A Southerly Win(d)

We bailed out of the office around 4 yesterday, about an hour after much of downtown New Orleans quit work for the day. The big BCS championship game in the Superdome had officially taken over the city by then, leaving local office denizens worried about traffic and anxious to get to either a tailgate party or home. As for myself, well, although I may bleed green and blue, there's always a little tinge of purple in there, particularly when the game is against one of those Yankee teams from way up the river, so it was good to see the almost home team take the win for the southland. Even so, one thing was for certain. The New Orleans tourism industry, including everyone all the way down to the folks selling plastic alligators at the flea market, definitely had their game on for this one, so I hope all of the visitors had a good time before, during and after the game. I'm just glad I don't have to fly home to Chicago this morning after a full night in the Quarter. The morning news had live interviews with a few people who were still going strong around 5 am.

So, getting back to the topic at hand, the morning ride was not exactly what you'd expect this time of year. With a southerly wind and pre-dawn temperature of nearly 70F, it might as well have been early April. The only fly in the ointment, however, was that the streets and most of the levee bike path were still soaking wet from some little showers that wandered through last night. There's just nothing like getting up in the dark so you can go out and have some nice gritty water sprayed in your face from the bikes in front of you! I briefly contemplated going to the front and pulling the whole way like The Donald likes to do, but I'd accidentally left my superman cape back at the house. Nonetheless, with a nice tailwind all the way out to the turnaround, the speed stayed pretty fast. Not quite fast enough for current free agent Howard, but to his credit he only strayed from his base training plan once or twice, and even then the rest of the group just watched in amazement. My intelligence sources tell me that he's actually sticking to a training program this year. If the guy actually succeeds in bolstering his aerobic capacity, improving his on-bike flexibility, and dropping a few pounds over the next month or two, he may well arrive at the red flag, or white sign as the case may be, of an uphill finishing road race or two with enough left in the tank to allow for full deployment of those massive quads, and if that happens I highly recommend being on his wheel and making sure the 11t cog is fully functional.

So anyway, we had around ten riders this morning, and other than the road spray it was a nice 40 miles or so, even if the contingent doing the pulling at the front dwindled considerably as we made our way back into the teeth of a steady south wind. Meanwhile, one of the infamous Winter Bike League rides was held last weekend up in Athens, and thanks to an alert from the ever-vigilant Steve I checked out the always entertaining WBL Ladies Day ride report and saw that GiVo is still somehow successfully juggling doctoring and racing. Trust me, these ride reports are worth a read!