Bump in the Road

It is a damp grey day here in the Crescent City, but at least the roads were mostly dry as I rushed to meet the 6:15 group up on the levee bike path. Thursday is typically a "long" day when the group goes all the way up the river to the end of the bike path, logging something around 42 miles in the process. Thursday is also typically more of a smooth paceline day compared to Tuesday, and the group tends to stay together better. As the pace gradually crept up to speed this morning, I gradually slipped into auto-pilot mode as my mind wandered through a long to-do list. Then, as we approached the "dip" where there's often a lot of gravel and sand down at street level, Donald looked over at me and issued a warning that there might be more gravel than usual because of all the rain we've been having. I was sitting on Mark's wheel at the time, but as we coasted down the levee to ground level I eased up just in case. Mark didn't. The gravel, as it turned out, wasn't bad at all, but since the rest of the group had slowed down too, I waited for everyone to regroup before continuing back up the levee. By then, Mark was pretty far down the road, and when Howard took off after him on his Cervelo P3, the rest of the group hardly seemed to notice.

A few miles later, all hell broke loose. As we came up to one of the many roads that cross the levee, the lead riders suddenly noticed that someone had ground out a foot-wide swatch of asphalt, leaving a nice sharp and unavoidable bump across the bike path. It wasn't there yesterday. We were rolling pretty fast at that point and it was way too late for anyone to do much about it by the time we saw it, so the entire paceline plowed right over the thing as expletives flew in every direction. In front of me Richard's bike launched its big water bottle and I watched as it twirled around on the ground, wondering where it would end up. Well, naturally it ended up right in front of me, but luckily I hit it neatly at a right angle and didn't go down. I rolled up to Richard and said "I think I killed your water bottle." Of course, everyone coasted for a little bit to regroup and it wasn't long before I heard Lawrence say "shit!" Actually, I was surprised he was the only one who had pinch-flatted on that thing. So we all stopped there, a couple of miles before the turnaround, while he fixed it. Howard and Mark were still out ahead of us somewhere, but then Luke got nervous about a big rain cloud nearby and we all turned around and started the ride back. We never saw Howard and Mark again.

So the car's still in the shop and naturally the repair estimate is $432 with a $500 deductible. What are the chances that the little old lady with the expired license and no insurance will cough up the cash? Meanwhile of course I'm stuck with the bill. With the sky and my mood looking darker and darker, I headed off to work on the commuter in a light drizzle wondering why I had even bothered to put on clean clothes. I was a damp, wrinkled mess by the time I was two blocks from work and my rear time went catastrophically flat. I coasted another block as the last molecules of air hissed loudly out of what must have been a big hole and walked the last block as the drizzle turned to rain.