Fractured Friday

With the wind still blowing strongly out of the south I swung my leg over the Orbea this morning, gliding sadly past the Volvo with its crumpled hood, and rode out to see who would be at the levee for the Friday ride. I'd been up rather late the night before after a nice dinner in a private room at Arnaud's in the French Quarter that someone else was paying for, a quick 10:30 meeting with Robin to trade off stopwatches and stuff for the Tour de Lis Time Trial tomorrow, and some swapping around of wheels, tires and cassettes in preparation for this evening's trip with Mark to the Rocky Mount Stage Race. I'd been up until around 1 am, thanks to the two cups of post-dinner coffee and bag-packing, so when I went out to ride this morning I thought I had things more or less under control.

Up on the levee it was just Scott and me at first, joined eventually by Ali who motored past us, completely incommunicado in iPod land, on his way to the turnaround. So I picked up the pace a bit and tucked into his draft as he towed the two of us all the way out to Kenner. I would have been nice if he'd given us a little more room in the crosswind, but I didn't feel like shouting and he apparently couldn't hear my more gentle requests. Anyway, we got out there pretty fast thanks to the tail/crosswind, and then on the ride back the pace remained fairly brisk, at least for a Friday. The river was a few more inches higher this morning, but the Corps announced it was going to open up some of the Spillway today, so I guess this will be about as high as it gets this time.

So I got back home nice and early, which should have left me lots of time to finish packing things up for an early after-work departure today. Then, as I was standing in the basement lifting the bike up to hang on its hook I heard a loud "crack!" I thought, "Damn, what was that?" Looking down I saw that the chain had come partially off the front derailleur, but when I went to put it back on I discovered that the derailleur cage had slipped down below the level of the front chainring teeth. Hmmmm. Not good. The damned clamp-on derailleur had spontaneously fractured at its aluminum hinge. As luck would have it, I happened to have a spare front derailleur and clamp, in this case a Shimano clamp and a Campi Centaur derailleur, but beggars can't be choosers, eh? So I rushed through installing it and finally headed off to work in the fractured Volvo quite a bit later than planned. I guess I should count myself lucky, in a way, since I was going up to the S'port race with Mark, so the car wouldn't be an issue, and the one thing that broke on the bike happened to be something for which I happened to have a spare. I don't know if that qualifies as good luck or simply temporary reduction in bad luck.