack and when the rider ahead of me blew up and opened a gap, I just wasn't willing to dig deeply enough to close it. We were probably only seven or eight laps into the race.  I backed off and cruised around for a few laps until the pack came by again, jumped onto the back for another lap and then called it a day.

The event itself was great.  The city was fully on board, so the course was well barricaded, there was a live band, etc. I hope they hold it again next year.

"The Tour"

We wrapped up the annual Tour de Louisiane around 2 pm on Sunday. Things went pretty well in general, which is to say we didn't send anyone to the hospital and nobody was arrested. By Tuesday of last week the Tour preparations were alerady starting to eat into my time significantly, and the extra task list was made a bit more burdensome by the fact that the head cold I'd had for the prior couple of weeks had spawned a bit of a sinus infection. Without getting in the graphic details, any time I start producing non-transparent mucus in significant quantities it's a sure bet I've got a bacterial infection going on. Fortunately we had a stash of ampicillin around, so by Saturday things were starting to clear up. There is a lot of heavy lifting involved in putting on a weekend stage race, most of which revolves around herding together volunteers for follow cars, corners, set-up and tear-down, plus keeping on top of the situation with the police details at each of the three venues, not to mention securing and collecting items for the goody bags, prime prizes, etc. I try to keep my main responsibilities both well-defined and limited. Prior to the race I handle the event permit, website, Facebook page, officiating arrangements, and to some extent communications with the city of Covington for the criterium venue. I also create the race bible, get a couple hundred copied, staple them up into booklet format, print out the pre-registered riders' waivers, organize the bib numbers and pins, make up the registration and results spreadsheets, help stuff goody bags, manage the Friday night registration and Saturday morning registration, and then officiate the races where I handle data entry and results when I'm not scoring the races themselves. After each race I make the results web page and upload it to the server and then send out notices via email, Facebook and Twitter. Other club members handle setting up the courses with signage, dealing with the police details on race day, coordinating the follow cars, making sure there is water and, for the road race, cold watermelon, setting up and tearing down the venues, handling the awards ceremonies, podiums, photography, corner monitors, portable toilets, etc. So this morning I feel, appropriately enough, like I worked all weekend.

The races went well. Based on the weather forecast, I had been fully expecting to be standing in water up to my ankles in torrential rain for most of the weekend. Somehow, the rain missed us at every venue.  It stormed all around us, but it seemed like each race was in a little bubble that lasted just long enough to get in and out with dry socks.  It was a great relief to be done with the road race without rain or ambulances. The road leading to the road race had been under heavy construction and at the last minute I had to change the race bible, adding an alternate route to bypass that section because the weekend before, some of it had been un-paved and the construction crew was caravaning people across the worst section. As it turned out, they had finished paving the last bit the day or so before the race, so luckily that wasn't an issue. I had been having visions of team cars stuck in the mud calling me frantically because they would be late for the race.

Turnout was reasonably good at around 150 riders. We could certainly use another thirty or forty to fill out some of the smaller fields, but 150 isn't a bad turnout compared to the last few years. I guess we will probably end up losing at least three or four thousand on the event, but some of that is because we do not skimp on police for the road race (I think we had nine officers for 4 or 5 hours this year), and of course it is equally expensive to shut down the criterium course in Covington. The racing turned out to be really good this year, and I was glad to see a good-sized Masters field after a couple of years of really small ones. Lots of photos have been showing up, and I've been trying to share them to the Tour de Louisiane Facebook Page.

I got back home around 3:30 on Sunday, posted all of the results, monitored the Facebook pages and email, corrected a couple of errors, re-posted the resutls, sent the registration numbers to the Chief Ref for the Post-event report, and finally hit the sack around 11:30.  I still need to update the LCCS points for both the 2-person time trial and the Tour de Louisiane, and clean  up and store away all of the NOBC race equipment that is presently scattered randomly all over my basement. Next weekend is the LAMBRA criterium championship over in Gulfport, so I am hoping to be racing that and helping with officiating when I can. We had some LAMBRA riders up at Tulsa Tough last weekend who turned in some impressive results.  Tomorrow the annual Race Across America starts, which is usually something I don't follow, but this year Brian Toone is taking a run at it, so I will be watching it a bit more closely thanks to their website.

Summer Cold

May 28 Morning Ride group     

For a while I refused to believe it. That scratchy throat feeling slowly poking its way into my consciousness on a Monday afternoon at work couldn't actually be a summer cold. I tried to ignore it, but by late evening there was just no getting around it. My throat was so sore it hurt to swallow, and after a rather sleepless night I'd already thrown in the towel by 6 am on Tuesday. As often happens with these things, I was feeling a little better after a cup of coffee and a little activity, so I decided not to reschedule my 10:30 eye doctor appointment. I was on my last pair of contacts and hadn't had a checkup in a couple of years. As it turned out, my vision was pretty much the same as last time, so I re-ordered a batch of lenses and walked out into the bright sunlight with full-dilated pupils.  Ouch. Luckily I had a pair of sunglasses in the car and made it home safely, but I was pretty much worthless the rest of the day. By Thursday it had moved down into my lungs, which I suppose wasn't helped by the fact that I went out and did the usual group rides on Wednesday and Thursday mornings. Then again, maybe it would have done that anyway. It's always a tough call this time of year. I hate to lose more than one day of riding.

