"The Daughter" is 20

Well, The Daughter made 20 the other day, and since I'm really only about 25 in my head, I guess that implies that I was, like, 5, when she was born. That's kinda creepy.

She's been up in Iowa at school where she's apparenly kept pretty busy and is hopefully studying a lot in-between training and partying and sleeping. As far as I can tell, she's having a pretty good time. I shipped her some stuff for her b-day, and will have some more to send up shortly, including a new pair of riding shorts and some riding gloves. I wonder if she's been using that old bike to get to campus, but I'm guessing she's walking most of the time. I keep AIM up on my desktop most of the time, and it's nice to get her away messages if she's not there. Between that and the Pentacrest Webcam, and the weather channel site, it keeps me feeling kind of connected. Here's The Daughter's AIM away message today:

"chem lab chem disc, gym, anatomy, gym, books, dinner with Nic, SLEEP"

I always kind of liked chem lab, I have no clue what "chem disc" is, and who is Nic???

Singin' the Post-Olympic Blues

The Closing Ceremonies were yesterday, and another Olympics is in the record book. I always have this kind of melancholy reflective feeling after the Olympics. It's really the closest the whole world ever comes to The Ideal. I'm not much of a sports spectator, but it's hard not to feel the emotions that the Olympics bring out, and now there's this feeling of emptiness made even worse by the fact that it's also around the end of the cycling season. I guess we're all really just frustrated Olympians in one way or the other.

On the local front, nobody seemed to feel depressed on the weekend Giro rides! The rides were pretty fast on both Saturday and Sunday this week, and I was feeling good for both of them. There was supposed to be a track meet last weekend, but on Friday the organizer sent out an e-mail and cancelled it. I e-mailed him to find out what happened and he said that he had assumed that his meet was included under the USCF permit for the LAMBRA track series, and by the time he found out it wasn't it was too late and the velodrome folks (BREC) required a certificate of insurance. Talk about a lack of communication!! He basically said that LAMBRA screwed him. Sounds to me like he should have confirmed his permit and insurance arrangements more than a couple of days before the meet, though. There is some kind of "issue" between the promoting club (Tiger Cycling Foundation) and the President of LAMBRA that isn't doing anyone any good. They need to just get over it. Anyway, I expect to see a lot of turnover in the LAMBRA officials slots next year.

The Texas folks finally sent out the preliminary results of the Tour of Columbus, which happened A WEEK AGO! Good grief, what a screw-up! The silver lining, however, is that one of the Texas folks and I have gotten in touch with each other and will be working on developing a good Excel workbook that can be used by Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi folks, at least, for stage race results. He send me his version and I sent him the one I used for the Tour de La, so hopefully we can combine the best of both, add a few bells and whistles, and have something that will benefit everyone.

Training time is looking to be tight for me the next few days. I have a marathon of meetings all day tomorrow and Wednesday starting early in the morning, so the morning group rides will be impossible. Hopefully I'll be able to get in a few pre-sunrise miles to counteract all of the coffee I'm liable to be drinking the next couple of days.

(32-1)

Crack! I wasn't quite sure what it was. I had just jumped onto someone's wheel in the third sprint in this morning's Giro. My first thought was that the sound had come from the bottom bracket. I didn't pay much attention to it and finished the sprint.

After the sprint and the turn-around at Venetian Isles the group goes easy for a while to regroup. It was there that Clayton rode up to me and said my rear wheel was wobbling all over the place. I knew immediately what had happened. That loud sound I had heard was a spoke breaking. I released the quick-release on the brake lever and made sure nothing was rubbing. Not a big problem, really, just an unusual one for me. At 125 lbs, I don't break spokes very often.

This particular wheel is my training wheel. I guess it's got around 25,000 miles on it. Everyone should have wheels like this - standard 32-hole spoked wheels. I don't really understand why so many guys do all their training on expensive wheels. Tonight I'll pull a few spokes out of the big bundle of spokes that I've accumulated over the years, find one that fits, replace the broken one, true the wheel up (more or less), and I'll be riding the wheel again tomorrow morning. If I had broken a spoke on an expensive 18-spoke wheel, it wouldn't be so simple. For one thing, the wheel probably would have gone so out of true that I would have had to stop and call for extraction.

This morning's ride had a big group and was mostly pretty fast. On the way out we were at around 28 a lot of the time, and on the way back with a little tailwind, it was more like 30. I was feeling surprisingly good today and when Tim rolled off the front on the way back, I tagged along, hanging onto his wheel as he motored at 28 mph for three or four miles, dropping only to 24 or so to climb the overpass and bridge near the old airport.

I'm sitting in my office right now where it is about 90 degrees because they turn off our a/c on the weekends. I had to come in, though, because there was a bad link on the Donzaroo website for a benefit bike ride that's coming up and it needed to get fixed right away so people could download the registration form. Donnie is a well known and respected triathlete who came down with Lou Gehrig's disease, and the tri/cycling community has been holding lots of benefit events to raise money for him and his family. For my part, I built and maintain the website.

Last Saturday (I think this is funny, go figure!)

