Rough Week

It's been a rough week for riding thus far, having started out with two rainy mornings.  I went out into the humid chill on Monday with every expectation of doing a normal recovery ride.  It was overcast and therefore darker than usual, but I'd checked the forecast the night before and rain wasn't expected until later in the day.  I should have checked the radar.  I was only four miles from home when I felt the first light droplets hitting my cheeks.  By five miles I knew it was here to stay and I circled back toward home.  By then it was a steady but light drizzle.  I wanted nothing to do with getting soaked, being cold, or sliding around on slick streets, and was happy enough to make it home before getting truly wet. The next morning was even worse and I didn't even consider trying.  By Wednesday the front had passed and it was cooler and drier. I had two full days of meetings on my dance card, however, and would have to improvise.  On Wednesday that meant a short early morning ride that was mostly in the dark, but at least it was something. I'd normally have accumulated around 85 miles by the end of Wednesday's ride.  This week it was a mere 30.  I had an extra half-hour on Thursday, so I met the 6:15 group and was able to ride out to the little dip with it before turning around and coming back with Woody and Mignon and Daniel.  That one netted me 30 miles and even though I had to rush to get downtown in time for the first meeting, it was worth it. Today it was just Scott and me, ticking off the regular 26 mile ride at a steady 21-22 mph.  I'd received an interesting "gift card" from my sister-in-law for coffee at Zotz.  They don't actually *have* gift cards there, so she gave me this handwritten thing that said "Absolutely Legit" at the top.  Anyway, they did indeed have a little tab set up for me so I had a nice little Americano this morning after the ride.  Tomorrow I should be able to do the regular Giro Ride, but then on Sunday I have to go up to Brookhaven for the annual LAMBRA meeting.  As usual, a number of clubs are backing out of sending anyone there, claiming it's too far or that nobody can make it.  I'm about ready to just do away with the meeting and make up the rules and settle the schedule all by myself -  take it or leave it. Later, they will be complaining about the schedule or the LCCS rules or something else that happened in their absence. The fact that I will be giving up my first good opportunity this Fall for a long ride in the country is just another twist of the knife.  On Monday our contractor is going to start tearing up our kitchen, which I'm sure is going to present all sorts of unexpected challenges and expenditures, none of which I am looking forward to.  On the plus side, I bought a Bianchi Sempre frame (used, of course, and Celeste, of course) on Monday and am waiting for a few little bits and pieces to arrive before starting to build it up.  The geometry is extremely close to that of my Orbea, so I'm not expecting any big surprises and had originally planned on transferring stem, bars, seatpost, etc. from that bike to the new one, but late one night after a couple of glasses of wine, and considering the effects of the impending renovation project, christmas, and property taxes, I decided I deserved some new stuff instead.

The Long Weekend

It all started Thanksgiving morning.  Earlier in the week Mignon had innocently sent out an email suggesting a 7 am start time for a Thanksgiving Day ride.  We will often put together these "holiday" rides when a lot of people are off work on a weekday.  Of course, I was thinking this would be a nice smooth little group ride with some light conversation and just a sprinkling of actual training.  Apparently a number of others, however, were thinking of a long hammerfest race simulation to atone for the gluttony in which they were planning to indulge later in the day.  The group soft-pedaled for a while as it waited for a couple of late arrivals to catch up from the Playground, but as soon as they arrived the speed went up to 26 mph and pretty much stayed there. We lost a number of riders right off the bat.  The return trip felt more and more like a race the farther we went and when yet another surge took it up to 29 mph somewhere around the country club I decided it was time to dial it back a bit and let them go. The front group was basically sprinting for the bridge, I guess, because we caught up to them around the playground as most were heading for their cars. My daughter flew in that afternoon and we had a big Thanksgiving dinner that night, so I was more than happy to do a nice easy ride Friday morning.  Riding alone, I was able to enjoy the scenery and spotted a bald eagle near the bend in the river at the country club.  This is the time of year when I always seem to see eagles around here.