Anyway, last weekend was the annual NOBC 2-Person Time Trial, which I was officiating. I'd been a little worried the week before about having enough help for this one, but a bunch of people turned up a the last minute, so it was fine. There was some bad weather heading our way from Texas, but fortunately we had everything wrapped up well before any of it arrived. Frank Moak and Jaden Kifer turned in a course record time of 51:22 for the 40 km event this year. I cannot even imagine holding a 29-31 mph pace that long, even if I was just glued to someone else's wheel the whole time. I got back home and unloaded the car, and then an hour or so later they sky opened up.

Oak Street flooding, near Zotz

The rest of the evening featured some dramatic rain storm action.  I guess there were times when we got extended rainfall at a rate of 4" per hour or so, which is usually more than the city's pumps can handle.  That results in some street flooding in rather predictable locations, especially the underpasses. There was one cab driver who was on the news talking about having to abandon his taxi with his passenger when it stalled out under the Canal Blvd. underpass. A little while later the cab was completely submerged.

So on Wednesday morning the sore throat was a little better and I went out to meet the morning WeMoRi. My plan was to stay in the draft to limit the effort level as much as possible. I picked up the group around Marconi and Robert E. Lee and fortunately nobody was at the front really drilling it, so although the speed was in the 25-28 mph range it wasn't too hard to find a comfy wheel to follow. The next day I went out to the regular 5:45 am ride with pretty much the same plan. It was a little more difficult to limit my effort level for that ride, but I wasn't really feeling too bad. Even so, after I got home I could tell I was more tired from the ride than usual. Later that morning when I rolled the bike out the door to ride to work I found a chicken walking around in the middle of the street. I posed a photo on the neighborhood FB page but we haven't been able to find the owner yet. The neighbor says it's been hanging around for the past three or four days.

The Tour de Louisiane is only a week away now, so there are a few loose ends left to tie up. I had decided to use up some of the many leftover bib numbers I have from prior races this year, so didn't order any new ones. We used some for the 2-Person TT and discovered that some of the small numbers were apparently bio-degradable and when people tried to handle them they basically crumbled, so now I'll have to check all of the numbers I have set aside for the Tour to make sure they are OK. I hope they are, because it's too late to order new ones at this point. I finally got the new race bible posted to the website yesterday. There weren't really too many changes since last year except for sponsor logos, so that wasn't too difficult. Bob has been working on the criterium venue, so it should be interesting this year. On Sunday some of us will be heading up to the Tour road course to check it out, freshen  up the road markings, etc.  Otherwise, I think things are pretty much in place, so I'm just hoping the weather cooperates this year.

Bonts and Breaks

I was a little surprised today when I checked Strava and realized that I'd logged four weeks of riding without a single missed day and between 240 and 280 miles per week. It was only during the past week that I started to feel good on the bike again, so although I don't feel like I'm quite 'there' yet, at least there seems to be some improvement.

Last week I finally broke down and got a new pair of riding shoes. I've been riding with Nike Poggio's since 2006.  I think they stopped making them around that time. I was on my second pair and they were, literally, falling apart at the seams. After quite a bit of research I decided to try a pair of Bont Vaypor shoes.  Last year's model, of course.  On sale, of course. There's just no way I can wear the stylish Italian shoes like Sidis that compress toes together. I gave them about a 50% chance of being compatible with my troublesome right foot, especially since I was kind of throwing the dice as to the correct size. Now, these are the heat-moldable kind of shoes, so I popped them in the convection oven at 160F for twenty minutes, stuck my feet with two pair of socks into them and did my best to mold the uppers and to a lesser extent the footbed to fit my feet. Surprisingly, when I wore them on the Saturday Giro Ride they felt pretty good.  They are quite different from regular riding shoes and have a significant built-in arch, but it appears that my toes like them.  I rode them today for a 65 mile road race and really liked them.

Saturday Giro

Speaking of the race, I registered for the Feliciana Road Race with a bit of trepidation. It was looking like there would be a pretty big Masters field and my confidence level was running kind of low. One thing I know for sure, however.  I can't get into race shape without racing. I'd ridden the Saturday Giro Ride, mostly sitting in and taking it easy. Fortunately, my legs felt OK Sunday morning as I drove up to St. Francisville to join the 28-rider Master's race. After an easy first mile or two, the attacks started. I was not having a whole lot of trouble responding to them, and the pack was pulling them back, but the whole time the pace was staying well above 25 mph average, so I knew it would eventually take its toll. We were less than fifteen miles into the first lap when the first break went clear. It had riders from the three strongest teams in it, and none from ours, but the blockade at the front allow them to establish a huge gap very quickly and I knew we wouldn't be seeing them again. I guess there were five or six riders in that group.  A while later a smaller group of two or three got away. That time the gap didn't increase very quickly and a little coordinated chase could have brought it back, but even though there were still a lot of riders in the pack, there just didn't seem to be the will to do anything about it.  I guess part of it was because none of those riders were in the 55+ race, which was combined with the 40+ race, so the 55+ riders basically didn't care.  I hate when that happens.  Anyway, I felt pretty good on the hills, which was a real confidence-booster.  Even so, by that time there were nearly ten riders up the road and I was resigned to just making it a training ride. The last lap was fairly dull as everyone was waiting for the two big climbs prior to the finish.

