No Coffee, No Race

It was another hot weekend of Giro Rides for me, although up until around 8 pm on Saturday I'd still been considering the solo 5.5 hour drive up to Oxford to make the Sunday criterium.  Needless to say, it didn't happen.  Saturday started out with a slightly diminished Giro thanks to a fair amount of missing horsepower in the group.  That horsepower was up at the Oxford Endurance Weekend.  I made the best of it, though, and got in a pretty good workout despite the rapidly rising temperatures.  I imagine it could only have been worse up there in Mississppi for the time trial and circuit race.  That afternoon we packed up and moved most of the remaining contents of my mother's condominium after having spent all of Friday in the company of a couple of movers from "Mr. Move." This wasn't a simple case of taking everything in one house and moving it to another.  My nephew drove over from Baton Rouge with a U-haul truck, we picked up a U-haul trailer for the niece in Jackson, and of course the movers had their big truck. We had tagged all of the furniture and boxes so that, ultimately, it all got distributed among three houses in New Orleans, an apartment in Baton Rouge, a house in Jackson, and a storage unit in Jackson (ultimately to find its way to Orlando).  Anyway, there was still a lot of stuff at the condo on Saturday afternoon that required attention, including multiple trips to the Salvation Army and the local dumpster, and I think it was almost dark by the time we gave up for the day.  When the dust settled around 10 pm I briefly contemplated the wisdom of getting up at 3 or 4 am and driving up to Oxford in time to make the Master 40+ race, but ultimately decided that my chances of falling asleep at the wheel were significantly greater than those of a good placing.

So Sunday morning I was once again making my way down Carrollton Avenue trying to decide between Iced Macchiato (which at Starbucks is really more of an iced Latte) and regular coffee when, just as I passed the Mexican bar at Tulane Avenue (which was still going strong at 6:15 am), I heard the whack, whack, whack, of something stuck in my tire. The first thing I thought was, "Damn, I'm not going to have time for coffee."  My rear tire had been impaled by one of those damned sheetrock screws which I had to carefully unscrew from the tire.  I changed it out and pumped it up as best I could with my little mini-pump, sacrificed a bit of precious water to rinse off my hands, and continued my trip to rendezvous with the Giro Ride.  Once there, I figured I may as well skip the coffee, and instead walked across the street to where Mark G. was parked to borrow his floor pump.  The group on Sunday was even smaller than it had been on Saturday, but I guess we eventually accumulated 25 riders or so.  Anyway, just as I'm putting my helmet back on and everyone is getting up to start the ride, Mark walks out of Starbucks with a fresh cup of coffee which he ended up carrying with him as we warmed up along Lakeshore Drive.  There were at least four riders on TT bikes this morning, so I knew it was going to be a nice smooth paceline ride.  One of the TT bikes was piloted by Mike W., who recently returned from masters nationals with a couple of medals in an age group that to which we can all still aspire.  He seemed particularly unstable this morning as I watched him swerve from center line to curb along Chef Highway trying to put a water bottle back into one of those triathlete seat-mounted bottle launcher things.  Anyway, as I'd expected, the ride was a bit on the inconsistent side, depending on who happened to be on the front. By the time we were halfway down Chef Highway, still on the way out to the turnaround, it seemed like the number of people interested in being at the front had already gotten pretty small, but luckily we had a nice little tailwind that kept the speed up.

After the turnaround where Mike W went hammering off the front with one rider in tow, things got substantially slower.  Between the headwind and the heat, the group started to get pretty anemic as the pace hovered around the 24 mph mark.  After making a small effort over the Seabrook bridge with Noel, who continued straight on Leon C. Simon to head home, I came around the curve onto Lakeshore Drive and looked back to see the remnant of the group still going up the bridge. So it was a long solo ride back home as I rationed my remaining water and dreamed of vanilla ice cream.