No Good Deed

After another particularly fast levee ride on Thursday I wasn't feeling too bad about missing the easy Friday morning ride this week. It was staff service day at Tulane, aka "Wave of Green," and I'd volunteered for a day of construction work with Habitat for Humanity. Along with a whole lot of other people, I got on the bus and ended up way down on Frenchman Street where they were building a number of homes. When they asked for people to work on the roof I raised my hand since I figured it was better to stay above all of the people who were probably going to be dropping hammers and nails all day. It was practically crowded up there - I guess there were about eight of us -- but at least the sky was cloudy so it wasn't too hot. Once I got up there I quickly realized that I'd better stay away from the edge because some sort of allergy or head congestion was making me dizzy every time I turned my head too quickly. Once we got the felt paper down and the first couple of rows of shingles done my head was clearing up and I was finally able to be a little more productive, although it was rather difficult pulling nails out of my pants pocket since the apparently had run out of nail bags. Damn, I really should have stopped by Freret Hardware and picked up one of the tool belts they had on sale. All that roofing I'd done back in high school and college came back to me very quickly and soon I was wishing all those other people would just get out of my way because I was definitely on a roll, running up and down the slope retrieving shingles and having a great time nailing them down.

When it started to rain a bit before 2:00 we finally climbed down, soaking wet, and boarded the buses back to Tulane. The good thing about having to quit early, however, was that meant I'd be able to make it to the Tulane Student Organizations Expo where we had a table for the cycling club. I was supposed to ride rollers behind the table, mainly to attract some attention since there were probably fifty different organizations there trying to recruit new members. I ended up doing two solid hours on the rollers trying not to stare too much at the girls.

Well, by 10 pm that night as I was finishing up the start list for Sunday's Time Trial Championship I knew I was in trouble. My quads were getting really, really stiff and sore. It was the same kind of soreness I get if I suddenly decide to go for a run after spending all year doing nothing but riding. We're talking actual tissue damage here. I went to bed around midnight hoping for the best, but forgetting to set my alarm clock.

Luckily I woke up around 6 am, which would have been fine except that I was supposed to meet a rider who was in town from Miami at 6:15. My legs hurt like hell, but I hobbled down to the basement and rushed out into the darkness anyway. There was already a light mist falling, and by the time we got to Starbucks it was getting light enough to see how bad the sky really looked. We were definitely going to get wet. Of course the turnout was very light because of the weather, and perhaps also because of the impending Time Trial, but we headed out anyway in a light drizzle. The plan was to ride out Leon C. Simon, cross over the two bridges, and then head back for a lap or two around City Park if possible. The real rain caught up to us on the way back, and between my sore legs and the increasing rain I figured this ride wasn't really doing me anything but harm so when we got back to Marconi I just headed home. It never stopped raining for the rest of the day, but finally stopped for the most part around 7 or 8 pm.

It's 10 pm now and I can barely walk down a flight of stairs without wincing in pain, so I think I'm going to have to skip the TT tomorrow. You know what they say, "No good deed goes unpunished!" That doesn't mean I don't have to show up, however, since I'm one of the referees. That means a 5 am wake-up so I can load up the car and get out there by 6 am to set up for the 6:45 start of registration. I doubt I'll be walking normally tomorrow, but what I'm really dreading is the possibility of rain. The forecast is calling for a 70% probability.

So tomorrow the 29th is the 5-year anniversary of Katrina and there are constant stories and reminders on TV. We had evacuated on the morning of the 28th, so the last thing I wrote before the hurricane was late at night on the 27th. It was a short post that I wrote up after watching the news and realizing that the Mayor was probably going to call for a mandatory evacuation the next morning, which he did. That post ended with the sentence, "I think this is going to be bad." It was. We were on the road all the next day and I wasn't able to post anything again until the 30th as the city was beginning to flood from the broken floodwalls. By the following day it was becoming clear that we wouldn't be going home for a long time and we didn't know if we'd even have a home to which to go.

Teasing Us

Tuesday morning came up fast. Faster than the sun, it seemed. A bit before 6 am I opened the basement door and looked up at the eastern sky. It seemed a whole lot darker than it had just a week earlier, so I rummaged around and found my little headlight, fumbled for a while trying to get it clamped to the handlebar (for reasons I wouldn't discover until this morning), and headed off, safely enclosed within a bubble of flashing light-emitting diodes, for the levee bike path. My legs felt stiff and tired and I was reminded of the quote, "Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug." I was already sinking in to a state of depression due to the aforementioned reminder of the approach of the dark mornings of winter when I noticed that Woody and Rob were out on their time trial bikes again. So needless to say the ride went from fast to faster and I went from the front to the back. I just wasn't up for a fight, I guess, so I was happy to sit in well behind the rotation, not that it was all that much easier to do so.