I was riding second wheel in the last couple of miles, and when the rider in front of me stood up and attacked the second-to-last hill I went with him.  We got a big gap, but as we got to the top he suddenly cramped up, leaving me about a mile from the finish line, in a headwind.  Not good.  I think if we could have worked together we could have stayed out there to the finish.  Anyway, I bogged down on the next climb but managed to get back into the group when they came by and mounted about 75% of a respectable sprint for the 300 meter drag race after the last hill. My placing pretty much sucked, but my happy feet and the hint of returning race fitness made it a pretty good day.

Return to Routine and Unfortunate U-Turns

The only thing that has been routine for the past couple of weeks has been the riding.  In fact, it's been routine enough to qualify as dull, but at least I'm starting to feel like I have a reasonable base again.

The weather has been, in general, pretty nice for riding lately, and as a result I can look back on three solid weeks of respectable mileage and a slowly improving level of intensity. Last weekend would have been a perfect time for me to have taken off for a weekend of racing, but there was absolutely no chance for that. Danielle graduated from Tulane with her MS in Epidemiology on Saturday, which was preceded on Friday by an awards presentation in which she was inducted into the Delta Omega honor society for epidemiology. I really couldn't miss that, especially since Candy wasn't able to be at graduation because of a meeting in Toronto.

After the awards presentation on Friday we went over to the uptown campus for the annual "Wave Goodbye" party, which was actually quite enjoyable.  The weather was relatively cool and the food was great. I don't know what other universities do, but having live music and lots of food that included grilled oysters on the half-shell, gumbo, red beans and rice, salad, various po-boys, and a cash bar was pretty nice.

The graduation ceremony for the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, not to be confused with the huge morning's "unified" graduation production at the Superdome, was held at the renovated Saenger Theatre, just down the street from the SPHTM. I love being in that theatre. I can remember going to movies there when I was a kid and being facinated by the stars on the ceiling and the general design that makes it look like you are in an outdoor amphitheatre. That hasn't changed one bit. On the down side, my little camera was really not up to the task of taking photos under those circumstances. I probably could have experimented with a lot of manual settings until I got it right, but my battery was low and I decided to play it safe and make sure I could get at least one good posed photo afterward. Yesterday afternoon I drove Danielle and the two dogs and a couple of over-weight bags to the airport for her flight back to Seattle/Olympia for the summer. When she returns in the fall she will be starting at LSU Health Sciences Center to begin work on her Ph.D.

Meanwhile, I've been back to a fairly regular riding routine for the past couple of weeks. With the Rocky Mount race going on last weekend up in Shreveport, the Giro Rides on Saturday and Sunday were a little thinner than usual, especially on Saturday. It had stormed Friday evening and I think a lot of people had just decided they wouldn't be able to ride Saturday morning and so didn't even try. As it turned out, everything was dried out by then and we had a good ride. For me, the missing riders actually gave me a better opportunity to mix in a little more intensity than usual, so that was good.

Glenn Gulotta

Last week we had a surprise visit from Glenn Gulotta, father of the Giro Ride. He's looking good and it was great catching up with him, at least until he dropped off the back when things started getting serious on Hayne Blvd.

On Sunday's ride we were flying down the service road on the way out when I heard someone next to me hit a rock which shot out to the left. His front tire immediately went flat, and after I turned around I was shocked to find that two other riders had also pinch-flatted their front tires on, apparently, the same thing.  It was almost comical. Then, on the way back after the turnaround, I found myself off the front with Laron while the rest of the group was still talking or doing whatever they do when they stop by that lonely tree out on Chef Highway. I wasn't planning on staying out there, but after a little while Laron started pushing the pace and when I looked back I couldn't even see the rest of the group. I think I took one pull and spent the rest of the time glued to his wheel.  I think we got all the way back to around the Goodyear sign before the rest of them finally caught up.

So Monday morning I was feeling a little stiff and just went out for a nice easy spin on the levee, which was great. Then this morning I met the usual 5:45 group to ride out to the lakefront. I could still feel the weekeend in my legs.

Jim's Hand

As usual, we met up with some other riders out near West End, and also as usual made a U-turn near Brisbi's to start our lap of Lakeshore Drive. I turned around and started riding easy as the rest of the group came together and then heard something odd.  Looking back I could see a group in the middle of the road and a pickup truck backing up in the right lane. Well, as it turned out, Jim (aka Professor) had started to make a u-turn and the truck, which must have been going substantially faster than the 25 mph speed limit, smashed into his left hand.  It could have been worse, of course, but the result was that Jim had broken all four metacarpals, two quite badly. We had to call for extraction to the ER, and last I heard he was in surgery. That really sucks since he had been training hard for the past couple of months and was planning on racing the Feliciana Road Race next weekend.

Coyotes on the Levee

I have a lot of backed-up stuff to do on the NOBC website, LAMBRA, Tour de La, upcoming 2-Person Time Trial, etc., and I am hoping I can make some significant progress on that stuff this week. Candy returns on Wednesday. I'm meeting with the City of Covington folks about the Tour de Louisiane on Thursday, and I'm planning on racing on Sunday.  Danielle's scooter is having electrical or starting problems that I need to diagnose, hedges and trees need trimming, the house needs painting, the car needs service, I need to schedule an eye doctor appointment (on my last pair of contact lenses right now) and some bills still need to be paid.