So on Saturday morning Joey D stopped by the house and joined me for the ride out to meet the Giro.  There was a pretty big group that included some of the LSU riders.  Apparently a few of the riders had deicded amongst themselves that the traditional warmup section of the Giro was too slow and decided to make it faster. Normally, riders roll out from Starbucks in a long disorganized string with lots of big gaps because they know that the group will be going slowly and everything will come back together halfway down Lakeshore Drive.  Well this time it didn't because the riders at the front were pushing the pace way above "normal."  Some riders had to chase hard to catch.  Others got dropped for good in the strong crosswind.  There was even a crash that I'm sure nobody at the front even knew about.  The rest of the Giro that day seemed like a windy road race in south Florida. There was a pretty strong northwest wind that kept the speed low but the effort level high. When the speed ramped up about a mile before the Venetian Isles sprint I backed off as the group started to shatter.  A moment later I saw the group coming back.  They had turned around way, way early for some reason.  In the process, they had left Brett Regan and Mike Williams, who had raced all the way to the usual turnaround, behind.  They ended up chasing all the way back and were not too happy about it, either. 

It was deep in Lakeview after Katrina

The return trip got pretty fast as well, especially when the route took us westward with the tailwind, and we spent a lot of time in the 26-30 mph range. It wasn't an easy ride, nor a very civilized one.  Afterward I stopped at NOLA Beans on Harrison Avenue for a club meeting to discuss our 2013-14 team kit and didn't get home and out of my own team kit until nearly noon.  A little brass plaque on the wall near the bathroom noted the Katrina water level.

Sunday morning I had to take The Daughter to the airport, so I missed the Giro, which was probably a good thing under the circumstances.  It was pretty cold in the morning, so I waited until around 10:30 and set off for a long solo ride on the river bike path, staying mostly in the 18-20 mph range and enjoying some pretty great weather.  I was still feeling guilty about all of the pecan pie, lemon merangue, turkey, turkey soup, stuffing, and wine I'd consumed when I went out this morning for what I expected to be 25 miles at a moderate pace. It was cloudy but the last weather forecast I'd seen had put the chance of rain at around 10% until later in the day.  It was wrong.  Five mile in I started to feel the drizzle and promptly made a u-turn for home, arriving rather damp but not yet drenched or cold.

Two Hundred Fifty

Two Hundred Fifty miles a week has always seemed to be the point at which, for me, I feel like I'm actually making progress. If I can string together two or three weeks at around that mileage I start to feel like I'm getting in shape. Of course there are some weeks during the racing season during which I might not hit that mark, but those are usually weeks in which I make up for lower mileage with higher intensity, otherwise known as "racing."  So anyway, last week I finally got back up to a 250 mile week for the first time since mid-September.  Although it should last, it probably won't if the weather and my unreasonable fear of cold have anything to say about it.

The wind that had been plaguing us around here for the better part of a week finally started to die down yesterday, and that, combined with the aforementioned 250-mile week, had me feeling particularly frisky on yesterday's long levee ride.  This morning the wind was nearly calm, and for some reason we had a rather large group of ten or twelve when we started.  With the slack wind and the traditional steady 22 mph Wednesday pace, it was an enjoyable ride. The temperature was in the mid-50s, riding to maybe 60, the sky was clear, and there was a light fog hugging the ground here and there.  Since the bike path is now closed downriver of the Orleans/Jefferson parish line to the Corps of Engineers Building, everyone dropped down onto River Road at Dakin Street with me today. Unfortunately, we got caught by a particularly long train.

Things are pretty quiet here in the office today. Faculty and students are both in short supply ahead of the holiday weekend, so I'm just hoping against hope that one or two of my emails will actually generate replies.  We have some consultant meetings next week and scheduling for them has been particularly difficult.  The annual LAMBRA meeting is scheduled for a week from next Sunday and as usual practically none of the clubs has put its race dates on the planning calendar.  I'll send out a reminder tonight and see if we can get some action on that. 

Tomorrow we have a 7 am  holiday ride up on the levee that should be nice.  We'll have a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow evening so I know I'd better get my ride in early since the rest of the day will probably involve vacuum cleaners and trips to the grocery store.

