Ninety and Knobbies

The weather around here has been changing faster than I can change clothes lately.  This morning I went out perfectly attired to meet the Giro Ride, but I knew my pockets would soon be stuffed with discarded clothes. My original plan of doing Saturday's Baton Rouge cyclocross race had been rearranged when I got a request to officiate Sunday's 'cross race.  I also needed to pick up The Wife from the Westin downtown in the afternoon, so I set my sights on Sundays cyclocross race and figured I'd do the NOBC club ride out to Fort Pike this morning.  After a quick stop for coffee I met the Giro Ride group at Robert E. Lee Blvd. and was surprised how many riders were there.  Since the NOBC group wasn't leaving for another fifteen minutes I decided to go ahead and ride with the Giro group out to Venetian Isles and then pick up the NOBC group when it came by later.  It was a good plan.  The Giro turned out to be pretty fast and so rather than sit around at Venetian Isles for twenty minutes or so, I started riding back down Chef Highway until I finally saw the group coming a few miles later. 

The NOBC group had a good paceline going and with a nice little tailwind we made pretty good time out to Fort Pike.  For a change, the view from the top of the bridge was great today. I was feeling pretty good, but by the time the odometer was reading 65 miles my legs were starting to feel the distance a bit.  Later, a few of us stopped at Kona Cafe to eat.  By the time I got home I had 90 miles on the computer and I had a feeling my legs were not going to be too happy about that cyclocross race on Sunday.

It'll be interesting to see if my bike holds together for Sunday's race.  My poor-man's retro cyclocross bike is a 1972 vintage English frame with 5-speed friction shifting. I finally broke down and bought a couple of 30mm cyclocross tires for it.  The problem was that the wheels on the bike were 27".  I had a nice pair of 700c 6-speed clinchers, so I figured I'd just swap the freewheel over to the those wheels and all would be good.  Unfortunately the old freewheel had welded itself to the hub and the removal notches were mangled, so I never could get it off.  Luckily the LBS actually had a 5-speed freewheel in stock. 

Then I just had to fix the loose headset, reposition the brake pads (which I hope I don't actually have to rely on), replace the missing bolt holding the cleat onto my mountain bike shoe, and replace both derailleur cables (the front one had gotten water inside the housing and was in pretty bad shape).  While I was at it I installed a "new" old-style Concor saddle that's been in a bag for the better part of twenty years.  Hopefully nothing will come loose because I didn't really have a chance to go out for a test ride.  Fortunately I won't have to worry about slowing anybody down tomorrow since that would require me to be in front of them and we all know that's not going to happen.