Mississippi Grand Prix - As Luck Would Have It

It was finally a weekend I could race.  Well almost.  I jumped in the car late Friday afternoon for the two-hour drive up to Brookhaven, Mississippi for the annual Mississippi Grand Prix stage race. I was scheduled to help with officiating of the Cat. 1/2/3 evening criterium, after which I'd be relatively free to race. I wasn't entertaining much hope for a great placing, but it was already May and I desperately needed to jump into the deep end if I was ever to get in shape this year.

The Friday evening officiating duties went smoothly and despite the bad finish line camera images.  The 60hz flicker rate of the halogen lights and the camera's 1,000 hz frame rate result in the camera storing a number of slices while the lights are, essentially, off. The result is an image with vertical black stripes that make it hard to read the bib numbers. Anyway, by the time I'd sat down to eat dinner at Broma's, Ricky had already sent me the Crit results to post.

Saturday morning was surprisingly cool, but with our master's race start time set for 9:30 am, I knew it wouldn't be a problem, even for me. There was a decent-sized field of 20-something, as we set out for the first of three laps.  The course had a couple of significant hills and lots of little rollers, so I thought that would take it's toll by the end of the almost 60 miles we had to complete. The one really decisive hill was about halfway around the course, and I knew my fitness level wasn't quite up to it yet this year.

We hadn't gone very far when one of the riders rolled off the front without any response from the field.  I motored up to him, initially just to cover it so there wouldn't be a big chase later.  After trading pulls with him for a while it was clear that the pack was letting us go, and although I had no illusions about our being able to stay out there, I started thinking that if we could just make it up and over the big hill we could spare ourselves having to respond to the inevitable attack that I knew Jerry would launch there. We still had maybe thirty seconds when we came to the bottom of the hill, at which point the other rider apparently dropped his chain and I found myself alone.  No worries, I thought, I'll just ride easy tempo over the top and be ready to jump onto whatever was left of the pack on the other side.  Well, as luck would have it, Jerry attacked hard at the bottom of the hill and I was shocked when a string of five or six riders came blasting past me halfway up the climb. They came by me like I was going backwards, and although I tried to respond, I was just too gassed by the top to close what remained of the gap. Moments later other riders started coming by, so I got in with them and we ended up with a nice little six or seven rider chase group that included three of my own teammates.

For most of the rest of that lap we were holding the gap pretty well, but as we started the second lap the cooperation lagged and the gap suddenly shot up to a minute and a half and I knew the chase was over. A mile or two later I felt my rear wheel going soft. I dropped to the back and when we got to a smooth section of road I bounced a couple of times and felt the rim hit the ground. I raised my right hand to get the attention of the follow car, shifted to the small chainring and small cog, and rolled to a stop. With only one person in the follow car, and my own 1-speed wheel buried in the back of the pickup truck, and the quick-release not set up correctly, it was a few minutes before I was rolling again. I still had the better part of 40 miles to ride, and since there was no chance whatsoever of catching even the chase group, I knew my GC chances were shot. I settled into an easy pace and rolled around the course, thankful that it wasn't too hot, and enjoyed the scenery. I assumed I was the last rider on the road, but after I finished I was surprised that there had been a nice little group just a couple of minutes behind me the whole time.

So the afternoon time trial was on a new course that turned out to be about 70% downhill. I really should have pre-ridden it, but since my GC chances were hopelessly down the drain (I think I was well over ten minutes down), and since even on a good day I wouldn't have made it into the 5-deep stage prizelist, I wasn't very motivated. I looked down at the computer about half a mile after the start and saw a speed in the low 30s, which was a little surprising since I was not putting much pressure on the pedals. I think I had a max of almost 36 mph without really trying. About a mile from the finish I finally came to a steep climb that had me out of the saddle and looking at 14 mph for a little while. I ended up with a time about a minute and a half slower than the winner, which was about mid-pack and no surprise at all. At least there was the criterium on Sunday.

Watching the Cat. 1/2/3 Criterium

The Master's criterium was a nice 60-minute one on the same course I've ridden for years. With little to lose, I decided to ride near the front, get some good training, and try to make it into the top five. I tried to do a decent warm-up, and was glad I had. From the start Jerry took the lead and thanks to a quick clip-in I was right on his wheel. The first three laps were very fast, and indeed a number of riders were dropped for good as I clung tenaciously to the wheel ahead of me. When I finally looked down I was dismayed to find I'd forgotten to start my Garmin. The pace eventually eased, and I could tell that Jerry and his teammate Tim were going to wait for the points hot spot before making another big effort. As I'd suspected, they went hard for that hot spot, taking 1st and 2nd place. Scott was 3rd with me on his wheel, but the two riders had opened a bit of a gap in the sprint. That's when I made the mistake of staying on Scott's wheel as he backed off.  Granted, I was pretty much at my limit, but it would not have been impossible for me to have bridged up to the lead duo. As they went around the next corner I saw one of them look back at the gap and then they looked at each other and I knew they were going to go for it. That was about the last we saw of them. With them already leading the GC, the other riders in the group were not showing any real interest in chasing. We ended up having a few real lulls in the pace over the rest of the race.

Finally, with two laps to go there was a hard attack up and over the hill that nearly shattered the whole group and I had to dig pretty deep just to close it. Unfortunately, nobody followed through once it was caught with a lap and a half to go, so it was gruppo compacto again for the last lap. I don't really know when or how Scott opened  up such a big gap on us, but he crossed the line with a second or two to spare and then Michael F. slingshotted past me, leaving me in 5th place. I was actually reasonably pleased with that under the circumstances. I felt like I'd ridden a decent race and considering that I'd been dropped like a rock in the last two races I'd done, at least there was some hope.

