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.