Tuesday's Turtle Tumble

Waiting to fix flat number one.

Dry roads with no threat of rain brought a lot of people out of the woodwork this morning for the long Tuesday levee ride.  Rolling out from the start it took a few miles for things to get organized, but by the time we passed underneath the Huey P. Long bridge there was a long string of riders.  Over the next few miles the tailwind-assisted pace gradually crept upward from 20 mph to 23, then to 25 and beyond.  I think it was VJ who planted himself at the front and pulled the whole group like a mother duck for at least three miles. Eventually a rotation started and I took a pull or two with the pace hovering about the 26 mph level.  I dropped back after one pull watching the string of riders stream past me until I finally slotted back into the draft near the tail end of the group.  There were a lot of people out on the levee today - walkers, runners, other riders, etc. -- so every now and them there would be drop in speed as we negotiated our way around them all.  It's always a little uncomfortable being near the back under those situations because you usually can't see what is up ahead very well and have to put a lot of faith in the riders in front of you.  Anyway, somewhere out there the group split.  I didn't even realize it until we went around a bend and I noticed a group of maybe six or seven that was fifteen or twenty seconds up the road.  There wasn't much of a concerted chase going on, and it was a little while before I finally rotated back up toward the front.  Lenny got impatient and sprinted past on the left to bridge up to the break while the rest of us just maintained a reasonably steady pace.  The front group started shedding riders as we got closer to the turnaround, but for the most part the pace didn't get too much out of hand.

The wind must have been picking up during the ride because by the time we had started back we found ourselves in a pretty significant head/crosswind. We stopped momentarily to pick up Richard who was just finishing fixing a flat he'd had a mile or so from the turnaround.  I was pretty far back in the paceline when we hit a long section of crosswind between St. Rose and Kenner that had most of us lined up on the far left edge of the bike path, switching back over to the right at the last second every time there was a rider coming the other way.  I considered going up closer to the front where the draft was better, but it would have been a long time in the wind.  Besides, I knew we would soon be turning more into the wind, which would slow the speed a notch and also allow for a better draft where I was, so I just held my position.

After we passed Williams Blvd. the road started its gradual bend to the south and I was looking forward to getting out of the relentless crosswind when suddenly riders started hitting the brakes ahead of me.  I heard the crash a moment before I saw it, and had just barely enough time to bail out onto the grassy levee to the left, narrowly avoiding one of the bikes that was sliding along the asphalt.  I had no idea what had caused the sudden and entirely unexpected braking, but as I climbed back up to the bike path I could see that three riders had gone down.  I rode back to see if everyone was OK, and as I was standing there Matt walked by holding a big turtle that he then escorted down the levee and released onto the batture.  Apparently someone in the middle of the paceline had touched the brakes rather suddenly because of the turtle and precipitated the crash.  Luckily nobody seemed too badly hurt, although David's Mavic wheel had taken a pretty bad hit.  At least five or six of the spoke heads had popped out of the hub entirely, so the rim was up against the chainstay and wouldn't even roll.  He called for extraction as we waited for Richard, whose tire had gone flat again, to change his tube.  Most of the group took off, leaving just four or five of us to ride back with Richard.