From the RBR Newsletter:

Last Saturday Morning
On Saturday morning, a roadie gets up early, as he has for so many Saturday morning rides, and softly slips out of the bedroom. He dresses quietly in the next room, grabs his helmet and water bottles, and goes out to pump the tires. As the garage door opens, he's confronted by an icy,windswept rain. He's ridden before in these conditions. He doesn't like it, but when it's Saturday morning he never misses. He ponders the dismal conditions and then retreats to the kitchen to tune a small TV to the Weather Channel. The forecast only sounds worse. This is one Saturday when he just can't summon the determination. With a sigh, he slips off his shoes, quietly returns tothe bedroom, undresses and slips back into bed. There he cuddles up to his wife's back and whispers, "The weather out there is terrible." To which she sleepily replies, "Can you believe myhusband went riding in that crap?"

My Kind of Bike Stuff - Cheap!

My many unprepared years of parenthood, along with some sort of inborn resistance to waste and marketing, have made me rather - how shall I put this? - frugal. This seems to be especially evident when it comes to my bike. Granted, it's a real nice bike with full Campy Record stuff, but then again, I didn't actually buy it. I got it in return for some website work I did for a friend who, at the time, owned a bike shop. But somehow spending real money on my bike always feels like I'm taking food off the table.

In reality, I'm the guy who takes home the punctured inner tubes that the other guy with the fancy-schmancy CO2 inflator has left behind. Guys give me their old tires and I usually get another thousand miles out of them. My saddle only has leather left on it about half-way down on the sides, and what is there is held to the underlying foam with superglue. I buy patches in boxes of 100. (If you're real nice, I'll tell you where to find them.) Get the picture?

The only thing I don't scrimp on too much are my racing wheels, because you just can't be worrying about whether that piece of duct tape on the inside of the tire is going to hold up when you're careening around the last corner at full-bore in a criterium. Of course, that's why I use that wheelset only for racing. The other 10,000 miles each year are ridden on standard 32-hole wheels with whatever rubber currently holds air, and never mind the thump-thump-thump from the front wheel when the brakes are applied and catch on the little crack that is developing at one of the nipple holes.

Anyway, yesterday I broke down, pulled out the debit card, and ordered a few things. It wasn't really my fault. You see, The Daughter's birthday is coming up and I wanted to get her some nice speakers for her laptop since she didn't bring a stereo up to college this year. So I hunted around and ordered her some from Altec-Lansing, but the problem was, that got me into that "ordering stuff" mode, so I also ordered her a pair of on-sale Pearlizumi shorts from Supergo.com, along with some innertubes and a waterbottle cage for myself. Then I hopped on over to Longscycle.com. This is the most amazing website. It is a really terribly designed website, but these guys have some great deals on things like socks and shoe-covers and arm-warmers. I picked up a pair of DeFeet arm-warmers for $9, and some DeFeet socks for $2.49 a pair, and some DeFeet shoe-covers for $9. They seem to buy up overstocked stuff, stuff left over from special events, and some "seconds." I've bought stuff from them before. It's been a long time since I worried whether my socks matched my jersey, so if I can get some nice socks for half the regular price, I'm not going to quibble over whatever odd design is printed on them.

Of course, I wish I was instead at the LBS (Local Bike Shop) buying some $3,000 time trial wheels and those new chainrings I've been needing, and some new shoes that don't make my toes scream in agony after 50 miles, but hey, it's a step in the right direction, right? Maybe eventually the bank account will cooperate and I'll start to wonder why someone would ever go to all the trouble of actually patching innertubes! But I doubt it.

Ahh! Back to the Lakefront

Yesterday's training ride on the levee turned in to kind of a hammerfest for some reason. Not that that's a particularly bad thing. In fact, I spent some time up there with the hammer in hand myself. There were a few times when it got kind of ridiculous, though. I'll never understand the guys who get to the front and up the pace to 30 or 31 mph. They can't sustain that for any length of time, of course, and so by the time they've finished their pulls and dropped back to the back, the pace is already back down to 24 or 25, since the rest of the riders start to get defensive anticipating the next surge. I always have this urge to counter-attack!!

Anyway, when I got up this morning I thought I'd forgo the levee and take a ride out to the Lakefront instead. Back before the levee bike path was completed (a couple of years now), my usual morning training ride took me 6 miles North through town to Lakeshore Drive, along the Southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Lakeshore Drive is fairly quiet in the mornings and offers a five-mile stretch of nice 4-lane road with few intersections and no stop signs or traffic signals, so it's a favorite place to ride. I would do a complete lap of Lakeshore Drive, sometimes tacking on a few extra miles, and then head home, giving me a nice 20-25 mi. ride.

I headed out in semi-darkness. It was a nice change to get back out to the lakefront and train alone. I'm becoming convinced that I need a day or two of solo training each week, even though it can be a little disconcerting because of the lower average speed. Riding alone, I'm usually most comfortable at 19-22 mph. In a group, it's usually more like 25-27. Anyway, it is still hot and humid around here, with no end in sight.

