Grain Elevator Gunk

It's a warm and breezy day in the neighborhood. As always, I am having a hard time forcing myself out of bed in the dark for the 6:15 rides. I mean, I'm doing it, I'm just not liking it very much. This morning we had a humid wind blowing our of the southeast, and that made for a fairly quick ride out to the turnaround. Somewhere between Williams Blvd. and the Jefferson Parish line they have set up a drilling derrik directly, and completely, on top of the levee. It takes up the entire width of the asphalt. For some reason, they have also stretched orange plastic roll fencing down both sides of the levee so that you have to ride down the grass quite a bit in order to get around it. When I arrived at the start this morning there were a couple of riders there who were waiting to warn us about it because they had nearly plowed right into the thing in the dark. Indeed, today the darkness lasted a bit longer than usual thanks to some clouds that were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, one of those misplaced clouds dropped a bit of rain on us just before we got into grain elevator territory at the far end of the ride. There is always a thick layer of grain dust on the bike path near the grain elevators, and it typically deposits a nice layer of dust all over your bike -- except when it's nice and wet. In that case the wheels spray grain dust gunk all over everything, including your face, glasses, helmet, shoes, etc. It's not a pretty picture. This stuff is what you would get if you dropped a handful of Cheerios into a blender full of dirty water and then took a shower in it. Anyway, the ride out to the turnaround, other than the sprinkling of rain, was fairly uneventful, culminating with a nice surge for the last mile or so. It had obviously rained out there before we even arrived, judging by how wet the road was.

Guess what happened next. We had just turned around when behind us we heard the dreaded announcement "flaaaat!" So the few of us in the lead eased up and soft-pedaled, waiting for the flat to get fixed. As we came to the bridge with no sign of anyone coming up from behind yet, Jeff looks down at my rear tire and says "that looks low." Sure enough, I could see bubbles on the wet tire where the air was escaping around a chunk of glass or something. Just about the time I got it fixed, the others caught up, so that worked out OK except that I was feeling really gunky after changing the flat on a wet tire covered with grain elevator gunk. The ride back was mostly into a headwind and seemed to take forever even though we were keeping up a decent pace.

I got an interesting communique from Gina V this morning with a link to a blog story about her nabbing some guys who were stealing team bikes at last weekend's Spin City Classic races in Orlando. Check it out: http://www.myogenesiscycling.blogspot.com/.

So the club is gearing up for next weekend's 2-Person Time Trial where everyone, even the riders who race in it, pitches in to help keep things running smoothly. Unfortunately I won't be there this year since I have to go to another gymnastics meet up in PA this time.