End of a Week

It was another long ride Thursday morning on the levee, and I was in the mood to get a good workout. You see, I'd completely forgotten about the Wednesday training race, and when I walked out of the office around 5:45 it was way too late to make it. I guess I'd been kind of preoccupied all day between checking on Masters Nationals results and, well, WORK. Anyway, the Thursday ride was goood, if unremarkable, and as is usual this time of year I arrived back home wet, tired and hungry. For some reason my legs have felt kind of sore all week, even though I've been trying to give them a little rest. After I got home I noticed I'd received a text message. It was from Tim who said he and Jen had been at the hospital since 2 am and that the baby was almost there. A few hours later I checked back and by then there was a new baby girl in the family. Later that day I got a call from Gina who was on her way to Louisville for her criterium on Friday, having finished up her Residency in Emergency Medicine a few days ago. Since she'll be starting work in a few weeks, she figured she'd have some fun in the interim, even though she was pretty out of shape. Checking the results this morning I see that she didn't finish. Vivian, who rode in a different age group, placed in the 20s in her race the same day. The Herring guys are racing today.

So this morning I had a nice easy ride with just a couple of other riders up on the levee. Since a lot of people don't have work today, including me, the bike path was pretty busy. In particular, I noticed a whole lot of women this morning. Later today I'll be heading up to Oxford, MS with Sam and Rich for a couple of races up around Ole Miss. Kenny, Woody and Scott are supposed to be going there right after their nationals criteriums on Saturday. Looks like it'll be a hot weekend, and I don't feel very well prepared for this one. Oh well. Situation normal.

Riding to Work

This morning's training ride was a fairly typical one at first. Everybody was taking long steady pulls at moderate speeds, except for Sam who darted ahead and rode off the front for a while. Woody was with us for a while, but he was being careful to protect his legs ahead of his trip to Louisville tomorrow where he, Kenny and Scott K will be racing their respective m-nats criteriums. From today's time trials, word is already out that Mike Olheiser won his age group, but I haven't yet heard anything about the fate of our LAMBRA riders (Mat Davis, Mark Graffagnini, Stan Prutz, Charles Hobbs, Vivian Torres, and whoever else I'm missing). Anyway, for the return trip from the turnaround at today's ride, we all hopped aboard the "D" train as Donald pulled the whole bunch of us pretty much the entire way back at 24-25 mph. My legs were still feeling kind of sore from yesterday, so I wasn't inclined to rock that boat at all.

After a quick shower I headed off to work by way of the neighborhood bank's ATM machine and Maple Street Starbucks. At the bank I discovered that they had done away with deposit envelopes and that the new machines now simply suck in each deposit check one at a time, scan them, figure out the amount, and make the deposits that way. I was impressed that it could read the handwritten checks. So I headed down Short Street toward Starbucks, and for some reason decided to get my camera out. This is the street that I normally use to get to the bike path for my morning rides. The first thing that caught my eye was the brightly painted handmade sign at Sycamore St. that says "Slow your roll." There are a number of little signs this scattered about the lower Carrollton neighborhood, and although I have no idea who makes them, I like seeing them. A bit farther down Short Street, near Willow, is a particularly brightly painted little Camelback house, probably originally built as a simple Shotgun around 1900 or so, that I've always found interesting. The tropical plants around this house are further decorated with bromeliads, giving it kind of a Caribbean feel.

Every now and then, it's nice to look up from the handlebars for a few minutes.....

Riding and Results

Tuesday's ride was kind of a hard one. I guess there was a little crosswind today, and after a while the pace started getting faster and faster. Halfway out, the paceline started to come apart, and after a big surge the gaps started to open. Next thing I knew, I was in a little group off the front with Tim and Woody and a couple of others. Riding behind Tim is about as good as it gets -- smooth, steady, and lots of draft. The only potential problem is that he may be going so fast you can't hang on. After the turnaround, it was just Tim and me for much of the way back, with Tim taking long, long pulls and me taking short, short ones. Even so, I got a pretty good workout and arrived back home tired, hungry, and dripping with sweat.