The daughter started classes yesterday up in Iowa. It will be an interesting semester for her, taking some interesting but challenging courses and living off-campus. She will have a tight schedule between classes and gymnastics practice, and dealing with bats flying around in the house she and four other athletes have rented. I hardly remember what it was like to be a sophomore in college, but for me it was much different - living at home, just starting to race bicycles. Such a missed opportunity.

There is a track meet this weekend at the velodrome in Baton Rouge, but I'm very undecided about whether I want to race. I've only been on the track once this season and I never seem to do very well on the oval for some reason. We'll see. I hate to not support the event. The meet is mostly pursuits, with a couple of scratch races thrown in on Saturday afternoon. I really don't have any interest in the pursuits. I mean, that's just pure torture.

"Can't Trust That Day" Monday Report

Monday, Monday.
Geez, it must be 85 degrees in my office right now. Our office is on top of a 25-story building in downtown New Orleans, and I have this great view of the Mississippi River and French Quarter, but the problem is that it's all single-pane glass and it's facing South, so on a clear Summer day like today the glass heats up like an oven wall and we bake until the afternoon.

Athens. New Orleans. Hot, hot, hot. Spent much time this weekend hiding in the minimal a/c of my bedroom eating whatever came to hand and watching Olympics coverage. The highlight for me: The women's marathon was just fantastic! This is what we would call a "selective course" in cycling. The 91-pound 4-foot-something Japanese woman won, attacking the climb and putting the favorites in serious trouble. Somehow I just love seeing those big tall powerhouses get crushed by the lightweights. I always liked "Mighty Mouse." The U.S. woman was never in the lead group of 10-12, and was down by a couple of minutes at one point, but stuck to her plan and started picking off runners one-by-one over the last 10k, finally passing the 3rd-placed Kenyan and moving solidly into third place. Awesome.
On the home front, I got in a couple of nice Giro rides and an easy ride this morning, and just finished posting a bunch of photos from the Team Time Trial at:http://www.gnofn.org/~nobc//2004/team_tt_r.htm . The temperature is already in the 90s and the forecast for the next week is identical each day. Highs in the mid-90s, lows around 80, 30-40% chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Typical summer weather.

Got an e-mail today from someone who will be moving to N.O. from Houston and was wondering about Cyclocross racing. I had to give her the bad news that it practically didn't exist here, but I think she was happy to see that there was at least some mountain bike racing. She has been very involved with bicycle advocacy in Houston, so if she's interested in that, she won't have any trouble finding stuff to do around here. Maybe we can convert her to road racing! We could really use a few more good women around here. Hopefully she can find a decent job here (she's moving because of her boyfriend's job). Usually, people move from New Orleans to Houston, not the other way around!

Much to do today . . .

Giro Ride - Zoom, Zoom!!

Every city seems to have one - the weekend group training ride. Around here it's the "Giro Ride." I've done similar group rides in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas and California. They're always fun and they're usually pretty hard at one point or another, and for the non-OCD types like me, they're a better workout than riding alone. Now I know that a disciplined and determined rider can usally get better race results by following a carefully prescribed coach-designed workout plan, logging heart rate and wattage produced etc., etc., all to be uploaded later to the big-brother coach's computer for detailed analysis. I mean, it works for Lance. I guess I'm just willing to give up a little bit in the race-results column in order to get a little more in the fun column.

Anyway, today's ride started out with a pretty big group - around 45-50, I'd guess. The nice Fall-like weather that we enjoyed last week is long gone, and early this morning we had the usual high humidity and temperatures in the mid-80's. A couple of blocks from the Lakefront on my way to the ride start from my home uptown, my glasses started fogging up from the extra humidity caused by the warm Lake water. The official lake water temperature is 84° F.

The ride started out as usual with 5 or 6 miles of slow conversational pace along the Lakefront. Once the group got over the two bridges and hit Hayne Blvd., things ramped up pretty quickly. For the next 5 miles or so the pace stayed up around 28-30. I took a few pulls, but got out of the rotation now and then to rest a bit near the back. Heading out Highway 90 a few miles later, the pace got fast again and I was seeing a lot of 29s and 30s on the computer as a group of 15 or so riders had a fast paceline going at the front. I stayed in there for a few rotations, but didn't want to kill myself quite so early and dropped back for a while. About a mile from the turnaround sprint at Venetian Isles, I was sitting in the middle of the paceline, rather undecided about whether I realy wanted to contest it when I heard Robin coming up behind me calling my name. We had both noticed that the NBO guys were trying to organize a big leadout for the sprint, and, well, we just couldn't ignore that!

So I jump onto Robin's wheel and he rides up the left side at 29 mph and pulls even with Brett. Brett accelerates and I shift over onto his wheel causing a little disruption behind. A couple of NBO guys come around and I latch onto Noel's wheel and he basically just pulls me the last 50 meters to the nonexistant finish line at around 36 mph. Yeah, I probably could have come around him, given apropriate motivation. The ride back stayed fairly fast, with the usual sprints to tops of the two bridges. I was feeling pretty good today and went with the leaders on both. It was a fun Giro ride, but it sure is hot and humid around here.

