The morning levee ride group was a bit thin today. I think we had about ten at one point, but a few turned back early at the dip. VJ was up there on his TT bike but on the way out he hung back just off the tail end of the paceline so he could ride his aero bars in the wind in peace. The district TT championship is this Sunday, and so all of the aeroheads are starting to obsess about it. Personally I prefer to downplay its significance. I'm sure it is no coincidence that I'm not a very good time trialist.
So we arrived at the turnaround with a small group of maybe six. The group usually starts back at a slow pace so that everyone can sit up, drink and recover a bit. When I turned around, VJ was already heading back. One other rider caught up to him and latched onto his wheel, so I picked up the pace a bit as I waited for the group to come up from behind. Although he wasn't doing more than 2o mph for sure, VJ was starting to pull away and when I looked back I found myself in no-man's-land between the break and the group. I decided to catch VJ rather than wait for the group to catch up. So VJ's still up in front with two of us in his draft and the speed gradually ramped up to 26 mph. I felt like the caboose, just hanging onto VJ and taking the express train back home, and just like a big diesel train engine, VJ towed us at a steady 26 mph all the way back to Kenner when he finally pulled over to let us each take a pull or two. Luke and his son latched on somewhere around Kenner, adding a couple of cars to the train, and soon VJ was back on the front. Even on his TT bike, VJ is tall enough that I felt like I was missing out on a lot of his draft that was mostly about a foot above my head.
On the way home I ran into what must have been the first day of school traffic at the local school, Lusher Elementary, with which Tulane has recently partnered. Confused parents in SUVs were clogging up Pine street and I nearly had to unclip at one point when one of them just randomly stopped in front of me. They'll all eventually figure it all out, of course. A couple of blocks farther down I saw Adam of Adam's Bicycle World walking (with his bike) down Pine street with his kids on their way to school. Adam and I will be the USCF officials for this weekend's Time Trial. I spent an hour or so last night sorting out leftover race numbers so we can use them for the TT after Robin called and asked if I had any. I'm afraid it will be just a little bit confusing for the riders because the number sequences don't start at "1" and there will be a break in the sequence for the Cat. 5s. Hopefully we'll be able to generate some sort of start list, but time will be short since there's no pre-registration. I have to set up the registration and results spreadsheet tonight.
Got home yesterday after work and turned on the kitchen faucet which proceeded to sputter and spit and spurt out dirty water. Yeah, the Sewerage and Water Board must have been fixing yet another broken water pipe nearby and managed to inject a ton of dirt into the water supply line. I had to clean out the aerators which were all clogged up with those tiny little rocks that constitute the larger components of dirt. Then this morning I had to disassemble the fill valve in the toilet because it too was so clogged up that it would have taken half an hour to fill the tank. I don't even want to think about what the bottom of the water heater must look like. .... and we drink this stuff!
So Spike Lee showed his new and obviously political documentary about Katrina to a smaller-than-expected crowd in New Orleans yesterday. Wouldn't want to miss such a great opportunity to point fingers and try again to make it all into a racial issue. Yeah, those white folks went out there in the middle of the hurricane and blew a hole in the industrial canal levee. So who blew the hole in the 17th street canal?
No comments:
Post a Comment