There was a new rider with us on Tuesday. Zack is a Tulane student from San Francisco who had just gotten to town, put his bike together probably the night before, and rushed off down the streets of Carrollton in the dark to find the morning ride. The first thing he found a New Orleans pothole where he crashed, but still got to the ride on time despite some road rash and twisted brake levers. Considering the horsepower at the front of the paceline that day he'd unwittingly jumped right into the deep end, so to speak. He hung on pretty well for most of the way out and then jumped back in for a little while when we came blasting past on the way back. That evening I got a facebook message from him saying that his frame was cracked, so he'll be stranded until a replacement arrives.

Anyway, I was kind of preoccupied that morning because I planned on taking the car in to the Volvo dealer a much-needed control arm repair and a slightly overdue timing belt replacement. Taking a Volvo in to the dealer is always a traumatic experience similar to handing one's wallet to a guy wearing a ski mask and holding a gun to your head. I took the free taxi ride back home and rode in to the office only to later learn that the car would actually be ready by the end of the day, assuming I thought it was worth $1,200 in cold hard cash. So around 4:30 I called the cab company back for my free ride back to the dealer, waited about forty minutes for them to arrive, and picked up the car after commiserating with one of the Tulane faculty members who was picking up her own Volvo and was about to shell out $500 because she'd lost her fancy-dancy electronic "key." Now we all know that one can easily purchase a perfectly nice laptop complete with wireless and software for $500, so there is just no getting around the fact that $500 for a key fob, however electronic it might be, is just a high-tech way of holding a car for ransom. But I digress. The bottom line is that both The Daughter's car and ours are reasonably road-worthy again for the bargain price of around $7,500. The fact that this wad of cash might have been sufficient for the purchase of, ohh let's say a new 14 lb. Van Dessel Rivet decked out with Campi Record or Cervelo R3SL with SRAM Red has, sadly, not escaped my notice.

Anyway, that's just water under the bridge now, and I'm a creature of habit, so rather than drench my sorrows in cheap Merlot and sleep late, I headed out Wednesday morning for the usual training ride. The weather this morning was really teasing us. It was actually not hot. I mean, it must have actually been in the 70s for a little while, before sunrise. It felt absolutely spectacular. What didn't feel spectacular, however, was my front brake. I'd noticed it on the Tuesday ride. The brake lever had a lot more resistance than normal and I kept running through my head all the things that might have caused it. I was thinking that perhaps something, such as copious amounts of sweat, had gummed up the works, or that one of the cable housing ends had collapsed. Whatever it was, it wasn't getting better, so I reluctantly planned to take it all apart some time soon to investigate.

The Wednesday ride was a nice traditional one -- 23-24 mph, nice smooth paceline, long pulls, no surprises. It was just what I needed. I even got to the end without being completely drenched in sweat for the first time in weeks. As I spun my way back home through the neighborhood my mind came back to that brake lever problem. Suddenly a little light bulb (the incandescent type, of course) appeared above my head. I reached my hand around the bottom of the headlight mount that I'd installed on Tuesday. Yep. Sure enough, I'd gotten the blasted front brake cable *inside* the clamp, practically squashing it against the handlebar. I released the clamp. Problem solved! If only it was always that easy. An hour later I rode to work by way of the Reily Center where I signed up for the Sept. 11 CPR course. Tulane's club sports folks require a couple of people to have CPR training, and at the bargain basement price of $10, and considering my friend Stan's recent massive heart attack, how could I refuse? I rode through campus, which this time of year is filled with bright young students, and then to the office by way of Audubon Park where I spotted that moss-covered bike.

Just Across the Border

The 5 pm start time of the Masters criterium of the Meridian-Cuba Challenge Omnium up in Meridian was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Dave and I didn't need to leave until the luxurious hour of 11 am. On the other hand, it was going to be pretty warm up there in the middle of Mississippi. I'd ridden the Meridian criterium course a few times before. It has a nice mix of features -- some nice tight corners, some rough road surfaces, a nice little climb, and a fast downhill turn leading into the long and wide finish straight. On the drive up I could tell that Dave was psyched for this one. I was feeling a little uncertain about my prospects, however. Looking around at the other masters riders in attendance, I figured it would be a good race. The Gulf Coast team, based in Biloxi, had six riders on the start list, and Alabama Masters had Jim Brock, Andy Maddux and Miroslav Novak on hand. Also in the mix were Mitch Evans from Baton Rouge and Lonnie Kennedy from Mesa Cycles up in St. Louis (he has family down here). I figured it would be an aggressive race. As we warmed up I told Dave that Lonnie was an experienced breakaway artist and pointed out some of the other riders who I thought would animate the race.