Weekends Past and Present

Division II Team Conference Champions

The past couple of weekends have been pretty busy, and although those are really the times when it would be best to keep up with the blog, they are also the most difficult times to do so. The weekend before last was the Green Wave Classic collegiate race, which also served as the Conference Championships for the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SCCCC for short). Planning for the event had been pretty good, but of course there were still a lot of loose ends to tie up the week before. Those relatively minor things, like corner monitors and putting up course signage and finding follow car drivers, quickly started to pale in comparison to the elephant in the room, namely the consistently dire weather forecast. It wasn't a question of whether or not it would rain.  It was a question of whether or not the races would need to be cancelled because of hazardous road conditions. I didn't sleep much on Friday night worrying about that.

So Sunday morning it was wet but not actually raining when we drove out to Enon to get the course set up. We had free PJ's coffee out there, which helped, and the Tulane club was out in force helping get registration and everything going, so everything went fairly smoothly.

As we began to stage the various groups for the start of the road races, right on cue, it started to rain. Luckily, most of the heavy rain missed us, so although most of the road races were conducted in a light to moderate rain on wet roads, it never got really windy of particularly hazardous, and as the last races were finishing up there was even some sunshine.

Results went smoothly despite all of the complications caused by the "permanent" numbers they keep trying to use to identify the riders. I had already set up my results spreadsheets to use license numbers rather than bib numbers to link riders to their season-long points totals (45% of the riders had different numbers than they'd started the season with).

The evening TT again featured some light rain, but nothing to worry about. All-in-all the day's racing went exceptionally smoothly thanks to a lot of hard work over a couple of months getting everything organized and recruiting volunteers.

By Sunday morning the bad weather had passed and we had clear skies and warm temperatures for the day's criteriums at Lakeshore High School. We had gotten permission to use the school grounds for the races and had laid out a nice challenging course. We'd picked up the keys to the main gate as well, so when we arrived early that morning to find the gate already open I started to worry. The first thing I did was drive around the course in the rented cargo van to drop off traffic cones at the corners and intersections.

You can imagine my shock and dismay when I found that something was going on at the softball field at the back of campus.  The only access to that location was right through the criterium course. I sent Kenny to find out what was going on and he reported that there was a softball tournament that morning.  Great. Fortunately it didn't seem to be a particularly big tournament, and once everyone had arrived there was not too much traffic to deal with, so we stationed traffic monitors at both ends of the road leading to and from the field and they did a tremendous job of shuttling cars across without interfering with the races.

As far as the actual racing went, the Tulane riders were doing great and by the end of the road races I was pretty sure they had the Division II conference team championship in the bag. The racing was pretty good all morning, spiced up by one spectacular crash in one of the early races that landed the rider square in a water-filled ditch, and then later when Ben Spain went down on a corner during a solo attack and landed on his face, breaking a couple of teeth. So in the end, Tulane did great, winning the DII championship, scoring the second  highest team points regardless of division, winning the individual omnium for Cat. A men and Cat. B men, along with a slew of other top-five omnium placings. I was very proud of them, and especially my daughter who served a team president and race director.

So the next week I basically started back to a reasonably regular training schedule. I had to officiate the Harbor Master Criterium last weekend, which was a fun event with spectacularly nice weather.

I brought my bike and ended up entering the Cat. 1/2 race where I knew I'd get slaughtered, but it was the race for which I was least needed at the finish line and it was way past time for me to get back into racing mode. I went in with a plan for this one.  The plan was to get dropped early, wait to be lapped, jump into whichever group lapped me, hang on for a few laps, and repeat.  I think I was lapped four times by the lead group (lap times were maybe 1:30 or so) but at least I got in some riding and missed the big crash on the final corner that took out a few people and a couple of bikes.

This was the same course we'd used last year.  It's pretty technical and tight in a couple of places, and I never have quite gotten it figured out.  The 123 race started out with a couple of relatively smooth laps, but then the attacks started and I quickly found myself at the back with Mark and Kenny. It was, of course, the worst possible place to be on a course like this, but I did not want my own lack of fitness to screw up someone else's race, so I was intentionally leaving room for people to come around me when even the smallest gap would open. The not unexpected result was that I got popped off the back after a few fast laps. Luckily the officials didn't seen a need to pull me, so I basically used the race to do four or five 3-5 minute intervals with full recovery in-between.

At the end of the race Stephen Mire went down, presumably hit a pedal and/or rolled a tire, taking a few riders with him. There had been a similar crash on the last lap of the Cat. 4 race that took two of the Tulane riders out.

This week I've been back to a regular training routine, finally, although it's been marred by numerous unrelated flats. In a few hours I'll be on the road to Brookhaven to help officiate the Mississippi Grand Prix Cat. 1/2/3 criterium this evening and then to race the Masters race the rest of the weekend.  I fully expect to get my lunch eaten since I do not feel like I am anywhere close to race shape, but I guess I've got to start somewhere.

April

There is just so much going on in April. Years ago we used to hold the Tour de La in April, but we eventually pushed it farther back into June because there were just too many competing events and activities in April. Well, that and the fact that two of our club presidents around that time were CPAs and CPAs don't even come up for air until June. For me, it's been really busy.