The real news, though, is that two LAMBRA riders won their national championship road races up in Louisville. First, Debbie Milne in the 40-44 age group, and then on Monday Mat Davis. in the 30-34 group. Both wins were well-deserved, too. Naturally, I had to also check the results from the 55-59 age group, which would be mine. The top five were very familiar names: Wayne Stetina, who I raced with back at nationals in 1980 (he won, I got pulled), David LeDuc, who I've raced with at more than one other Masters Nationals, Tom Doughty, who won the Tour de Louisiane one year back in the 80s, and of course Kent Bostick, the original cycling dinosaur. Probably twenty national championships among that group, not to mention at least a couple of Olympics. Anyway, it's exciting to have such great results from riders in our own little Local Association. I'll try and compile all of the LAMBRA results once Masters Nationals ends next week. Mark Graffagnini raced today, but is listed as a DNF, so I don't know what happened there. I'm hoping it wasn't a crash.

Good Rides, Ending Badly

It was another race-free weekend for me, a chance to do some group rides, put some miles in the legs, and flirt with severe dehydration. Saturday morning, with a little time to spare, I rode slowly out to the lakefront for the regular Giro Ride. A few of the stronger local guys were at the stage race in Memphis, or on their way to Masters Nationals, so I was expecting the ride to be a little easier than usual. There were a lot of bikes out at the lakefront. Besides the 40 or so people doing the Giro Ride, there were also the smaller Bovine Paceline group and the GNO Tri groups, both of which leave a few minutes earlier. As usual, the pace remained conversational all the way down Lakeshore Drive and over the Seabrook bridge and Casino overpass, but once we got down onto Hayne Blvd. things picked up considerably. It quickly became clear that it would not be an easy day. In the group was a mysterious rider in an unfamiliar dark jersey. Kenny asked, "Do you know who that guys is?" He was obviously an experienced rider who was riding well. It was a long time before I had the chance to talk to him and learn that he was visiting from Toronto. Anyway, the ride out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles was quite fast. The only thing that hinted at the missing horsepower was the fact that the pace would occasionally slacken for a minute or two before ramping back up. As we came into the last kilometer before the turnaround sprint the speed surged up to 35 mph or so. I can only assume that Howard was on the front at that point. It was way too early, and soon riders were dropping out of the rapidly disintegrating paceline and those of us who had been at the back ended up at the front simply by default. After that, I think the heat started to get to everyone and the pace on the return trip was somewhat less intense. Regardless, it was a good ride. As we cooled down (I use the term loosely) Jay said they were going to do a long ride on the northshore on Sunday, so I added that to my plans.

Sunday morning I was alone heading across the lake to meet the group for the 7:30 a.m. start. As I pulled into a parking spot at the Lee Road school, John Eagan parked alongside and quickly discovered he'd left all of his riding stuff (shoes, shorts, etc.) at home. A couple of hours later we would run into him as we were heading back. The ride started out with I guess ten or twelve riders, and although it was already getting pretty hot by 8 am, the pace was brisk and steady. Somewhere on the back side of the Enon loop we lost a few riders, but since they all knew the route we didn't wait around for them. They were so far back that we couldn't even see them, so we figured maybe somebody had a flat or something. Anyway, that reduced our number to around seven. The pace was really about perfect for me today, and other than the intensifying heat, I was feeling fairly good.

I was running strictly on sugar today. Saturday night I'd been at the welcome party for the new Psychiatry Residents and Fellows where, in addition to a few glasses of Zin and a TurboDog, I'd also sampled a couple of Plum Street Snowballs that had been enhanced with a little Bacardi Rum. This was not great preparation for a long ride in the heat. Breakfast on Sunday had been a leftover cupcake and a 20 oz. bottle of Coke, and for the ride I had a couple of gels and lots of water.

