Rouge Roubaix

Those crazy Cajuns - who else would come up with a 102-mile race with three dirt sections (including one 20% climb) and some paved sections worse than the dirt sections?  It was a blast!

Road Trip!

Robert and a few other Georgia Neuro teammates went to Rouge Roubaix last year and had such a good time that I decided to join them this year.  On Friday morning the two of us plus Stony and Van headed out toward St. Francisville, Louisiana, which is about 30 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.  Road trip!

We met at Stony's house.  While we were waiting for Van to get there from taking his kids to school, we stood in the driveway, chatting with Stony's wife Jodi.  Admiring the handy, four-bike rack on the back of Robert's Nissan, Jodi said, "Nice rack!"  Our eyes got wide as we all looked at each other, and then we burst out laughing.  It's not too often that you hear a woman say that to a man.  (And when it's vice versa, a slap usually ensues.)  That was a good preface for the drive to Louisiana.  Van, who seems like such a quiet, unassuming guy, is actually quite hilarious.  He and Stony both kept us entertained.

Cajun Hospitality

The drive from there to the Magnuson Hotel in St. Francisville took approximately 8 1/2 hours.  We were glad to have rooms at the race hotel, particularly since the race would be starting right at its front door.  A fleur de lis fountain gave us a warm Louisiana welcome:

Race package pick-up was already available.  Each of us received a terrific musette with the Rouge Roubaix logo:

My current lunch bag is getting kind of worn out, and I will enjoy replacing it with my musette.  The race organizers were kind enough to give me an extra musette, too.  My sister, who is a French teacher, will love it!

I also bought a Rouge Roubaix jersey, a great memento of the weekend:

The three guys and I then did a bike walk to check out the last few miles of the race course and the finish line.  Afterwards, we met up with our fellow cycling friends from Georgia: Jake, John, and their mechanic Byron with the Cherry Street Cycles team and Matt R. from Columbus.  We carpooled down to Baton Rouge for dinner at The Chimes.  I thoroughly enjoyed some good beer, delicious oysters on the half shell, and a nice, big spinach salad.

Pi Day

Saturday was an extra special day.  Not just because we had a Rouge Roubaix recon planned for the afternoon, but also it was Pi Day!  I love celebrating Pi Day every March 14, but this year it was epic.  That's because it was on 3/14/15.  The digits of pi are 3.141592653...  Therefore, I had to celebrate really hard at 9:26:53.  (We had two opportunities to do so on Saturday, A.M. and P.M.)

As a math lover, I have several pi shirts.  With this once-in-a-lifetime special Pi Day, I brought two pi shirts on our trip.  I wore my chicken pot pi shirt to breakfast:

On the way to breakfast I had seen a beautiful egret by the pond in front of our motel.  I kind of regretted not stopping then to take a picture, but I was happy to see it still there when we returned.  I wish I could have gotten closer before I scared it away.  I love water birds.  This is the best picture I could get.

Recon

After indulging in a late morning nap, I joined my teammates and the other guys from Georgia for our afternoon course reconnaissance.  The course covered an area north of St. Francisville that extended into the southwestern tip of Mississippi.  We focused on the three dirt sections.  The first one was much like the dirt roads I ride near my house, but not as hilly.  The second dirt section was much hillier than home, featuring several significant climbs.  It also had one particularly sandy section, which was still somewhat moist from the heavy rains that had fallen in the previous few days.  However, because such sandy soil drains quickly, we knew that this area would be a lot trickier to navigate by race time.  I'm not a very good technical rider and planned to take all of the dirt descents carefully anyway, but I was glad to see what I would be facing.

Then it was time for the infamous Big Bertha.  This is the first climb in Tunica Hills, the third dirt section of Rouge Roubaix.  Big Bertha isn't a terribly long climb, but it has a 20% grade!  I was happy to make it up without walking.  We'd just have to see, though, how I would fare during the race itself with 80 miles in my legs.

The Tunica Hills Wildlife Management Area is beautiful.  It has several other significant hills in addition to Big Bertha.  The climbs, corresponding descents, narrow roads, and strategically located mud puddles and potholes made this one of the most challenging portions of the ride.

Slightly muddy after the recon

The road more graveled through Tunica Hills

Van is the walrus.  Goo goo g'joob.

The Tunica Hills region has fascinatingly unique geology resulting from alternating Ice Age and warmer periods.  During the Ice Age conditions, expanding glaciers ground down rock in the upper Midwest, forming "rock flour" or loess.  These sediments were carried downstream by the Mississippi River during subsequent warmer periods when the glaciers began to melt.  As the climate cooled again, the flow of the Mississippi River decreased, and wind carried the loess to the east, forming the Tunica Hills.  Later, bayous eroded the hills to form channels and gullies.