So I should be working on building up a new (to me) bike soon. I'm guessing it will be a couple of weeks before I have everything together, assuming neither time nor money runs out first.  Yeah, I know.  The suspense is killing you, right?

Fair Weather and Festivals

November is always an interesting month around here.  One weekend the weather can be spectacular; the next it can be absolutely miserable.  Last weekend was a prime example of the former.  While our more latitude-challenged brethren to the north are busy selecting new snow shovels and expensive high-tech outerwear, we're just adding arm-warmers and full-finger gloves to our wardrobes and, when mother nature cooperates, enjoying brisk group rides under blue skies and feasting at Po-boy festivals.  I suppose there must be some benefits that come with living in places where the average winter temperature is below that in my refrigerator, but for the most part they escape me.

I had been expecting, perhaps hoping, that the Sunday Giro Ride would be a relatively civilized affair with speeds just above the training-effect threshold and well below the hypoxia threshold.  Some of it actually was, but as usual there were complications.  It was still pretty windy.  I was getting pretty damned tired of that wind which had been with us relentlessly for nearly a week, and as the pace ramped up along Hayne Boulevard I could tell it was going to be a factor. Sheltered in mid-pack, my effort level was merely moderate as the riders up front busted a hole through the chilly headwind.  I knew, however, that as soon as we turned south the speed would go up dramatically.  We went from 23 mph to 28 mph right away, slowing briefly as we turned east underneath I-510, and then surging right back up to 28 as we again turned south on the service road. Near the end of that road I heard some loud voices behind me that had been precipitated by Kenny slamming over a big chunk of concrete in the road at about 30 mph and pinch-flatting both tires. I think I'd hit the same thing on Saturday. He knew it would take a while to fix, so he told people to go ahead without him, but a number of us had already circled back to assist.  As it turned out, he'd actually managed to pinch-flat a tubeless tire on one wheel and a regular tube on the other.  One of the spare tubes was leaking at the stem, so it took about ten minutes, three tubes and four people to get him going again.  On the plus side, that meant a few miles of smooth easy paceline as we made our way down Chef Highway looking for the group on its return trip.

The first two or three riders we first saw were way out in front of the group and hammering away with the tailwind.  Nobody even considered turning around to latch onto them.  Instead we turned ahead of the main group that, at least for the moment, was going around 24 mph.  Soon, that 24 mph became 26, 29, 31 mph, but it was for only a few miles and there was a strong tailwind.  There was another section like that when we got onto Hayne Blvd., again with a tailwind.  That tailwind, however, wasn't much help with getting me over the two overpasses, however.  It still hurts to pull hard on the handlebars, so riders were passing me like I was standing still on the uphill sections.  After riding back home I went right back out to meet a few of the Tulane riders to do a few easy laps around Audubon Park, which at least let me make up for the miles I missed while criticizing Kenny's tire-changing technique.  Later that afternoon I walked over to Oak Street for a brief visit to the Po-Boy Festival that included a Shrimp Remolade Po-boy and a frozen Nectar cream soda, neither of which you are likely to find elsewhere.

The Small Group

All indications were that it would be an awesome day for riding. The 40F morning temperature would be climbing up to around 70, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the wind was relatively light.  As riders began filtering in to the Starbucks patio where the Giro Ride starts, it became clear that almost everyone was planning on "going long" today.  The winter Giro Rides, particularly on Saturdays, usually have a group that goes past the usual turnaround point at Venetian Isles and continues all the way to Slidell. I guess that works out to around 40 miles each way, so for those who ride out to meet the group and ride home afterwards, that can mean a 100-110 mile ride.  Of course, it's dead flat and there's a group to ride with, but still, it can be a hard ride, especially if you have to deal with a lot of wind out there where there's water on both sides of the road.  And there's always a lot of wind out there.  I'd decided to give it another week before venturing out on a long group ride like that.  I'm still getting home with some soreness around my neck and shoulder.