We were only about ten miles from the end of our ride when the crash happened. The last of the traditional sprints on this route is at the parish line on Lee Road. I was toward the back of the paceline and wasn't planning on sprinting. In fact, I wasn't sure anybody was until the pace surged. So I just followed wheels to keep from getting gapped off, but otherwise wasn't paying much attention. Suddenly I heard the unmistakable sounds of crashing bikes as the rider's wheel in front of me locked up and started sliding. Narrowly escaping the carnage, I went right, across the roadside gravel, into the grass, and down into the grass-filled ditch at around 28 mph. I immediately switched into mountain bike mode with my butt hanging off the back of the seat, just hoping there wasn't a big hole or chunk of wood hiding in the tall grass. It was a close one. I finally slowed down enough to turn around and what I saw didn't look good. Jaro was still sitting in the middle of the road holding his left shoulder. There was a twenty-foot long scrape mark on the asphalt. Somehow, nobody else went down, although Jay had ridden right over Jaro's fallen bike. The bike took a bit of a hit. Although the frame was spared, the derailleur hanger was dramatically bent and the derailleur itself was lodged in the spokes. Both wheels were out of true, the bars were twisted almost 90 degrees, and the brake levers were both twisted to the side. Jaro was already saying he thought his collarbone was broken. Anyway, Jay headed down the road to get his car while the rest of us found a shady spot and hung out with Jaro until he arrived to take him to the ER. The rest of the ride was just plain HOT, but at least it was short. It's been about four hours now and I still can't get in touch with Jaro, so he may still be at the hospital. So other than the crash, it was a great ride. I arrived home a couple of quarts low, judging by the bathroom scale, so I guess some rehydration is in order.....

Raindrops and Haze

Fooled again! I left work on Wednesday with plans to ride out to the lakefront for the 6 pm training race. As I rode north on Pine Street I could see the huge black clouds up ahead, and as I neared the house I felt a few cool downdrafts coming from the thunderstorm. The radar looked bad, and by 5:30 the raindrops were already falling, so I cancelled the training race plan and plopped down on the couch, a bit irritated but at least thankful that we were finally getting a little rain. It looked to be impossible that the lakefront would escape the downpour, and at any rate, I would have had to ride through the rain and lightning in order to get out there anyway. Well, as I found out later, it never rained on Lakeshore Drive and the six or seven who showed up had a nice little workout.

Thursday's long levee ride turned out to be a pretty hard one, at least on the way out. The first ten miles or so felt more like a race than a weekday training ride, but it eventually settled down. Then, on the way back, someone flatted at The Dip, and although he told the group to keep going, we had already slowed down and it took a long time before the pace picked up again. This morning's ride was a nice typical Friday ride with six or seven people and a steady speed in the 20-22 mph range. Thanks to some more rain yesterday, the humidity level was pretty high, making for a hazy sky and balmy air. You know, normal weather.

The next week will be very busy for some folks. There's the big Memphis omnium up in Tennessee this weekend to which a number of the local guys are going. Then, Masters Nationals start in Louisville on Sunday and run until the following Friday. LAMBRA will have at least ten riders up there in the various age groups, so hopefully a few of them will get some good results. This year LAMBRA is giving $150 travel grants to our riders who go to Nationals. I think we started a trend, because TxBRA just announced a similar program. Their program, of course, is restricted to Juniors and U-23 riders and there's a limit on the number of awards they can do. There are way too many riders in Texas for them to be able to do it the way we did. It'll probably cost LAMBRA around $2,000, maybe just a bit more. Money well spent, I think. Hopefully these riders will come back and share their experiences and encourage others to upgrade and compete in more regional and national races. Immediately after Masters Nationals, there's an Omnium up in Oxford, MS with a criterium on the Ole Miss campus. I think a couple of the guys are planning on driving straight from their criteriums at Masters Nats over to Oxford. Me? Well, considering the big expense for the air-conditioning system at the house, and the fact that I needed to be at the Oxford races, I think I'll have to pass on Memphis and Louisville.

