Month: March 2011

By Mark McGraw | The Campus Gypsy

For those of you who missed the LSU trip, here’s a rundown from my point of view (riding in Men’s C with Carlton Mathis, James “Rosie” Rosenbaum, and Chris Standley).

Team Time Trial (Saturday morning) – beautiful, windless, smooth, flat 10 mi. loop near the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge.

The four of us took 20 second pulls, rode hard and smart and did a good job of talking to each other.  We only needed to finish with 2, so we intentionally rode hard enough so that at least one of us would have to drop.  Chris Standley valiantly hung with us to about the 8 mile mark, gave a ginormous final hard pull and the remaining three of us finished in a sprint.  Rosie and Carlton edged me at the line and Rosie’s wheel counted for our time.  As it turned out we needed just about every second to edge out UT and LSU to get 2^nd in the Men’s C TTT behind Tulane.  We did about as well as we hoped.

By Mark McGraw | The Campus Gypsy

No one in the Men’s “C” group looked back or missed a pedal stroke when we heard the stomach-churning sounds of lycra-encased flesh and a carbon fiber bicycle hitting gravel at speed. It was too early for sentimentality. We were on the first of four eleven-mile laps of a collegiate road race. There were still many tactical moves to be played, much gravel to churn through, and endless pain to be meted out and endured over the next two hours. This was Tunis-Roubaix, the Texas A&M Cycling Team-sponsored event famous for sending unsuspecting riders down tennis ball-sized gravel roads (I believe this year’s course was actually much, much tamer than in years past). What wasn’t tame was the weather: about 52 degrees with a 17 knot north wind gusting to 25 and intermittent rain.