Tilting the Other Way

Can you feel it? The shorter days, the later sunrise, the carpool lines in the morning? It's happening again - we're tilting away from the Sun. There's something about this time of year. I went out just before dawn this morning to ride, since I had to get to work early for some meetings. Leaving the house in the dark, I looked up at the stars just starting to fade ahead of the dawn and it made me think of winter. The only reliable time I have for training is in the early morning, and in the winter that means hitting the road in the dark, when it's still really cold. This morning it was certainly not cold, but it still made me think of the coming Winter. With only a few races left this season, at least races that I am likely to be able to race in, it's getting harder to concentrate on training. I always want to ride easy and look at the scenery this time of year. In fact, I look forward to it. The morning group was on its way out as I was on my way back, and since I still had a few minutes to spare, I turned around and rode with them for a few miles before heading back home. Riding down Carrollton Avenue there were little groups of schoolkids on the corners waiting for their busses - today was the first day of class for the public schools. The Superintendent is hoping to set a new record by having 90% of the students actually show up for the first day of class. Pretty sad.

I felt good riding today, though. I wish I was looking forward to some big races, but the reality is that things are winding down and besides I can't really afford to be taking any big road trips or paying any $60 entry fees anyway. I'll try and stay in reasonable shape for the rumored Baton Rouge criterium and our traditional end-of-season Rocktoberfest race on the lakefront, but I'm sure that by the time it's October I will have already lost some fitness. Another month or so and I'll be wrapping up my 33rd racing season. Damn. 33 years and I'm still tying to get it right!

Gold, Silver and Bronze!

Time and Time Again - The Race of Truth in Athens


(photo by AFP Photo from Cyclingnews.com)

Big day for U.S. cyclists in Athens today! First, veteran time-trial specialist Dede Demet took 2nd place in the women's Time Trial, with 30-something teammate Christine Thorburn in 4th, and then old brittle-boned Tyler Hamilton won the men's time trial with a blazing average speed of just over 31 mph for the 48k course! Right behind him taking the bronze medal was Bobby Julich riding with a broken wrist left over from the Tour. Three cycling medals on the same day! Sweet.

Too bad the USA just can't seem to put together a win in the Road Races. This year it was apparent that there was no real game plan - no team leader, unlike the Italians who did just a super job of getting their top guy across the line first. I am always rather amazed at the speeds these guys can go. I mean, for mere mortals, an average speed of 27 for a 48k course would be extraordinary. The difference between 27 and 31 may not seem like a lot, but if you race, you know that it takes a huge increase in power to make that jump. Tyler, I think, was the rider most hungry for this win and it showed, although I would have expected Ullrich to have made the podium. Don' t know what happened there.

On the home front, it looks like I'll be taking abbreviated rides the next couple of days because of some consultant meetings tomorrow and Friday, but I'm sure I'll find some time - maybe in the evenings. Besides, I need some riding alone-time anyway. Still lots of talk about last weekend's time trials. Shreveport is talking about putting on a short TT in late September. Tom Bain, one of the Texas dinosaurs, placed 3rd in the crit last week at masters nationals in Salt Lake City. Pretty good considering the altitude!

Trial by Time

The Time Trial is often called the "Race of Truth." Some riders, myself included, have less-flattering names for it. Like trips to the dentist, time trials are things that I make myself do now and then. Rather than glorious victory, I tend to strive for mere adequacy. Sometimes, as Adam Osborne used to say, "Adequacy is sufficient." Nowadays it seems that adequacy demands sub-hour times for a standard 40k TT like today's. The results from the TT are at http://www.gnofn.org/~nobc/2004/lams_tt_r.htm.

I can remember being quite pleased with TT times of 1:07. Then again, I can remember wool shorts with leather chamois. Nasty, those things were, but I digress. Today it is hard to take a time trial seriously if you aren’t equipped with the latest time-trial frame, $3,000 wheelset, carbon-fiber aero-bars, TT helmet and snazzy shoe-covers. In my case, I clip on a set of aero-bars I inherited from a rider who retired from racing, remove my water-bottle cages (purely for psychological reasons), put on my 20-year-old skinsuit, and prepare for an hour of painful mental warfare. With a fairly serious headwind blowing down the outbound leg of the course, it was going to be a long way to the turnaround. Here’s the play-by-play:

