Although the mid-day temperatures were back up to normal this weekend, I didn't hear anybody complaining. To be sure, we could use a little rain around here, but from the cycling perspective, you really couldn't find anything about which to complain. So I was up early on Saturday, riding out to the lakefront in the dark to meet the Giro Ride, with a quick stop at Starbucks along the way.
The group was surprisingly tranquil, and we were all the way out to Chef Highway before the pace really started to ramp up. We had Stan Day (SRAM) riding with us on Saturday. He was in town for Tulane Homecoming, but nonetheless spent a lot of time up near the front of the Giro Ride. The guy can ride. Things got going pretty fast along there, but legs were still fresh and with maybe a dozen riders working at the front, I doubt we shed many until the last mile or so before the turnaround sprint. Then, on the way back down Chef, we came upon an auto accident, along with its attendant police cars, which resulted in the whole group actually stopping for a red light. Imagine that! That kind of threw a monkey wrench into the Goodyear Sign sprint, although I think a handful of guys did make a run for it anyway. Afterward, we had a small club meeting at Kona, so by the time I got home it was getting close to noon. I was planning on doing the Tulane Cycling city ride at 2 pm, so that left me just enough time to refuel and run over to the bike shop to pick up a new cable set before I was pulling on my riding clothes again. A complete "official" Campi cable set costs over half as much as my first custom racing frame. Ouch.
Saturday's Tulane ride just had three of us. Considering all of the other stuff going on, including the Tulane homecoming game at 2:30, I wasn't surprised. Early October is definitely "festival season" around here, and on Saturday you couldn't hardly throw a rock without hitting a festival. On our easy 20 mile afternoon ride we rode through one festival at City Park, some sort of reunion party on Wisner at the old JFK high school, and finally the Magazine Street Blues festival where we stopped for some refreshments. I finally made my way back home with something in excess of 80 miles on the odometer.
Sunday morning was the first "official" northshore winter training ride. With another awesome weather day on hand, we had about twenty riders at Lee Road Junior High for the traditional 65 mile ride. We were only a few miles down the road when I heard a loud "pop" from Ed Novak's wheel. As he dropped back past me, I looked over and said, "something broke!" Sure enough, he'd broken a spoke in his front wheel. He pulled his trusty Van Dessel track bike over to investigate as everyone waited, but the news wasn't good. His front wheel had straight-pull radial spokes with the nipples at the hub, which meant that regular spoke wrenches would be useless. Since the wheel was far enough out of line that the tire was hitting the inside of the fork, he really didn't have any alternative but to limp back to his car. I guess it was lucky that it didn't happen when we were thirty miles away. 
Anyway, I was kind of expecting a hard ride, given the significant amount of horsepower on hand. In fact, it was significantly more mellow than I'd expected. Don't get me wrong, though. It wasn't all double paceline and chit-chat. There were a few stretches that were good and fast, and although I didn't go for any of the freshly re-painted sprint lines (now complete with preceding 1km and 200M marks), others did. Even so, there were never any really big splits and everyone mostly stayed together. I was surprised how good my legs were feeling, although perhaps that is more attributable to the moderate pace than any sudden improvement in my own recovery time.
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