Long shadows as the Giro rolls out along Lakeshore Drive

Since so many people were planning on going long, the pace out to Venetian Isles remained mostly moderate.  Mostly.  There were a couple of surges into the upper 20s, but for the most part we were rolling along in the 22-26 mph range.  When I finally turned around at the usual spot I was surprised how few other riders did likewise. I guess there were only ten or so who didn't continue out to Slidell today. As we started to get rolling again Jeff came up and said there were a few others chasing, so we eased up to let them catch.  In the meantime, Brian had gone off on his own, and when the gap went out to thirty seconds or so a couple of other riders took off to bridge up to him.  The rest of the group just kept rolling along at 24 or so. I contemplated going after them for a while because the gap wasn't really growing very fast.  When we had to stop for traffic at an intersection, though, they pretty much disappeared up the road and we didn't see them again.  I arrived back home with about 60 miles on the computer, as usual.

Little Jorge

It was easy recovery ride day today, so I decided to go meet the Tulane riders over at the nearby Reily Center for their 6:30 am ride. The early morning temperatures are still hovering about the 48-50 degree mark down here on the south side of Lake Pontchartrain, and I'm still dressing as if they were in the 42-45 degree range.  Since I knew we would riding easy and that there was still a significant north wind, I was pretty sure I wouldn't have to deal with any heatstroke-related issues anyway. I had been over at the LBS the night before for a "fit party" and was glad to see a couple of new faces there.  Likewise, the Friday ride included one rider on a brand-new Giant. The ride was pretty mellow, as planned, but still separated on the way back into the headwind.  My right hand kept going numb and the shoulder felt particularly achy today, and I guess it will be another week or so before all those muscles and tendons stop complaining. Pat, who was coming from the Ormond end of the levee bike path, met us on the way out and then stayed with us all the way back where the two of us stopped at Zotz for coffee.  I was already running late but couldn't resist the offer. 

Jorge, some time in the 80s

While we were sitting there a rider in full team kit pulled up and I was surprised to recognize him as Jorge Cardona.  I think he's been up in Massachusetts where he works as a bike mechanic, as I recall.  Jorge (everyone uses the English "George" version) is from New Orleans and did a lot of racing here in the 80's.  He was always really strong and, since he is hearing-impaired, we used to say that he just couldn't hear his legs complaining.  At the time, there was another Jorge, namely Jorge Merle, racing here.  We called the former Jorge "Little Jorge" and latter "Big Jorge."  Jorge Merle is still a very active racer in Houston, and Jorge Cardona, judging by his Facebook page, seems to do a lot of travelling and shows up in New Orleans every now and then.  Anyway, he picked up a drink and stopped to shake hands before riding off down Oak Street.  I'm sure that one of the things that lured him down here is the Oak Street Po-Boy Festival coming up this Sunday. A few minutes later I followed suit, already running forty-five minutes behind schedule.

Strava

Almost a year's worth of Strava

A long, long time ago, back in the days when the only things that were wireless were AM radio stations, bike racers kept training diaries.  Every year around Christmas I'd buy a new one.  They were usually intended for runners, as those were the most readily available.  Occasionally I'd plan ahead enough to order one from Velo-News, and once in a while I'd get the ones Joe Friel was selling.  I'd start the year enthusiastically, determined to log valuable information after each ride -- distance, time, effort level, ride type, terrain, wind, etc.  There were even a few years when I actually managed to do that for almost the whole season.  It was extremely valuable information, and I'd often find myself looking back at prior years to see how my training and racing compared to a particular year during which I raced well.  Usually, however, the consistent half-page diary entries of February would sputter down to a handful of characters by June.  Often, I'd just write down the number of miles I'd ridden and perhaps a note along the lines of "felt terrible" or "cold and rainy." The one thing that I usually managed to salvage, however, was the mileage number.  When I started using a bike computer that was actually reliable enough to survive an entire season, around the late 80s or early 90s, I could at least keep track of my annual mileage without writing it down and adding it up.  By then I had a pretty good feel for what worked and what didn't and keeping up a detailed log seemed redundant. In addition to the many little nuances regarding intensity vs. recovery, a couple of very consistent things emerged from those twenty or twenty-five years of records.  I learned that I don't start to feel like I'm really in shape until late April or May, and only when I have been able to string together a few 250 mile weeks.  I also discovered that in a typical year I consistently, without ever setting it as a goal, logged something very close to 11,000 miles.  These are not remarkable numbers for a mid-level bike racer.  So I went maybe ten years without keeping any sort of daily log, training by feel and prior experience, riding those 11,000 miles over and over again.