The race started spot on time and the attacks started soon thereafter. I felt like I was on the ropes almost from the start, but didn't dare drop too far back from the front. After a few solo attacks were pulled back I found myself in a somewhat promising one of four or five riders. It was still very early and I was not much help and after a lap or two we were brought back. Shortly after that Tony Scott from Peachtree and Tim Carbonneau from Gulf Coast took off. The timing was good and the response from the tired pack was weak. A few more laps and the break was out of sight and the pace eased up a little bit, but there were still some attacks. I had already burned a lot of matches but I really didn't want to be sprinting for fourth place so I was still doing my best to help pull those back. Just after I'd put in a big effort doing that, Lonnie attacked hard on the technical part of the circuit. Since he was racing in the 55+ category in this combined 40+/55+ race, there wasn't much of an effort to go after him, although I would have been nice if Dave or I had been able to tag along. We were probably four or five laps from the finish when the lead break lapped the field, but since they didn't try to blow through to the front I doubt most of the riders realized it. With a couple of laps to go I started working hard to maintain a spot near the front, and with one to go looked around to find Dave. I caught a glimpse of him behind me, so I figured I'd go earlier than usual for the sprint and hope he was still on my wheel by then. There didn't seem to be any sort of big team leadout on the last lap, so things got a little tight coming down the hill into the last turn and I was a few spots farther back than I wanted to be. Just before the turn a couple of guys came screaming through on the inside and I changed my line just a bit to catch a little bit of that draft. I was probably already in a 53x14, but as soon as we straightened out I was out of the saddle and looking for more gears. I was still way too far back, but the run-in to the finish is a long wide slightly uphill drag so two or three of the guys in front of me started to fade. I got lined up a few bike lengths behind the wheel that was moving forward the fastest and ended up coming in second in the pack sprint with Dave right behind me in third. Since two 40+ riders had been in the break, that meant we were 4th and 5th. I was a little angry with myself for missing the crucial break, but on the other hand I was glad to have finally put in a decent sprint after so many disappointing efforts this year.

After a nice dinner at the local Olive Garden with Vivian and Elise, it was back to the Super8 to start worrying about Sunday's road race. The road race that starts in Cuba, Alabama, is a pretty tough one with lots of hills and long sections of hot chip-seal that make your bike feel like it's suddenly ten pounds heavier and you're riding through wet sand. Almost from the start of the road race I knew I was in trouble. My legs were loading up way too quickly on every little climb and I was seriously wondering if I'd be able to keep from getting from dropped on the big climb about ten or eleven miles in. Just after we started we figured out that two of the riders who had finished ahead of us weren't riding the road race, so suddenly Dave an I were in 2nd and 3rd for the Omnium. On the other hand, Donald Davis was on hand, and although he wouldn't be eligible for the Omnium since he hadn't ridden the criterium, it was soon obvious that he was not planning on taking any prisoners in the road race. As I'd expected, there was a big surge up the "big" climb, but somehow I remained more or less in contact. Right after that, though, a break went off the front with Donald, Dave and a few others. The pack wasn't quite ready to concede defeat yet, so after a long chase it was pulled back by the time we were about halfway around the course (we were doing two laps of a long loop). By then I was camped out near the back of the group wondering why my legs were feeling so lousy. A little while later I saw Donald ride off the front again, and a little while after that I saw that another rider had bridged up to him. I wasn't sure who it was and although I did a little work to try and keep the gap from getting too big, I wasn't getting much help. I really should have figured it out. One of the riders who was working hard trying to mount a chase at the front was in the 55+ race, but Lonnie, who was leading the 55+ race, wasn't up there. Anyway, the break was soon a minute or so up the road. Around that time we started to figure out who exactly was up the road and I realized that none of the 40+ riders were chasing because the other rider in the break was Miroslav who was in the 55+ race. Since Donald wasn't in the Omnium, the Gulf Coast guys, who I guess were focused on protecting their teammate's lead in the omnium, weren't interested in chasing the break at all. That's about when Lonnie discovered that one of the riders up the road was in the 55+ race. He made an effort to get a chase going, but it was way too late and there weren't enough surviving 55+ riders left to do it. After that, the pace in the pack really slowed down. It was getting hotter and hotter and I could tell that some of the riders were starting to struggle. On the other hand, my legs were actually starting to feel a little better. I was still reluctant to put my nose into the wind, however. Ten miles from the finish it was starting to look like a pack finish for 2nd place, and although I did a bit of work to chase down some brief attacks, for the most part Dave and I were just watching and waiting as the pace occasionally dropped down into the mid-teens. I think that the Gulf Coast guys would have done better to have gotten together and really pushed the pace at this point, because they might well have dropped a number of riders, including me. Instead, the pace remained slow enough that I was actually feeling better than I had on the first lap.