• Matt counts me down from 10 seconds in French (I think I did that to him earlier this year when I was the starter for the Tour de La). ... trois, deux, un - and I take off. I try to take off at a medium pace, but the first time I look at the computer it reads 27. Let's see. 27 mph into a headwind for the next 20k? "I don't think so."
• Half a mile in and I’m at 26 mph and starting to go anaerobic. I gradually drop it down to 25 to see how long I can hold that.
• I look up and see that I’m about to catch my minute-man. WTF? I’m only 2 miles in, and I’m not going that fast.
• By 5 mi. I’ve finally started to settle in and am holding around 24 – 24.5 mph., which I know from experience is about the bare minimum, but it is hurting.
• About half-way out I come to the boat launch area where there are fewer trees alongside the road and the wind hits me in the face like a bag of cement. My speed drops to 23 and I shift down a cog to the 53x16. I can see my 2-minute man just up the road and my 3-minute man a bit farther up.
• The wind eases a bit and I get back into the 24 mph range and am rolling pretty well, but it’s been so long since I’ve done one of these blasted things that I am very unsure how hard I can afford to go without blowing up. Every now and then I slow down one mph or so for a little recovery. Not really a good idea, as it turned out, but I pass two more riders before the turnaround.
• I make my usual fast and clean turnaround. I realize this is my favorite part of the TT – you know, the part that is most like a Crit! Figures.
• I’m immediately disappointed because the tailwind isn’t as nice as I had been expecting (it never is), but I find that I can handle 27-28 most of the way back, with a few surges up to 30 or so.
• I pass a bunch of the women and a few bicycle tourists who have wandered onto the closed TT course, and pick my way through herds of gigantic black and yellow crickets having insect sex in the middle of the road.
• Finally, I can see the finish from about a kilometer out and I gut out a long stretch at about 29 mph to finish. I don’t feel too bad, and already I’m realizing that I probably could have gone a bit faster. I end up with a 59:05, which will suffice to prevent any major embarrassment, but isn’t going to look too great next to all the 56s and 57s that I know the Real ™ time trialists are going to turn in, not to mention the 54:10 that 40+ Frank M ends up doing. I think my 40k PR is a high 57, though, so I can't really be very disappointed.

After I finish, there are still a lot of riders who haven’t even started yet, and I notice that nobody is entering results yet (I had made an Excel workbook for results the night before when one of the organizers called and didn’t have anything to use). Well, they’ve made some crucial organizational mistakes results-wise and I see it’s going to become a problem, so I head down to the finish line and get the complete results sheets for the masters, waiting around a few minutes for the last few of the old guys to finish. We enter all of that into the computer and wait, and wait, and don’t get the rest of the results, basically all of the non-age-graded riders,until the last riders come in. Then the generator supplying electricity for my old dead-battery laptop runs out of gas!! Meanshile, riders are gathering around the results table looking over our shoulders and wondering what’s taking so long. Robin heads off to get more gas, and I tell Todd he’d better start doing the senior results by hand, which he does. We finally get the generator working again and the results out (man, we REALLY needed a printer!!) before the mob turns angry on us.
I hustle home and immediately hit the road for Florida – dried salt still on my face – and spend the next three hours in the car plugged into the inverter putting the senior results into the spreadsheet and building the results web page.
Still, it was a great event with probably the best turnout for a time trial ever in La/Ms, and I get the results up on the website around 7 pm when I arrive at Sandestin. And then, finally, a SHOWER!!!

Athenian Gods

I just love the Olympics. I'm watching the rather scattered coverage on NBC right now, although I knew the results of the men's road race hours ago thanks to cyclingnews.com. They probably won't show anything of the Road Race until late at night and I'll probably miss it. Having been a swimmer in a previous life, I find that watching those events causes my heart rate to rise, particularly near the finish. I just love it. Same thing with watching cycling. I must say that even though I wasn't really expecting a gold medal from our cycling team, I was still disappointed with the results. The men's gymnastics is on now. I did a little bit of gymnastics (i.e gymnastics 101) my freshman year in college, but I cannot relate at all to those guys with arms that are bigger than my thighs. Some of the things they do just seem completely outside the realm of possibility for mere mortals. At any rate, I have got to get my skinny butt into the pool this Fall and Winter and try to get some muscle tone back above the waist. Maybe I'll sign up for Spinning classes again this Winter and take a swim after the sessions.

Well, I'm going to do the 40k TT tomorrow morning. I'll be picking Bob up real early since registration opens at 6:30 a.m. for an 8:00 start. It's hard to get excited about time trials when you're competing against guys with special time-trial bikes and $2,000 wheels and aero helmets and all. I usually just take my water bottle cages off (strictly a psychological gesture), clamp on a set of aero-bars, tuck in my jersey and go for it. Hopefully I won't embarass myself too much. I rode the Giro ride this morning, taking it as easy as I could and staying away from the front. Taking a day off is almost never good for me.

I'm using my old back-up laptop right now - a partially broken one that I resurrected from work - because our main laptop, which is Candy's work laptop, seems to have had some sort of problem with its transformer/power supply which basically stopped supplying power. Probably the wire between the transformer and the connector has broken somewhere. I had a universal one at home, so I set it for the right voltage etc., and got it working, but it looks like the power problem caused some hard disk damage. I just got it to finish a 2-hour long surface scan where it found the bad cluster and presumably repaired it, so I'll have to check it out now and see if it's working OK. Otherwise I'll have to run over to work and pull that old Sony Vaio out of my file cabinet to take to the site visit in Florida tomorrow because I will absolutely need to be working some on Monday to line up a bunch of meetings for Thursday and Friday, plus I'll want to get the TT results posted to the NOBC website.

Fall Already???