First, there was the road trip with the Tulane team to Collage Station at the end of March. I had brought the bike with plans to get in some miles during the road race, but they had only one or two follow cars. The course included a couple of miles of gravel, so I knew there would be lots of flats. I volunteered to drive one of our minivans behind the Women's B race. I ended up picking up two people on each lap, neither from the race I was supposed to be following. The gravel road was literally lined with riders walking or trying to fix flats or just waiting for a ride back to the finish line. I had to rush to catch back up to the women each time and for the last lap I didn't stop for anybody from other races so I could stay with them.

This weekend was the MSU Velo de Viento in Wichita Falls. I'd intended to go to the MSU race but had to instead drive up to Jonesboro, AR for a work-related conference Wednesday through Friday. That turned out to be an easy 7-hour drive, but of course cost me two days off the bike. I'd already taken Monday as a rest day since the prior week was over 300 miles. I was thinking I'd be able to make up for it over the weekend, though. Well, the weather had other plans. I went out to meet the Giro Ride at Starbucks Saturday morning in the rental car I'd taken to Arkansas. The plan was to do the Giro then drop off the car and ride back home from the car rental place. So I head out a little after 6 am, get almost to Starbucks, and realize I've forgotten my shoes. I rush back home to pick them up and head out again, but now it's starting to rain. I probably wouldn't have even ridden if it hadn't been for the car rental thing. There were only a few people at Starbucks, of course, but we headed out anyway with the plan to do a short Giro. The whole way out along Lakeshore Drive and Hayne I'm getting sprayed with water and feeling generally miserable, so I turned around at the end of Hayne, rode back to Starbucks, returned the car, and rode home.  A couple of hours later the sky was almost clear and the roads were drying so I threw the bike in the car, picked up some road marking paint, and drove across the lake to Enon to mark the road course for next weekend's Tulane "Green Wave Classic" collegiate race. I rode the course once with a can of green paint to mark all of the corners, which used up that can. Then I switched to a can of orange paint and rode most of it again to mark the potholes on Dummyline Road. I ran out of paint before I got to the end of the 2-mile stretch of bad road. Then I got the last can of green paint and put a mark on the finish line, rolled off 200 meters and marked that, and rode back 1 kilometer and marked that. Then I loaded up again and drove over to the time trial course at Lakeshore High where I started my Garmin and car odometer and found the 3-mile finish spot.  The old mark from last year was still there, barely, but it's really hard to find from a car, so I hammered in a stake and painted the top green so the finish line officials will be able to find it next Sunday (if it's still there). By then it was starting to cloud up again, but I was glad to have gotten in 65 miles for the day.  We still have a lot of loose ends to tie up for the Tulane race, and I'm a little worried about having to sort out the final conference points in order to make those awards.

This morning it was raining so I didn't even get out of bed. I probably could have gone out for a ride around 3 pm but would probably have gotten wet anyway. The forecast for the rest of the week isn't looking all that good. Meanwhile, over in Wichita Falls, the Tulane riders had a fairly good race despite the usual 25 mph winds. At least they avoided the rain. Danielle had upgraded to Cat. A the week before to try and score more team points, and so had pretty much jumped into the deep end since they were racing with the Cat. B men who, by this time of the season, were pretty aggressive.

Relentless in New Orleans

It was suddenly springtime, bordering on summer, last Saturday. With Rouge-Roubaix behind us, and a race-free weekend ahead of us, combined with warm temperatures and the impending spring road season, I knew we were in for trouble. Hanging out at Starbucks as the sun came up I watched as a steady stream of riders filtered in from all directions. By the time we were on Lakeshore Drive, there were about fifty riders, including essentially all of the fastest local ones, some of whom were on their time trial bikes. Aside from the Giro Ride that morning, there were at least two other groups doing the same route, so it would be safe to say there were a hundred road and TT bikes out on the Giro course that morning.

I was feeling OK, but still a little heavy and sluggish from nearly a month of low-mileage weeks. Even so, I wasn't really expecting what happened. As soon as we hit Hayne Blvd. the pace ramped quickly up in to the 26-30 mph range, but with such a large group and no significant crosswind issues, it was not too hard to stay in the draft as I gradually got warmed up, a process that seems to take longer and longer every year. Looking back, I note that the average speed on the Hayne Blvd. section was a brisk 26.4 mph. We made the right turn onto Paris Road and the pace didn't really ease at all, so we came over the I-10 overpass and rolled down the other side at around 30 mph.

Although I knew better, I was way back toward the tail end of the long strung-out group at that point.  It looked like we would have a clear shot crossing over the two lanes of I-610, and indeed about 90% of the group did so, but then a pickup truck appeared coming around the curve and a few of us near the back had to slow way, way down until the driver finally waved us through.  Well, the front of the group was still going 30 mph at that point and so all I could do was stand up and sprint and hope to make it back into the draft before blowing up. Yeah, well that didn't happen. As my heart rate edged into the 95% bracket, Stephanie Smith came by and I jumped onto her wheel.  I thought, "Perfect! A triathlete to help bridge a long gap."  I damned sure wasn't going to be able to do it myself.  We chased at full power all the way down the exit ramp and then most of the way along the service road before finally making contact just before Chef Highway.  My average speed for that section was 27.1, and I was completely gassed as came to the Chef Highway intersection. Well of course the front of the group jumped across in front of a car and the rest, including me, had to wait, so immediately we were chasing at 27-29 mph again. I finally just sat up as the relentless pace was offering no chance for me to recover and get my breathing back under control.