After we made the final turn, three miles before the finish, things started to pick up as riders began thinking about the impending uphill sprint finish. About a mile before the finish the course goes over a little rise as it crossed the interstate, and at that point Mitch Evans launched a well-timed attack. Dave was right there and went with him. The rest of the pack looked around at each other to see who would start the chase. They got a good gap as the sprinters watched each other and I thought they would make it to the finish. Dave was figuring that he could make it ahead of the group, but even if he didn't, he knew I'd be surfing wheels back in the pack and would be ready to put in a good sprint. Our sprint really didn't start in earnest until just before the climb, maybe 400 meters before the finish. My suddenly recovered legs felt good and I went hard for it from the start, passing a few riders on the steepest part of the climb, one of whom was Mitch. As the road levelled out a bit at the 200M flag I dumped it into the 12 and crossed the line in 3rd place, a few seconds behind Dave who had held on for 2nd (remember that Donald had been in that 2-man break most of the day and had finished minutes earlier). So as it turned out, Dave won the omnium and I was 2nd, so thanks to some good luck and satisfying sprints we felt like we had a pretty decent weekend. Elise took some great photos of the masters race, one of which is above.

Woody

Thursday morning I went out as usual to the levee for the long Thursday ride. There was a pretty big group and I was expecting to get a little exercise during the 40-something mile ride. When I spotted Woody turning around to join us on his TT bike, all I could say was, "Oh, oh." Somehow, a few miles down the road, I found myself on Woody's wheel. In fact, Woody's rear wheel is pretty much all I remember about the entire ride. Of course, it's not surprising that I remember it so well since I probably spent ten miles with my nose about two feet from it. Once Woody got to the front, he settled in to a steady 28 mph pace and just kept going, and going, and going. When he finally pulled off I did about fifteen pedal strokes at the front and pulled off, looking for the wheel of someone with a little more of a draft. After the turnaround, guess what? Yeah, same thing. Woody went to the front and just rolled for miles and miles.

So the Tulane Cycling team kit prices are about ready to go and although the actual team members will get small discounts, and most will just place their orders in person at the first meeting currently scheduled for Sept. 1, everyone else can order from the BikeReg site. I think Murali will get the link up on the cycling.tulane.edu soon to be updated home page in a day or so. There will be a student activities expo on the quad on Friday the 27th where we'll have a table and hopefully someone riding rollers. Unfortunately, I will probably miss it because that's the Wave of Green day when I'll be doing the Habitat for Humanity thing somewhere in town.

Tomorrow I'm heading over to Meridian, MS for an afternoon criterium, followed by a road race the next morning in Cuba, AL at the Meridian-Cuba Challenge. This is one of those races that just keeps trucking along year after year. It may not be the fanciest race around, but it's challenging and consistent and the courses are good. It's a good 3-hour drive, but fortunately my race tomorrow doesn't start until 5 pm. I'll probably end up leaving before noon anyway so I can watch some of the earlier races, but at least it won't be another 4:30 am wake-up call. It looks like we have only a few teammates going this year, and for various logistical reasons I'll be going up alone and coming back accompanied by The Great White Box, the generator, and various other items of race equipment. The LAMBRA Time Trial Championship is the weekend after, so we'll need all of that stuff down here. It seems early, but the TT championship will mark the end of the local road racing season. Fortunately, there's a good stage race in Pensacola in mid-September that I'm hoping to make, and of course there's always the Six Gap Century Sept. 26. I really need to find a cassette with something bigger than a 25 this year!

The Rest of the Story

The rest of the story from Ruston: So Sunday's road race up in Ruston was on a short 5-mile loop that I remembered from some races a long time ago. What I remembered most was the final kilometer-long stair-step climb up to the finish line and the full minute I lost once when I blew up one year at the start of the sprint. The back side of the course featured a couple of significant climbs and one nice descent before the final turn leading up to the big climb. The route is so far out in the middle of nowhere that there's grass growing up through the cracks in the asphalt. The temperature forecast for the day was about the same as Saturday's, which called for highs in the low 100s. Fortunately, the Masters race was in the second wave, starting around 9 am, and the distance was short - about 30 miles. Of course, than meant six laps and six times up the hills in fairly rapid succession.

As the earlier Women's race was ending I pulled the bike down from the rooftop carrier, filled my bottles, and rolled down the road for a little warmup. When I looked down I was surprised to find my rear derailleur canted inward at a fairly dramatic angle, no doubt a result of the prior day's run-in with Dona's front wheel. It was bad enough that the derailleur was rubbing the spokes when it was on the 25, and I thought to myself how lucky I was that it hadn't snagged a spoke on the final climb the day before. I was so out of it at that point that I don't even remember what gear I was in. I assume I used the 25 but don't remember hearing anything hitting the spokes. I stopped and carefully bent it back into alignment, more or less, wondering how many times I'd get away with that before the aluminum derailleur hanger broke. I had a spare one in my bag, but since one of the tiny Allen bolts holding the old one onto the bike was mangled, replacing it would probably require power tools and another bolt. Anyway, I got it all working fine in plenty of time.