What great weather this morning! Usually, this time of year, it's 80 degrees and 95% humidity at sunrise when I ride. This morning the Jet Stream decided on a little road trip to the deep south and we had a Northeast wind, temperatures in the low 70's, and ultra-low humidity. Sweet! Friday is the easy day on the levee when we do an easy 25 miles at speeds like 19 mph and catch up on all the gossip. I rode today alongside Billy Widner, who I swam with way back in grammar school and high school days. I think he swam in college. He said that he ran into our old coach, Butch Trellue the other day. Now Butch was a piece of work. He was a great coach and was really the first coach my high school had who really taught us what training was all about. He would show up for meets in outrageous clothes, organize us so we played mind games on the other teams, and got us to shave our legs, which at the time was not generally done at the high school level. I guess that's why shaving my legs for cycling wasn't really such a big deal for me when I started racing after high school. It's still a pain in the arse, however.

So I don't know how long this low humidity will stick around, but I'm glad I got to really enjoy it this morning! The down-side to this great weather, however, is that whenever there's a strong North wind it's really a struggle riding my heavy, upright, single-speed, highly over-geared commuting bike up the Broad St. overpass, which I generally have to do standing up at about 30 strokes per minute dressed for work with a big messenger bag on my back while trucks and busses whiz past at about twice the speed limit. So far, I haven't had to walk, but there was one particularly windy morning last winter when some guy walking down the bridge sidewalk as I was going up actually stopped and cheered me on like Bela Karoli - "You can do it, you can do it!"

I see that the La/Ms points standings have finally been brought up to date. The club is in 2nd place, but there's a pretty big gap now between us and 1st since we had one of our team time trial teams DNF last week after two of them flatted. That probably cost is around 120 points right there, since I'm pretty sure they would have won the masters class. I hope we have a good turnout for the time trial this weekend. I think I'll be able to do it, although I'm not going to be breaking any records! I've been feeling kind of fat and lazy since the Iowa trip. I just can't seem to get excited about time trials. Hopefully that last-minute criterium in Baton Rouge will happen so we have something interesting going on in September. That would at least keep me motivated.

New Rider in Town

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a guy named Bob who was in Paris and was about to move to New Orleans to start Law School at Tulane. I often get e-mails like that, since I'm the website contact for the club. Anyway, he arrived in town recently and called me yesterday to find out the details on the training rides and that sort of thing, and to see if he could get a ride to the Time Trial this weekend since he doesn't have a car. Turns out he rented an apartment just about half a mile down South Claiborne Ave. from me, so he met me at 6 a.m. this morning so I could show him the way to the morning training ride. He looks like he'll be a good rider. When things got fast on the way back he hung in there near the front and ended up with me in a 4-person group hammering along the levee at 30 mph for a while. On the way home he asked if I knew where he could pick up an old mountain bike or something cheap that he could use to commute. Turned out I had an old mountain bike in my basement that I had picked up from somebody's trash about a month ago, so he'll take that and clean it up (rusty chain, broken cables, etc., but round wheels and working brakes). Glad I found a home for it. I hate to see bikes go to waste, even those cheap 40-pound mountain bikes! This wasp sting from yesterday has my whole forearm swollen. It hurts when I ride down bumpy streets!

Good news! I think I may be able to ride the time trial this Sunday. Well maybe that kind of news isn't really so good, considering how much I despise time trials. They're right up there with visits to the dentist on my list. The kind of thing that you know you should do once in a while, but you don't really look forward to it. Anyway, turns out we don't have to be in Florida for that site visit until Sunday evening, so we can probably hop over to LaPlace for the TT and then just head East on I-10 after that for 5 hours to Sandestin. Please light a couple of candles for the old Volvo!!

Meanwhile, I've got a TON of work to wrap up today and tomorrow. You know what they say: "Work Hard, Play Hard!"

Stung!

What is it lately? This morning I'm half-way back from the morning training ride and a wasp slams into my forearm, apparently stinger-first. This is the third wasp sting I've gotten in as many weeks. Prior to that, it must have been years since I had been stung. So now I'm suddenly attractive to wasps?? Anyway, it looks like the tropical storms will be bypassing this neck of the woods for the time being and I'm anticipating some nice weather if we get a little of the usual North wind as one of them passes to the East of us. Should make for a pleasant weekend anyway, though I think we're supposed to drive East to Destin on Sunday, which means I'll miss the Time Trial championships in Baton Rouge, not that I'm really crying about that.

Visited the dermatologist last Monday to have him check out some sort of thing on my arm that was a little swollen and wasn't really healing very well. As I suspected, it was probably just an insect bite of some sort. While I was there, though, he took the opportunity to spray my face liberally with liquid nitrogen, so now I look like someone's been putting out cigarettes on my face. Well, maybe that's an improvement?

Reading some interesting stuff in Science (the July 30 edition finally showed up in my box) in a special section on "testing human limits," which is really a thinly disguised effort to capitalize on the interest in the upcoming Olympics. Still, some interesting stuff, including an article on gymnastics - injuries, score inflation, etc.