Pi Day Redux

After the recon, we all went to dinner together.  Matt W. from the Cherry Street team and his wife Kim joined us, too - the more, the merrier!  (They had been visiting friends in Baton Rouge the night before.)  We drove a short distance to New Roads, LA for dinner.  It's on the other side of the Mississippi River, which we crossed on a cable-stayed bridge that looked especially grand at sunset:

We sat on the deck at Satterfield's, which highlighted another intriguing geological feature, the oxbow lake.  It looked like we were on the Mississippi River, but it was actually a U-shaped lake that was formed when a meander of the Mississippi was cut off due to sedimentation, creating a free-standing body of water, i.e., an oxbow lake.

I continued my Pi Day festivities by eating some crawfish pi while wearing my cow pi T-shirt:

I likely would have ordered this dish anyway because I love crawfish, but who knows when I might get to celebrate Pi Day again with a Cajun flair?

Race Day!

After a good night's sleep, it was game on!  I was a little nervous because this was my first road race since my very serious crash three years ago.  I've essentially given up mass start races, but I made an exception for Rouge Roubaix because there was a separate women's field, and I figured that the long distance would spread out the field.  Twenty-seven women did the race, the largest field Rouge Roubaix has ever had.  My competition came from as far away as Colorado and Ohio.  One of them in particular looked like she could kick the rest of our asses.  I guess she did because she made the podium!

The first 3.75 miles were a neutral roll-out.  I was on the front, pedaling easily.  When the race went live at the first turn, I picked up the tempo.  I had no idea whether a group would try to break right away or if it would be more of a tea party.  Not that I have that much road race experience, but I've seen both situations in women's races.  This time it was somewhere in between - a good solid pace for the first 25 miles, like a hard Tuesday Worlds.  It was pretty challenging because we went on some fairly rough rural roads.  I had to keep concentrating to stay with the peloton while simultaneously avoiding the serious potholes.

We turned onto the first dirt section.  That's all she wrote.  I was pedaling as hard as I could, but I got dropped like a hot potato.  Honestly, I wasn't surprised, and I wasn't totally heartbroken.  I had already suspected that I wouldn't be able to keep up for the whole race.  Also, some of the worst paved sections were still to come, and it would have been nerve-wracking to deal with them in a group.  So, I just put my mind to riding as hard as I could for the rest of the race.

I did manage to pass a few other women who popped after I did, and no women passed me after I got dropped.  Knowing that I would climb better than average on the two remaining dirt sections, I thought I would place fairly well after the front group.

I had already been riding at or near threshold when I was dropped, and I hoped that wouldn't come back to haunt me late in the race.  Fortunately, it didn't.  All my training - long endurance rides, intervals, dirt road rides - paid off.  My fueling strategy from brevets worked well, too.  I had three unwrapped Clif Bars in my jersey pockets, which I ate every hour and a half.  Two bottles of Heed kept me hydrated and provided additional calories.  Additionally, there were three feed zones with neutral support, i.e., water bottles that you could reach out and grab.  One nice touch is that Rouge Roubaix provides real water bottles with the race logo, not just disposable bottles of store-bought water.  The reusable Rouge Roubaix bottles make nice souvenirs, too!

By the way, I had worn plain, black cycling shorts instead of my team bib shorts to make it quicker to take nature breaks.  Robert had told me that I wouldn't feel the need to take one, despite the approximately six hours I would be on the bike.  He said that it's the weirdest thing; he can't go for more than an hour on a Peach Peloton ride without taking a nature break, but he never has to take one during a race, even a long one.  Robert was right; I never had to stop!

The sandy area in the second dirt section was, in fact, even drier and more treacherous than the day before.  I did have to hop off my bike and push it through that trough.  On the other hand, I was able to pedal up every climb, even Big Bertha!  Woo hoo!  That was one of my goals for the day.  I reached all of my other goals, too: no crashes, no mechanicals, and riding well for my abilities.  I wanted to finish in less than six hours, which I did; my official time was 5:45.  Not that I was fresh as a daisy at the end, but I wasn't dying, either.  I was happy with my performance.  I wound up placing 13th out of 27, in the top half - I'll take it!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

We took showers at the motel and hit the road home as soon as possible.  It was a long drive, not to mention losing an hour going from the Central to the Eastern time zone.  I slept as much as I could in the car.  Robert and I dropped off Stony and Van in Macon and headed to our house in Monticello, arriving around 2:00 A.M.  Monday morning - and work - came all too soon.  It was worth it, though, for such a fun weekend!