The Masters race was fairly animated with a number of breakaways by LaS'port and S3 riders that were, no doubt, designed to make Donald and me work. Since Donald was riding pretty defensively, I ended up chasing down a couple of them pretty much all by myself. My legs were feeling OK, but I knew I'd end up paying for the extra work I was doing. It might have been smarter, from an Omnium standpoint, to let one of the breaks go so that the 1st place points would get sucked up by someone who couldn't win the omnium, but I always have a hard time with that sort of thing. Halfway through the last lap someone attacked hard just after we'd been passed (once again - we passed each other a couple of times) by some of the Cat. 4 riders who were apparently having a much faster race than we. The pack didn't respond at all and for a little while I wondered if it had been a Cat. 4 rider. It wasn't. I decided I didn't want to race for second place, so I went to the front and pulled it back, finally making contact just before the start of the final climb, probably about a mile before the finish. Halfway up the hill Donald and Grant attacked up the left side and I was too slow to go with them, so I ended up finishing 3rd in the race and ultimately 3rd in the omnium. The last 200 meters were past the steepest part of the climb and it took forever to get to the finish line. Despite the heat and low Masters turnout, it was a fun race on some really challenging courses.

In the earlier Women's race Mignon and Ashley had finished 4th and 5th, which I think was a little disappointing, giving them 3rd and 4th in the overall omnium for the weekend. We hung around for a few laps of the Ca.t 1/2 race, but it was getting pretty hot and with a 5 hour drive ahead of us we left before the finish. On the way home I learned that Mike W had crashed pretty heavily during the Giro Ride - something about the traffic barricades down at the end of Hayne and the fact he was riding his track TT bike with, I assume, just a front brake.

This morning's levee ride got uncharacteristically fast for a Wednesday when Woody hit the front on his TT bike. A few miles earlier Scott had yelled to him that his saddle bag was starting to come loose, but apparently he hadn't heard it. I planned on reminding him about it, but once the pace picked up I forgot all about it. Someone pulled out of the paceline as the speed ramped up to 27 or 28 and I soon found myself on Woody's wheel searching for a draft. Suddenly I saw something fall and knew immediately what it was. His seat bag had fallen and wedged itself between the rear wheel and the frame, completely locking up his rear wheel. Woody went left. I went right and got by him as he skidded to a stop, burning completely through his rear tire and twisting or bending his front derailleur until the crankarm caught it. Somehow nobody went down. This all happened just as we were passing one of the ubiquitous police cars up there, so by the time I'd slowed down, turned around, and gotten back to him, Woody was already loading his bike into the officer's car to get a ride back to the parking lot. The pace got a lot slower after that!

drisKILL

Sweat was already dripping from my face as I pinned my number on for the noon start of the Mount Driskill race up here in Ruston, LA. I'd driven up with Mignon, leaving around 5:30 am and arriving shortly before 11. This was going to be a tough 50 miles. As if the jagged course profile wasn't enough, we would also be dealing with temperatures in the upper 90s. The masters field was small, about a dozen in size, so there wasn't going to be any place to hide. We weren't more than six or seven miles into the first 25 mile loop when I pushed the pace up a rather unimpressive little hill and discovered that two of us had opened a rather large gap. I rolled through and pretty soon we had maybe 30 seconds on the field, but the rider I was with was starting to have second thoughts and dropped off. I looked back and could see a few riders trying to bridge, so I kept rolling hoping that we could make something of it. Soon we had a nice group of Donald Davis, Grant Dona, one other rider, and me. We kept the pace pretty high and the next time I looked back I couldn't see the field. I was feeling pretty good at that point. We lost one rider but kept working together as we approached the end of the first lap. Donald took off early to go for the hot spot, but I stuck with Grant and we ground our way up the steep climb. I shifted up one cog and stood up to sprint, and when I did Grant did the same. I just didn't have the heart to come around him after he'd pulled most of the way up the hill. I guess I'm getting soft in my old age.