Once again, Stephanie came up to me, so we started a nice controlled 2-person time trial at around 23 mph as the group started to disappear in the distance. A minute later we came up to Graham on the side of the road fixing his sticky rear brake, so he joined us for the rest of the way out to Venetian Isles fighting a moderate headwind.

Finally back in the pack after the turnaround, the relentless pace continued, and we were soon strung out in a long thin line once again. The average speed for most of that section to the Goodyear Sign sprint was 30.1 mph. After another 30 mph stretch along the service road, things finally settled down a bit on Bullard, where I later found out Steve had crashed when he hit one of the may cracks in the concrete. Once on Hayne the relentless pace continued, however, and after sprinting up the overpasses and finally coming back down onto Lakeshore Drive I was pretty well toasted. It was also only about 8:55 am. Usually, if the Giro gets back onto Lakeshore Drive by 9:10 it's a fast Giro. I rode around Lakeshore Drive for a little bit waiting for Danielle who had been doing intervals, but couldn't find her so I rode back to Starbucks and hung out with the NOBC group at NOLA Beans until she showed up.

So Sunday morning it was raining when I woke up at 5:45, so I went back to sleep. I'd had more than my fair share of wine the night before since my brother and family were in town for his 60th birthday. I eventually went out in the afternoon when the streets were dry. By then a stiff wind was blowing and it was hot. My legs felt really heavy from Saturday's thrashing, and now I had to fight a west wind all the way out to Kenner on the Lake Trail. I was going mostly 16 mph but the effort felt more like I should be going 24. I got back home three hours later tired, dehydrated and achy.  I guess it's time to start training again.

Springtime

It's 84° F right now in New Orleans. Most of the rain that had been predicted earlier in the week never materialized, and other than a day or two the next week is also looking pretty good. The weather gods even smiled on the annual Rouge-Roubaix race up in St. Francisville last Sunday, offering a nice dry day with warm temperatures after a week of rainy weather.

Like last year, I was helping officiate rather than riding.  I can't honestly say I was disappointed at not being able to ride it. If you aren't in pretty good shape for a hard 4.5 hours on the bike, the last thirty miles of Rouge-Roubaix can be torture. This year the gravel roads were apparently nicely packed down and very fast, which allowed a lot of people to avoid the walk of shame up Blockhouse hill. The Pro/1/2 race was won with a time of 4:10, which is to say those guys at the pointy end of the field rarely saw speeds below 26 mph. I made a Google Fusion map of the home towns of the participants since the race seems to be getting more and more people from farther and farther away. In the Pro/1/2 race there were only two riders in the top 25 from La/Ms. I guess that's good. One highlight this year was Ed Novak's impressive solo win in the Masters race. For once, Ed didn't have some sort of mechanical disaster, plus he had a couple of teammates with him in the final break who effectively thwarted the attempt to chase him down after the last gravel road.

On the other side of the coin, however, were a couple of notable crashes.  Kenny Bellau went down upon hitting a pothole following the first gravel segment when he looked over at just the wrong time. He hit hard on his head and shoulder, and the current diagnosis is a torn labrum.  He is still nursing that arm the same way you do when your collarbone is broken and it still seems to be very painful with little range of motion. Another rider in the Masters race, Howard Sklar, went down even harder, apparently around the end of one of the gravel segments, breaking some bones in his face, his sternum, a collarbone, and some ribs. He was still in the hospital awaiting surgery on Wednesday. Other that that, however, the race went fairly well from an officiating perspective, although since I was at the finish line all day I wouldn't know much about the on-the-road situation. There were only a couple of mistakes in the initial results that were quickly and easily corrected.

Even without riding, however, it was a long weekend for me.  I drove up around 1 pm on Saturday with Tim, one of the other officials, and we worked registration until 6:30 or so, I guess. We were out the door around 5:30 the next morning for another frantic round of registration and data entry. The first group rolled out promptly at 8 am and the last at 9 am. I went straight over to the finish line, about a mile away, and we spent a while setting that up. I had the new RapidCam camera, so we actually had two legit finish cameras on the line plus one regular camera, even though there are rarely any really close finishes in this race. Once the first riders finish, it's pretty much a steady stream for the next three hours, and toward the end you have riders from all of the races coming in all mixed together. It is difficult to sort them all out. We set up a mobile hotspot and emailed pdf files of the inital results to the after-party where the award presentations are made, which worked out OK, I think.

Heading back with the group on Thursday morning.

So after skipping riding on Monday because I had been up until midnight posting results catching up with email, I made it out Tuesday morning for the group ride. It was a fast one, probably because of the warmer weather.  On Wednesday I met Chris Cleeland from St. Louis who had ridden the Rouge and was still in town. We rode out to meet the WeMoRi and stopped for coffee afterward with Brian. Chris was the one who had been behind Kenny when he crashed, and although he had landed much more gently, he stayed around to make sure Kenny was OK before continuing on. Anyway, it was a pretty fast little lap around City Park. Thursday we had a big group for the morning ride, but it never got quite as fast as it had been on Tuesday, which was fine with me because I was feeling a little tired.

