It sounds like the VA Beach Sportsplex Training Criterium Series may be extended!  The City has approved the following dates July 9th/16th/23rd and August 6th/13th/20th.  The race day has been moved from Tuesday to Wednesday.  Even better… there is rumor that they may have it worked out to reduce the registration fee from $15 to $5.  Now $5 is a price I can handle to go out and race knowing that I am going to get spit off the back of the pack.

Tidewater Bike Racing Club has managed to pull it off. They have the Va Beach Crit Course at the Money Pit Stadium (aka Soccer Stadium) lined up for training crits on Tuesday nights!!! From what I can recall in emails that went bouncing around the first one will be on April 15th.
Click here for the race flyer.

This weekend went by in a blur! My sister, Gilbert (aka keirinracer), Danielle, and I left Friday night to head to Charlottesville, VA for a fun filled exciting weekend playing official for some great bike races. The first race of the weekend took us about 1.5 hours from Charlottesville to an area outside of Harrisonburg for the JMU Reddish Knob Hill Climb. After over taking several “high speed” horse and buggies, yes thats right horse and buggies in true pre-motorized vehicle form straight from the barns Amish (or Mennonites) we finally arrived at the staging area. This was an interesting, and beautiful, setting for a race. The time trial was about 12 miles long that straight out course that started with a gradual slope then increased in steepness through several switchbacks to the top of a mountain. At the start the temperature was around 50, at the top it was in the neighborhood of 10 or 15 degrees cooler. Riders were reporting having to make stops along the way to sit atop rocks that were in the sun to warm up before proceeding the rest of the way down the mountain. I forgot how much fun Time Trials can be when they have 30 second starts. That 30 seconds can at sometimes seem to draw on forever, and othertime go by in a flash. Riders rolling in at the last second, trying to make sure the right people have the right numbers, and making sure that your time gaps are correct makes for a very chaotic time! All in all this was a great race and my first experience working a collegiate race. I found that the collegiate racers were a group to work with. Their enthusiasm level and positive attitudes made for a great racing environment.
It’s interesting to me how one or two people will really stand out from in a crowd. Sometimes it’s a bad attititude, sometimes a stellar performance. This Saturday that person was, Julie Gliesing, but then again she stands out at most races. Not only because of her phenomanal strength and speed as a racer, but because of here incredibly positive attitude and radiating smile. From what I heard her smile could be seen coming up the side of the mountain amidst the suffering that had to have been going on in the last stretch of the hill climb! Every time I have ever seen her at a race she is full of encouraging words for her team mates and never have I heard a negative word out of her mouth.
Saturday night was a trip to the South Street Brewery in Charlottesville with a group of 11 other people. They do not take reservations so a wait for a table for such a large group at 7 on a Saturday night was quite long. So I took advantage of the waiting time to enjoy one of their beers called Satan’s Pony. I wasnt sure what exactly it was going to be, but with a name like that I had to try it. It turned out to be an Amber Ale. It tasted pretty good after a long day but wasnt as hoppy or “full bodied” as I tend to like my beer. Once seated the first beer chosen was Absolution Ale, it was good! Much better than Satan’s Pony. More hoppiness and a slightly sweeter taste. The food wasn’t anything to write home about, but then again it was a large group and just a burger. Who comes to a brew pub for the food anyways? The final beer was JP Ale. This one was somewhere in between the Absolution and Satan’s Pony as far as taste. Definitely worth a try. I would like to go back sometime and try this place again with a smaller group and at an earlier, less busy time. Following South Street was a wonderful time sitting in the lobby drinking some great beer that Kevin Long brought down from Blue and Grey Brewery in Fredericksburg. The beer was good and the company was better. Conversation carried on until around midnight, getting up on Sunday morning was going to be “fun”!
The race on Sunday was the Jefferson Cup Road Race. Sunday proved to be an “interesting” day. We arrived at the start line which was in the middle of nowhere at 7:30AM to drop off the equipment and start setting up. It was COLD, and shortly after we arrived something interesting happened. It started to sleet and snow. IT’S LATE MARCH, this isn’t supposed to happen. Luckily I packed for every possible scenario and was able to layer up to stay warm! Ruth Stornetta and her team organized an excellent event. She hired a top notch crew of officials and even paid to have the Finishlynx camera system on the line. From an officials stand point we had one of the best possible scenarios for producing results. We had some of the best hand scorers I have ever seen, the Finishlynx Camera, then two Canon HD cameras attached to Macbooks for the catching the race finishes. The combination of the hand scoring and the the cameras allowed us to turn out accurate results in very short periods of time. The technology makes it much easier to get things done quickly and accurately, but as we found out in one of the races it cant always be counted on exclusively. No matter how good you think the technology is, there is always a need for a backup. Luckily, in this instance when one of the camera/macbooks decided it didn’t want to cooperate we had plenty of back up systems in place. The Finishlynx, other camera, and excellent hand scoring made the issue a complete non-issue. This is a perfect example of why the “art” of hand scoring is very important. If this where any other race, more than likely, the other cameras would not have been there and our finish results would have been entirely dependent on hand scoring.

On the topic of technology…. the site had some downtime this weekend. Stormyworld.net isn’t hosted in some big, overly redundant, super backed up server farm somewhere. It’s on my personal server in my own little house in the non-bike friendly City of Virginia Beach. I don’t have it on a un-interuptable power supply either so if the power goes off the server does too. It also stays off until someone manually turns the server back on. Saturday night the power was turned off in the house and the server was not turned back on until I got home last night. Amber was hearing steady beeping every few seconds Saturday night. After several she made several very frustrated calls to me she shut the main breaker to the house off hoping that would help her find the horribly annoying beeping. Now this one ought to draw some comments from some of the Fire Man/bikers that sometime peruse this site…. the culprit of the beeping was a smoke detector in a cabinet under a sink that had dying batteries. It was there just in case the sink caught fire. Now, before the comments actually get left I do have other several other smoke detectors with working batteries in the house that get new batteries twice a year. This one just happend to get forgotten.

The weekend was fun, but no riding time was put in. Today I am too exhausted to ride even if I didn’t have to take my son, who went to the dark side, to baseball practice. He’s decided to take the season off of “racing bikes” to dedicate himself to the sport of baseball, whats up with that, I thought cycling was the only sport that mattered?????

I FINALLY got around to getting these pictures off of the card and uploaded to the gallery.  Not much as for editing and cleaning up, but they are there.  It was a great time and I look forward to possibly joining in on the next one. 
Here’s the link to the gallery:
The Gallery

Oyster Point Criterium
City Center at Oyster Point Criterium