As we started the second lap I made the mistake of not taking anything from the neutral feed. I still had a large bottle of Heed and water, and about a quarter bottle of regular water, so I thought I'd be OK. Five miles later I was starting to get the feeling I'd made a mistake. It was getting really, really hot and I was starting to suffer on the hills a bit. I think we all were. By the time we were halfway around Donald was starting to skip some pulls. I had no idea how far back the rest of the race was, but I knew that our speed had dropped considerably. Grant seemed to be suffering the least. About five miles from the finish Donald pulled over and said, "sorry guys" and eased off the back. I think Grant picked up the pace just a bit at that point. I had already been rationing my water for at least five miles and knew I was approaching heat exhaustion territory. When we got to the bottom of the final climb up to the finish line, the Mt. Driskill "summit," I told Grant I was done and watched him ride up the hill as I shifted down into my lowest gear to trudge up that final kilometer. It took me a good half hour after the race to get my body temperature back to normal, and that was after downing three delicious slushee type things and a bottle of cold water. It was a tough day on the asphalt. Stephen Mire, the race organizer, did a great job with the race - everything went off on time, results were quick, there were lots of cold drinks and even watermelon. Tomorrow will be a different course, but I have a feeling it won't feel any easier. At least we'll start a little earlier.

TD-5

What was left of Tropical Depression #5 came barrelling right through New Orleans early this morning, bringing some truly impressive thunder, lightning and torrential rain. I guess it was before 5 am when the really heavy rain started, and by the time it finally let up there was a fair amount of street flooding in the usual places. Feeling kind of desperate for a ride, considering I'd missed both Monday and Wednesday, I decided to take the rain bike out for a quick 20 miles before work. I left around 7 am, but which time the rain had eased up considerably and there was just a light drizzle falling. I put on the rain jacket and headed down the street. A few blocks later I could see that Carrollton Ave. was flooded, so I turned at Short Street. The only problem was that the intersection there was about three feet deep, so for a little while I was up to my water bottle in water.

When I got to Montecello, just a block from the levee, traffic on River Road was practically at a standstill because of flooding on either side of the railroad tracks. Once again I dove into the deep water, riding the last block of Monticello in about two feet of water, which BTW is like riding on a trainer with the resistance set to high. Once I got up onto the levee, though, I was high and dry and had the entire thing to myself. I took a couple of photos and then got in eight or ten easy miles with my rain jacket flapping in the wind before turning around. By the time I got back the flooding was already subsiding as the pumps started to make some headway on the rain. Even so, I had one more stretch of deep water to circumnavigate (I rode on the sidewalk for a block or so) before getting back home where I immediately cleaned and lubed the chain. I'll have to re-grease the old classic Campi hubs and bottom bracket tonight since I'm quite sure that water got into them while they were submerged.

I just signed up for this weekend's Mt. Driskill Omnium in Ruston, about five hours away, which features two very hilly road races for which I'm feeling quite ill-prepared and possibly over-geared. I have to bring some of the LAMBRA equipment up there anyway. Mt. Driskill is the highest point in Louisiana, towering some 535 feet (yes, I said "feet") above sea level. I hope the altitude doesn't get me! Actually, the steepness of the climbs up there is definitely something to be worried about.

Rain Day

When it rains, it pours. As I'd planned, I skipped riding Monday morning on the dubious theory that my legs needed a day off the bike. Midway though my morning shower, however, I started to notice a lot of police and ambulance sirens. When I looked outside I could see there had been a fairly serious accident a block away, at Claiborne and Broadway - air bags deployed, smashed minivan, ambulance. Even so, there seemed to be a lot more police cars than usual. I threw on some clothes and walked outside where I could see numerous police officers walking around on the other side of Claiborne. Apparently the driver of the offending vehicle had taken off running after the accident (the victims were uninjured thanks to their airbags), and the police were searching for him in bushes, underneath houses, etc. I presume they found him, because a little while later one of the ambulances moved a coule of blocks away where there was a cluster of police officers. By then I was running late, so I scarfed down a couple of leftover Gulf shrimp and headed off to work. So that's how my week started.

The Tuesday morning levee ride had a pretty big group, but was relatively civilized this week, which is to say that the group mostly stayed together. It helped that John flatted on the way out and most everyone stopped to wait.

The Tulane cycling club's jersey design is finally ready and Rich has put up an order page on BikeReg (may still be some refinement to that before he officially announces it), so things are moving along on that front again. By early afternoon I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting room with my dad for one of his routine visits. We were there a good hour for a ten-minute visit.

After that I drove up to Baton Rouge with The Wife to check out some reported damage to her mother's house that has been vacant for the last five years. We arrived to find that the entire road in front of the house is completely ripped up and in the process of being widened, so we had a little hike in the mud just to get there. What we found was that someone had gotten in there and broken every single pane of glass in the entire house, kicked in every door, ripped down every light fixture, kicked holes in the walls, and generally had a fun old time doing as much destruction as possible. So we filed a police report just on principle since there's only liability insurance on the property at this point, stopped for dinner at the local Outback, and got home around 9:30.

Naturally, since I'd already taken one day off the bike this week, this morning I stepped out the door all dressed for riding, only to be greeted by a loud clap of thunder and rain. We're already getting rain ahead of the tropical depression that's out in the Gulf. It's projected track has it heading straight this way, but all indications are that it won't be very serious -- just very wet. Maybe I'll ride out to the lakefront this evening, weather permitting.