Back in the Groove

Far Out! Got in a groovy 20 mile spin yesterday evening and made it out to the 45-mi. levee ride this morning and am starting to feel like I'm back in the groove again. This morning's ride was rather fast - a small group of us held 26-27 all the way out to the turnaround and on the way back I rode alone chasing Donald for a few miles off the front at around 26 mph with my head down until I almost missed the turn-off where the bike path goes down the levee to bypass the chemical plant. Did a little Lance Armstrong thing down the grass on the levee to regain the path, but I lost so much momentum that I gave up the chase and waited for the rest to catch. There were a couple of guys off the front chasing me and Donald, so when they caught me I latched on with them. As we're getting back to Jefferson Parish I'm on the front and I notice a police car coming up the road to cross the levee. Not unusual, and there was time for us to make it across, so no worries. I heard him turn on his siren for a second and thought "nice of him to give us a little warning there." Then I look back and he's stopped the whole bunch behind me. Turned out that some woman walking on the levee with headphones on heard Donald yell at one of the guys in our group to "get the fuck over" as we passed her because he was still in her lane. She thought he was directing that expletive toward her and called the police. As they say, "No good deed goes unpunished." Geez! I mean this is America and we are well within our rights to tell anybody we want to get the fuck over if we want anyway, rignt? Danielle clues us in yesterday that she owes her share of the deposit on the house they're renting in Iowa City, which is like $600. Guess we'll be eating a lot of pasta and rice this month...

Sucking Wheels Sucks

Yesterday's Team Time Trial was rather disappointing for me even though we did a quite respectible time that was good for 5th place in the Cat. 1,2,3 category and less than a minute out of 3rd. The disappointing part was that I was feeling like crap. I guess the road trip up to Iowa and associated off-the-bike time had more of an effect than I expected. The TTT was only about 32 mi. - three laps of a loop mostly along the Mississippi River. I felt OK for the first lap, but when we hit the headwind section on the second lap I just didn't have any power at all. I was on Robin's wheel most of the time and he would take these long pulls into the wind at 28 or 29 mph. By the second lap, I was struggling just to hang onto his wheel and could only manage about 30 pedal strokes after coming around for my pull before my speed would drop a couple of mph. The last lap was pure torture and I was reduced to taking very short pulls and sucking wheel a lot, so I was feeling pretty disappointed that I couldn't really contribute much. I mean, usually I'm the smallest rider on the team, so I always feel strong in Team Time Trials since I get a better draft and therefore more recovery than the rest of the team. Our team consisted of three Masters riders and Branden, who upgraded to Cat. 3 just a couple of weeks ago. Our group of Robin, Rick, Branden and myself was very, very smooth and I think that if I had been in better shape we could have easily finished 15-30 seconds faster - even more if Branden hadn't been riding his regular road bike without even aero-bars (long story there...). Still, we were in good company in the final results, averaging around 26.2 mph with a top speed just over 31, which was pretty good considering the heat and wind, and we easily beat both of the NBO teams, although one of them had a crash that must have cost them a couple of minutes. I think we lost a bit of time on the second lap when we let it drop down to about 24 for quite a while.

So I get up this morning determined to get back to my regular training routine and, of course, it's raining. It seems that there's always some sort of conspiracy involving the weather and my life that screws up my training routine around this time of year. I had decided after the criterium championships where I had ridden myself well into the ground, that I would take it easy the next week, which I did. But then we had to drive up to Iowa City the next week, which meant three full days off the bike and two short easy days, so instead of the usual 200 miles or so during the week, I did all of 50, none of which was at race intensity. Not that it wasn't a nice trip. I really enjoyed it, actually. I just guess I should have been a little more compuslive about riding while I was there. The older I get, the faster I lose fitness. I guess by the time I'm 60 I'll have to be riding three times a day just to stay in shape!!

"Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more."

Through the Cornfields

Although it's not technically Kansas, every time I'm in Iowa, I can't help but think about the opening scenes of "The Wizard of Oz." We drive for hours through endless cornfields. Some of it is really beautiful in a Norman Rockwell sort of way.

We loaded up the old Volvo with three bikes and a huge bag on the roof and made the 15-hour drive up to Iowa City this week to bring Danielle up to school for her sophomore year. The BIG THING that got us up there so early this year was that she was moving into a house near campus that she and four other athletes are renting. This is a typical old house in the city, complete with spooky basement, creaking floors, and various creatures of the night in permanent residence. Their first night in the house, and a bat somehow gets inside, at which point they all lock themselves in the house's single bathroom, leaving Danielle to deal with the frightened little bat. She chased it into one of the bedrooms, shut the door, and waited until the next morning to call so that I could do the "born free" thing and release the cute little mammal back into the wilds of Iowa City.

I brought my bike on the trip and Danielle and I did a 25-mile ride the first morning. The weather there was nothing less than fantastic. Low humidity with low temps in the 60's and highs around 80. The ride was nothing spectacular, but some nice little rollers and decent roads. I did the same ride the next day by myself, but I still feel pretty unprepared for tomorrow's team time trial. This is about the lowest-mileage week I've had all year, I guess.

It was actually a lot of fun fixing up what I could of the house up there and getting Danielle set up in her new place. It seems like a great community there of mostly students. All the houses have bikes outside and people hanging out on the steps and porches. I still wish I had gone away to college. It all looks like so much fun, and even at my (ahem...) advanced age, I feel so comfortable around college students.