Feels Like

I was up a bit too late last night, thanks to some non-standard size Brazilian wine bottle that wouldn't fit conveniently into the refrigerator. So naturally I had to stay up until I finished it. I spent some of that time sewing a boot into a practically new Michelin Pro Race tire that had gotten slashed during a race earlier this year. Yesterday's rear tire was looking pretty tired after I pulled the big finishing nail out of it and then proceeded to ride home on the flat, so I thought it might be a good time to see if I can salvage a few miles out of that Michelin. Anyway, my late night activities certainly seemed to make my 5:45 am wake-up call a little harder to take than usual. Actually, there was an earlier 5:15 alarm from my wristwatch that I keep forgetting to reset.

There was a pretty good breeze blowing up on the levee this morning. We started out riding straight into it, but the group was feeling pretty lazy today and it was a long time before the double paceline devolved into a single one, and even longer before that disintegrated into just a handful rotating at the front. As the ride went on I started feeling a little better, especially after we turned around and had the benefit of a nice tailwind. Otherwise, it was a pretty normal Wednesday ride.

The hot and dry weather continues. Last night the weatherman seemed genuinely excited that there might be a slight chance of rain today. With the temperature hovering around 100F right now, it's not looking too promising, but who knows? I think I'll make it out to the lakefront after work for the training race, if I don't melt.

Flats and Fahrenheit

Almost midnight and the temperature outside is still 85º Fahrenheit with 76% relative humidity. Luckily I'm sitting here enjoying the new air-conditioning and trying not to think about what the next electric bill will look like. I had a 2 pm meeting this afternoon at Gibson Hall and the short ride over to St. Charles Avenue was less than wonderful. I think the high today at Audubon Park was over 100 degrees. It felt just like riding with a hair dryer pointed right at your face the whole time. The meeting, by the way, was animated by the arrival of a press release from the Governor's office saying that they were putting land acquisition for the new hospital on hold until LSU and Tulane work out a plan for running the thing. Basically, the Governor is letting LSU know he's getting tired of the game-playing. He can't afford to have this new hospital project fall apart on his watch if he has any intention of running for a higher office as everyone suspects. However, I digress.....

The long Tuesday ride was today and I am still not feeling quite right. As we headed out, the pace started to ramp up as usual, but I think a lot of the guys just weren't up for the usual hammerfest today. The heat will do that. I had to close a few gaps and I guess we were still going pretty hard when we hit The Dip. I was next to Kenny when I suddenly heard this loud "clank, clank, clank" sound. I thought he'd picked up a nail or something that was hitting the chainstay, but as it turned out he'd broken a spoke in one of those funky Campi wheels with the clusters of three spokes. He waved the group on while a few of us stopped to help while he unscrewed the broken spoke from the nipple.

Then, on the way back, things started getting fast again and I found myself off the front with Tim and Kenny. I took a pull and dropped back, only to find that Kenny was gone. With the light tailwind Tim was pulling at something like 29 mph. I'd come though now and then, but the best I could sustain was more like 26-27. I looked back and couldn't see the group at all. We were around River Ridge when I heard my phone ringing. I thought that perhaps there had been a crash or something, but it was just Kenny telling me that they'd had a flat and were way behind us. Well, since we were already near where Tim pulls off to go home, I sat up and waited. Eventually Kenny and Sam came up from behind around Ochsner and when I turned off to head home Kenny came along for the ride. Then, as we were riding down Short Street, I picked up a big nail in my rear tire. I was hot and tired and there were only seven or eight blocks to go, so I pulled the nail out and just rode on the flat the rest of the way home. I guess I could have really rushed to make the Time Trial out on the lakefront after work, but my commute home felt like a ride through a blast-furnace and I just couldn't get too excited about riding out to the lake to do a 10k time trial.