Stan Truxillo, who had that massive heart attack last week, had bypass surgery yesterday and seems to be doing great. Two hours of surgery for four bypasses, and by 5 pm he was back on his feet. If all goes as planned he'll probably be out of the hospital in a few days.

The Truth

The Time Trial is often referred to as The Race of Truth. That may be close to the truth, but the real race of truth is the Team Time Trial. You see, in an individual TT, there's always ample opportunity for self-delusion, rationalization, and generally convincing oneself that one doesn't really suck as badly as the stopwatch might indicate. In a Team TT, on the other hand, there's no hiding from the reality of one's own suckage, even when you're the smallest guy in the paceline.


So Saturday morning I was in the car at 6 am on my way up to Baton Rouge for the annual Team Time Trial. We'd pulled together a 40+ team consisting of Jorge, Rob, Keith and me. I knew Jorge would be up for a fast pace. Keith had been riding strongly of late, and although I hadn't ridden much with Rob, I figured he'd be up to the task as well. I wasn't so sure about myself. The TTT registration process was kind of confusing, at least from the official's side of the table, but I got all of the teams and riders entered into the computer and then had twenty minutes or so to change and get in a little warmup. We got our countdown and headed out on our 51.6 km torture test. The start went smoothly, and with a little tailwind we were soon up to 28 mph despite the plan to avoid going out too fast. I was feeling OK until the road started to turn into the wind. Jorge was taking long fast pulls, Rob seemed to be having a little difficulty with the pace, and Keith and I were holding our own. Every time I'd come to the front my legs would really start to load up after about 40 revolutions. This was not a good sign since we were less than ten miles into the time trial. It was around that time that we unexpectedly lost Keith. By the time we were halfway through the second of three laps it was going like this: Jorge would pull for about a mile, usually at about 27-28 mph. He would finally pull off, at which point Rob would come through and immediately pull over. Then I'd come through and the pace would kind of grind down one or two mph until I'd pull off and Jorge would come through again. Then I'd have to really put my head down to catch onto the tail of our 3-man paceline as the pace went up again. The last lap was just plain painful. In retrospect, I guess I was probably a bit dehydrated, but I think the real problem may have been that I'd never taken enough recovery time the prior week. Anyway, we did a respectable time thanks to Jorge who pulled a good 80% of the distance. Took me a while to recover from that one! I packed the station wagon back up with the LAMBRA equipment and headed home to post the results on the website.

Sunday morning I was back on the bike at 6 am, riding out to meet the Giro Ride. There was a little breeze already, but I knew the real issue would be the heat. With a few of the regular riders still up in Louisville for Masters Nationals, the group was a little smaller than usual, and I was surprised to see Jered and Ashley who had arrived back in town at something like 4 am after a very long drive from Denver. As soon as we hit Hayne Blvd., a small group rode off the front of the still-disorganized group. After some shuffling around, we finally got a good rotation going at the front and basically chased Rob K. and his breakaway companions until they eased up around Chef Highway. That didn't last long, though and another group took off on Hayne, so we were once again chasing, finally closing in on them a mile or two before the turnaround. The effort took a pretty big toll on the pack, though, and at least half of them turned around early to meet the front group on the way back. I think everyone was getting pretty toasty by then because the whole group was rolling down Chef Highway at about twelve mph for a long time. I eventually rode up to a small group that was down the road and soon found myself doing a 2-man time trial with Steven N. as I waited for the rest of the group to awaken and come storming by. We got reabsorbed toward the end of Hayne, but after the sprint the group came apart again so a small group of us rolled off the front for the last time. We kept the pressure on until the end of the service road, but after that things eased up. We were toast -- at least I was. A couple of miles from home I sucked the last drops of water from my big insulated bottle and promised myself a real recovery day on Monday.

The Weekend Already?

It was the shortest of weeks and it was longest of weeks. Every day I'd tell myself, "I'll post an blog update tonight," and every day I'd fall asleep before I did. So here it is Friday night. It's pouring down rain outside thanks to one of those little unpredictable summer thunderstorms, and I still need to get my act together for tomorrow's team time trial over near Baton Rouge. Since I have to bring a bunch of essentials for the race (generator, clock, etc., etc.) I'll need to leave around 6 am.