At least during the week I did manage to get the Tulane loaner bike we'd gotten from Brian all put together and functional so one of the medical students can use it for an upcoming race. The left Shimano shifter is all messed up and missing a little spring and I couldn't get it fixed, so Bicycle World gave me an older model left shifter they had lying around, the kind with the exposed cable. I think it will work fine, however. Then Mignon decided to give Tulane her old Specialized Tarmac. It had a broken right shift cable, the remnants of which were all jammed up inside the shifter so you couldn't shift it around into the position where removing it was possible. I ended up drilling a hole in the top of the shift lever in order to get the the cable end, so once we get some wheels, that bike should be good to go too.  That will give us three functional race-ready loaner bikes.

Arkansas

It had been a very long time since I'd ridden in Arkansas - like maybe 35 years. I'd driven up there on a hot mid-summer Friday with a friend in my Triumph GT-6 with my arm hanging out the window and hot air blowing through the numerous gaps in the firewall. It was a stage race in Little Rock and it was a lot of fun, but that was then and this was now. This time I left in a rented minivan with 4 bikes, 4 people, 12 wheels, 4 bags and the various other stuff for two days of collegiate racing.

The flyer offered a chance for alumni to race, so I brought the Bianchi and the race wheels, mainly just to delay the inevitability of being dropped. We left in the morning, headed for Fayetteville, about ten hours away. The forecast looked a little scary. There had been a lot of snow and ice a couple of days before, and the forecast wasn't offering anything more than 32 degrees and clear skies for Saturday morning's time trial, which I had already decided to skip.

Well, as often happens at collegiate races the time trial started at least an hour late. It was a dual-conference race, and the first of the year for the Midwest, so despite the cold temperatures the turnout was higher than expected - around 180 - and since most of them had to get their "permanent" bib numbers, things took a lot longer than expected.  The morning TT was a 10 km uphill, and Kenny and I hung around the start line until all of the Tulane riders had started. The last rider was a little Junior on 24" wheels, wearing a jogging suit and running shoes. Kenny and I followed him most of the way up the hill offering encouragement and instruction on shifting. It turned out to be a lot more comfortable temperature-wise than I would have expected.

The afternoon road races were on a 20-mile loop preceded by a 7 mile out and back section. The course was mostly just rolling hills except for one section that featured a particularly steep 1.5 mile climb. So having talked myself into the Category B race, I started the 50-something mile Road Race along with the Cat. B Men and the Cat. A Women. After a brief neutral section, the Cat. A women, along with a couple of the men, rolled off the front.  I figured they must know something I didn't about the "big hill" but my objective was to get a good workout, not to win the race. It would be practically the first bit of hard riding I'd done in almost three weeks, so I didn't have anything to lose. After a while I decided to take off and see if I could bridge up to the lead group, which at that point had about a 30-40 second lead but didn't seem to be going very hard. After a couple of miles of moderate effort I made contact and took a couple of minutes to recover.

Soon enough the rest of the field came up from behind and a little while later, about 20 miles in to the race, we hit the hill. I immediately dropped it all the way into the 39x25, which was clearly insufficient, and when I started gasping for breath I backed off as the pack spun, apparently without much effort, up the hill. I came over the top figuring I'd be doing a long solo ride, but when I caught another dropped rider I decided to ride with him for a while. After a brief period of 2-man TT riding, a couple of riders came flying past on my left and I jumped to latch on to them. It turned out to be a couple of the women who I'd passed on the climb earlier and now they were flying, trying to bridge back up to the field. The guy I'd been with dropped off right away but the three of us started working together really well and after three miles or so we were back with the pack. Of course I got dropped on the hill again on the next lap, but after that I started feeling much better and had a really nice fast time trial of ten or twelve miles back to the finish. The team did pretty well with Ben missing out on the Cat. A win by a tire width after being in a 2-man break with a Cat. 1 semi pro rider from MSU.

Sunday's criteriums were on a nice course in an undeveloped little subdivision. The weather was significantly warmer, although it was overcast the whole day. I lined up with the Cat. B men for the 45 minute race with the idea of getting in a good workout. Well, they started out more slowly than I liked, so after a lap or two I launched a soft attack, rode a lap or so alone, and was then joined by a couple of others. We were caught a while later, and when the pace sagged again I attacked again, this time taking one rider with me. The two of us worked pretty well together, although I was struggling a bit on the headwind stretch. I think we got the gap out to about 40 seconds, but by then the pack had awakened. After a while a Nebraska rider bridged up to us, which would have been good except that he wouldn't work. That resulted in the other rider backing off too despite my reminders that we had only ten minutes left to go. So we got caught with I guess 5 laps remaining. On the last lap things started getting a little sketchy so I backed off since there was really no reason for me to be taking any chances.

After the race I was surprised to find out that along the way I'd won a prime consisting of a pair of tires.  Sweet! Danielle got 2nd in her race, but the big story was Ben, who ended up in a 2-man break with the same rider from the road race. Ben led the whole last lap as their pace slowed dramatically and I was thinking he was just going to get totally smoked when the other rider attacked, but instead Ben accelerated through the last turn and somehow made it all the way to the finish for the win.

The drive home was a long one thanks to non-stop rain for about six of the ten hours back to New Orleans. Fortunately it was mostly light rain so other than the stretch on state highways through Arkansas it wasn't too bad. We got back shortly before 2 am.