Running Loose

It's still a struggle for me to get up in the dark and push myself out the door to meet the 6:15 am training ride, but I know that in a few weeks there will be more light at 6:00 and consequently I'll be at least slightly more awake, so I just have to hang on for a little while longer. Today, though, I had an early morning meeting on the calendar and knew I wouldn't be able to do the whole ride, so I made sure I was on time. After all, I am trying to get back in shape all in one week. Today, it showed. I started out feeling a little sluggish and by the time I got back home I was just plain tired. It turned out to be a good workout, though. Even though I had to bail out early, at the dip, Brady and Donald both turned around there too, so the ride back was definitely within the "training effect" range - probably much better than if I had ridden back alone. Brady and I are planning to meet over lunch next week to talk about what we might do about a weekday evening training race series. In fact, yesterday I sent the lambra-racing list a note with a link to the Tuesday Night Worlds in St. Louis, thanks to Dan at Bike Drool. It sure would be great is someone around here would promote something like that.

Today on my commute to work I had an unexpected "incident." This is the kind of thing that probably doesn't happen in most places, but around downtown New Orleans it isn't quite as surprising as you might think. So here I am, having just come down the Broad Street Overpass, enjoying the momentum and soft-pedaling the couple of blocks to the stop light at Tulane Avenue. Out of the corner of my eye I see someone sitting on the bench at the bus stop, which is just part of the normal inner-city scenery across the street from the Parish Prison and Criminal Courts Building, both of which are still not back in business since the hurricane. As I approach, the enormous woman spots me and suddenly jumps up off of the bench and starts screaming something at me. She sounds really angry, as if I had just snatched a Big Mac and order of Fries out of her chubby little hands. She's standing in the middle of the lane and is screaming something like "Get off dat bike. Gimme dat bike sos I can ride it." Apparently she has mistaken me for a Liberal Democrat. I ease over to the left to make a little more room between me and this unrestrained mental case, and as I go by she lunges her 350 pound self toward me. If I'd been close enough, I'm sure she would have taken me down. As I passed I got this mental picture of her huge ass perched on my little bike. Yeeech! Anyway, just so you know, since Charity Hospital has been closed down, there are a lot of un-medicated mental cases like her running loose around here, especially since Houston figured out what was happening to their crime and school achievement statistics and started pushing them out. Just as an update, all of the hospitals in the area that are open, including Tulane's, are really struggling. Pretty much all of the patients they are seeing in the emergency rooms have no way to pay, so they are ending up filling their beds with indigent patients. It's kind of hard to break even in the hospital business if you're doing it all for free. In fact Tulane hospital, which is actually owned by HCA and is a for-profit hospital, has apparently just decided to close down DePaul hospital, which is where they have been doing all of their psychiatric work. I hear that the hospital is losing around $4M a month right now, and the situation is similar at most of the other hospitals. Things are still pretty tough around here. On a brighter note, the level of activity downtown seems to be increasing steadily.