So this was a long and hot week. Tuesday's long levee ride was kind of strange. The ride out to the turnaround was mostly pretty civilized until we got way out past the dip. At some point I think Donald got irritated at Howard's surges, and by the time things really got rolling on the way back I had the distinct feeling that they were battling each other up at the front. Brady was there too, so the bottom line was that the ride back was way faster than the ride out. That evening I went out to the Arena for a little practice criterium. I wasn't really into it, but nonetheless got in a pretty good workout. I was impressed with Steven Noya who launched a couple of really strong and well-timed attacks. That afternoon I'd learned that Stan Truxillo, who was a very active racer and NOBC president for a few years before moving to Texas in the mid-80s, had collapsed on a bike ride with a "massive" heart attack. Someone administered CPR and luckily the hospital in Austin was equipped to put him into therapeutic hypothermia right away. I was still fearing the worst, but when they warmed him back up early Thursday and he came out of the induced coma he seemed to be in great shape. He's now scheduled for bypass surgery on Tuesday.

By Wednesday morning I was still not feeling fully recovered from the weekend, much less the previous day, and although the morning ride was smooth and steady, I probably should have done an even easier recovery ride alone. I was certainly wishing I had on Thursday morning when the levee ride got pretty fast. Then, on the way back, I found myself off the front with VJ and Rob, both of whom were on their TT bikes. It was like doing ten miles of motorpacing. I think I went to the front twice and very briefly at that. This morning's ride was a pretty typical Friday ride, which was a good thing. Hopefully my legs will still be functional tomorrow.

In the meantime, a number of LAMBRA riders have been up in Louisville at Masters Nationals. It hasn't been going too well for some of them, apparently. I haven't gotten any reports from them yet, but I've been surprised at how far down some of the area's strongest masters have been finishing in the Road Races. On the plus side, Debbie Milne won her Road Race for the second year in a row, apparently finishing something like five minutes ahead of 2nd place. The criteriums start tomorrow.

Electrolyte Season

It's 9 pm on Monday night. The thermometer out on the porch reads 92F and the air is thick and humid. I guess they were right about that specific heat of water thing. The last few days have been a bit uncomfortable around here. Welcome to summer in New Orleans!

There weren't any conveniently located race this weekend, which is to say there was nothing within a three-hour drive. Mid-summer us usually kind of slow down south, but once we get into September there's often a little flurry of activity again, kind of like a second little mini-season. So anyway, that all meant translated into two Giro Rides for me.

With no chance of relief from the subtropical sun for the Saturday Giro, it was time to dig into the electrolyte drink mix jar. Most of the time I go with plain water, but we were now in the middle of electrolyte season. I pulled the regular water bottle out of the seat tube cage and put it aside. Instead, I grabbed one of the big bottles, dumped in a heaping scoop of Hammer electrolyte mix, and filled it to the brim with water. I would have done the same with the other bottle, but the frame triangle is so tight on the Orbea that it's kind of hard to get the big bottles in and out. So for the downtube location I went with a regular bottle with regular water.

By the time I got to Starbucks to meet the group I was already dripping sweat. I got my usual iced coffee and tried to cool down as more riders filtered in and the sun started to come up. There was already a breeze blowing as the big group finally headed out for the usual warmup spin out to Chef Highway. It got pretty fast pretty quickly. A small group rolled off the front and a minute later the pack started to chase. I was feeling pretty good, but I knew some of that was just because we had a tailwind. I always wonder if the guys at the front understand that if there's a tailwind on the way out it means there will be a headwind on the way back.

On this particular day, a number of the riders doing the damage were on TT bikes, so frankly, I didn't feel like I needed to be spending much time out in the wind myself. The lead group eased up at the end of Hayne, so things mostly came back together, but by then we'd already lost a lot of people. We wouldn't see them again until the turnaround, because once we got to Chef highway the pace went back up for the duration. Actually, it was a good workout. As expected, things slowed down a couple of notches on the way back. Yeah, I drank every drop. A bunch of us stopped at Matt's house just off Robert E. Lee to rehydrate before riding home.

Later in the day we walked down to the monthly crafts fair at Palmer Park. I was so hot that I didn't want to stop walking, so I kind of zipped through looking at the usual stuff on offer and headed home for the comfort of the a/c.

Sunday morning was kind of a repeat of Saturday, except with fewer riders and a slightly slower pace. Fast on the way out, slower on the way back. Everyone seemed pretty wilted by the time we got back, myself included. Typical mid-summer Giro Ride!

When I wasn't riding, I think I spent most of my time last weekend hiding in the air-conditioning.

Back and Forth

So I have a few nice photos from Saturday's Giro to put up and really intended to use them for a weekend blog post yesterday, but instead I opted for a little computer moratorium. I've been going back and forth among three computers and two flash drives lately and I think it all tripped the circuit-breaker in my head some time on Sunday morning. The photos are on the computer at home, and the writeup is still bouncing around in my head, and it's all taken a bit of a back seat to work and cars and trying to stay out of the sun. Maybe the Mellow Monday ride this evening will smooth things out and I'll get back to normal tonight.....