Midsummer Rides

No prizes, but a podium!

The midsummer heat and humidity has been in full force lately, and so I'm going to blame that for the fact that I haven't felt good on the bike all week. I had skipped riding on Monday since I was clearly, obviously, dramatically in need of some recovery time, and I guess it helped somewhat.  Still, I've been feeling generally sluggish all week.  I missed Kenny's bandit time trial, which seems to get bigger and bigger every week, on Tuesday evening because we were going out to Mosca's with my father.  It had been quite a few years since I'd ventured into the wilds of the westbank for dinner at Mosca's.  The place was renovated a bit after Katrina, but they were successful in retaining the 1960's roadside restaurant atmosphere and I don't think the menu has changed since at least the Nixon administration.  We had a big family table and just ordered the huge shared plates of Oysters Mosca, Italian Crab Salad, Chicken à La Grande, and Shrimp Mosca.  It was good, messy, as always a bit overpriced.  James Carville and company had the table next to us. It's always amazing who you see at that place because if you didn't know better you'd drive right past it, which is probably what they're hoping the IRS does since they accept only cold, hard cash there.

Wednesday morning on the levee Scott said he'd just had his bike worked on and now the chain was skipping on one of the cogs.  I asked him the obvious questions about new chains on old cassettes, but that didn't seem to be the likely cause, so I took a closer look.  It was pretty obvious that they'd somehow mixed up the spacers in his Campi 10-speed cassette.  That's often what happens shortly after a mechanic says "oops" and the cassette parts scatter across the floor.  Anyway, he brought it back that morning and they straightened it out.  You kind of need the charts to do it right because the spacers aren't all the same width and the setup is different for practically every version (record, chorus, etc.).  I'd been planning on riding out to the lakefront in the evening for the training race, but by the time I got home and walked the dogs it was already nearly 6 pm and the streets were still a little damp from an earlier shower, which provided enough of an excuse.  I'd ridden back from work down Pine Street and by the time I was halfway there I started noticing an unusual amount of traffic. A few blocks later I was riding past a solid line of cars inching their way down the street.  As it turned out, the POTUS was at a little fundraiser thing a few blocks over on Audubon Blvd. and so a bunch of streets were temporarily closed down, forcing people to meander through the neighborhood searching for a way out.  Anyway, I wonder if that $25,000 per person snack time included some discussion about the Tulane football stadium, since it was being held at one of those houses. 

I can't say I was feeling any better this morning for the long Thursday levee ride.  After taking a pull and drifting back to the end of the line, the pace started to ramp up.  Tim, who had just set a new course record for the Tuesday night time trial (10.6 mi. @ 23:16 = 27.3 mph avg.), was up there, along with a few others who were planning on turning around early, and that kept the speeds up in the 25-28 mph range pretty much all the way out to Ormond.  I didn't see much of the front until we were past St. Rose, by which time the size of the group had dwindled a bit.  It wasn't terribly fast, but down around the tail end of the paceline it was erratic enough to make it difficult.  After the turnaround it took a little while for everyone to get back together. We finally got rolling at 25 mph or so near St. Rose, rode through The Dip, and then a little while later VJ, who had been on the front on his TT bike, started having some kind of shifting problem and finally sat up. As I rolled past him I asked what happened, but he had his earphones in and probably didn't hear me.  Steve and I soft-pedaled along for the next couple of miles thinking he'd flatted or something, but soon we couldn't even see anyone behind us and figured it had been something mechanical.  A little while later the paceline came streaming past and I asked Richard what had happened.  It turned out that VJ's cassette lockring had backed itself out, eventually hitting the inside of the dropout and stripping the first few threads on the cassette body.  He ended up having to pull off one cog in order to get enough good threads to screw the lockring back on, so he was able to continue.  Toward the end of the ride the group split and I don't know if he had to stop again to re-tighten the lockring, since I assume it was only hand-tight to begin with.  Anyway, I was just a puddle of sweat by the time I got home thanks to the heat and humidity.

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in the track races coming up this weekend, so I'm looking forward to that and hoping I will be able to race a bit and not have to officiate too much.  At least the weather seems to have settled back into a more normal midsummer routine of random afternoon showers rather than all-day wash-outs.