Well, now I'm back home with the bills and the job, and on Monday I'll have to hit the ground running to catch up on some important stuff at work. Plus, I am apparently going to be handling the U. of Iowa's women's gymnastics "inside stuff" website, assuming the data systems folks up there can deal with an "outsider" having access. Should be interesting - one more volunteer job!

On the WHAT???

"The pack's closing in on him and he's really on the rivet now."

I suppose I should explain the term "On the Rivet" for those who might be clueless about cycling terminology.

Once upon a time, all bicycles had leather saddles. Despite what some people might say, those things were only slightly more comfortable than unfinished two-by-fours. No manner of leather dressing and "breaking-in" ever got them to where they were more than merely tolerable. I rode on a number of those saddles back in the day, so I know what I'm talking about.

At any rate, the leather on these saddles was attached to the steel frame with metal (brass on the more expensive saddles) rivets, one of which was always on the top of the tip of the saddle. Now ordinarily one's nether regions were rarely in contact with that part of the seat, but when things got really, really hard and you were pushing for all you were worth, you would always tend to slide way forward on the saddle so that you were sitting, for all practical purposes, "on the rivet."

So, for generations, the term "on the rivet" has been used to describe a rider who is making a hard, concentrated effort. Never mind that most saddles in use over the last 15 years or so haven't had rivets. If you've ever watched Phil Liggett or Paul Sherwin as they cover the Tour de France, you've heard the term used.

Of course like many sports terms, this one sometimes finds it's way into general use, and indeed I often feel like I've been 'on the rivet' for the last 15 years, and, yes, the pack is closing in fast.

- Roadrider

Musical Teams, Again

Once again, one of our young Cat. 3 riders is jumping ship to join the local "elite" team. I don't get it. I mean, I understand that our club is larger and so we have to spread our resources around a bit more, but the usual excuse of "I want to race with a team with more Cat. 1,2,3 riders on it" just doesn't hold much water. I think that what it really means is "a bunch of my friends are on that team, so I want to be on it too." Not that there's really anything wrong with that. It's just that I'd rather they were all on our team rather than the other one.

Those guys are mostly just regular Cat. 3 quality riders and anyway have been generally absent at almost all of the races this year. Only two or three of them have been racing consistently, and rarely all at the same time. And I'm not talking about like 20 guys. I'm talking about like 5. I can't think of a single race where there was enough of a "team" in the 1,2,3 race for them to have any effect whatsoever. Worse, all of those riders were originally on the NOBC. It's so frustrating. It's like just because we have a few more masters riders than most clubs, the Cat. 2 and 3 riders don't seem to want to be associated with us, so as soon as they get a chance they switch jerseys. I've got to find out what the deal is here. Maybe they're just getting so much reduced-price equipment that it seems like it's too good of a deal to pass up. I dunno. All I know is that every time our riders move over to the other team, they seem to be racing less. I don't really mind when they get recruited by one of the more serious regional-level teams, it's just that this local team doesn't see like much of a step up.

I just wish one of our Cat. 1,2,3 riders would start recruiting riders from the other teams, rather than vice-versa.

So that's why riding shoes have holes in them...

It's been a while since the morning training ride got good and wet, so I guess we were due. Being a Monday, there was just the usual small group looking for the traditional easy 25 miler; and a good thing too as my legs were still sore from the weekend training rides; but off to the North there was the rumble of thunder. We went ahead anyway - funny how a group is always more bold than it's individual members - since this time of year the weather a mile a way has little relevance to the weather where you are, and in this neck of the woods you quickly learn that skipping rides because of the threat of rain is usually a mistake. As we neared Williams Blvd., maybe 10 or 11 miles out, it started to drizzle. Not those little feathery drizzle drops, but those big heavy ones that you can hear hitting your helmet. We decided to turn around at Williams, about a mile up. Just as we're nearing the turnaround there, this tall black guy on his way to work is coming the other way and he smiles as he wobbles by and announces "it's raining down there!" I look up and can see the wall of rain about a block away. We make a U-turn and start heading back as the rain starts to pick up. In a minute the lightning is starting to strike nearby and I can feel my rear tire getting mushy. The spray from the wheel ahead has a radar-lock on my eyes now that I've got my clear-lens Oakleys stuck in my helmet because I can't see through them any more. It looks drier ahead, so I shift my weight to the front a bit and got another mile or so down the road before the dreaded "clump, clump, clump" of the valve stem hitting the ground starts. With the weather closing in, every second counts, and before I come to a stop I've shifted down to the small cog and I have my pump and tire lever out of my bag and in my pocket for quick access. I do a lightning-fast tire change as the others wait in the drizzle, pump in all of maybe 50 psi with my anemic little pump, and we take off again hoping for the best. The best is not to be, though, and by the time I get home I'm soaked. I peel off the sticky wet jersey and shorts and take my time showering and changing, and finally the rain starts to let up so I can hop on the commuter bike and make the 4-mile trip to work with a change of clothes in my messenger bag.

At least I got in a few miles, since I'll be driving up to Iowa City tomorrow to deposit Danielle in her new shared apartment for school, which means I'll be sitting on my butt for a good 13 hours and likely getting little chance for exercise, much less training, for the next 4 days. I'll bet Lance doesn't have to miss his training rides like that.