So at the end of January of this year, having recently acquired a nice Samsung smartphone, I downloaded Strava and decided to track all of my rides with it.  So far, so good.  So for the first time in a decade or so, I can look back on the season and get some glimpse of how it all went.  The first surprise was finding three months in the early season during which I rode exactly the same number of hours.  Indeed, of the nine full months I've tracked so far, seven had between 48 and 54 hours of training.  I can see where, except for the Tour de Louisiane weekend when I officiated, May and June were very solid months, and I remember going into the Vuelta de Acadiana on the last weekend of June feeling pretty good, at least until I crashed and broke a couple of ribs.  So July suffered a bit for that, and also because I spent three or four weekend days at the velodrome.  August brought a reasonably good race despite having spent much of July at low-intensity because of the broken ribs, but mileage suffered because of another weekend of officiating.  So I started September with some consistent mileage and a few decent races, but never got back to that fitness I'd been approaching way back at the end of May, so I was looking forward to my now-traditional trip to the 6-Gap Century at the end of the month to put a decent bookend on the season. I was feeling pretty good for that, having been careful to allow for some recovery time the week before, and for the first fifty miles I was feeling confident I'd be able to post a good time. Well, we all know how that ended up. I would have been a lot happier if I'd crashed and broken a collarbone *after* the Hogpen climb rather than before it!  So the broken collarbone basically eliminated the entire month of October.  I did a little riding, mostly alone and never really worthy of the term "training," and then spent another week off the bike entirely with travel.  It was the second week of November before I did anything that I would call training, and by then I'd gained weight and lost a lot of fitness, and with no races on the calendar I've already resolved myself to a couple of months of long, slow distance base training.  Even so, it's been great to be able to look back at my training miles with Strava, and would probably be even more enlightening if I had power meter data as well.  It has certainly been a lot easier to maintain than those old training diaries were.  So thanks, Strava!  On the down side, I can clearly see that I'll end the year maybe 800 miles short. Of course I shouldn't be surprised under the circumstances, but still.....

All the Wrong Places

It was 49F this morning when I took off in search of the Wednesday morning levee ride, and it still feels really cold to me.  At least it's not dark at 6:30 am right now.  I can't really imagine making my way out to the WeMoRi ride that starts at, I think, 5:45 near the lakefront.  Like yesterday, there were just a few of us on hand, but fortunately the wind has finally started to die down a bit, allowing for a far smoother little paceline out to the parish line and back. Although there is always this mild dull ache over the place where my collarbone broke, the things that were really bothering me today were the stiffness all the way from elbow to wrist from the tennis elbow and a fair amount of soreness all around my right shoulder.  I guess I've been kind of pushing the range-of-motion envelope lately, and between that and the cold air and the weaker than normal musculature, and perhaps the somewhat altered shoulder geometry, I shouldn't be too surprised.  I just hope it all resolves itself over the next couple of weeks because I would really like to make some of the winter northshore rides without being too miserable, or too off-the-back.

So now that I am getting back into a more regular training routine I'm starting to think again about the bike.  It's clearly time to look into finding a new frame and building it up with that Campi 11-speed stuff I got from Matt, but which way to go?  The choices are (a) a nice used frame, (b) a new brand-name frame, or (c) a "generic" frame.  It goes without saying that a, b and c would be carbon-fiber, although I might still consider something along the lines of the aluminum Cannondale Caad-10.  Each choice, however, has it's drawbacks.  Finding a nice used frame in my size with race geometry is difficult, and of course a little risky.  The brand-name route is great, but of course it gets really expensive really fast.  Frames like the Bianchi Sempre would fall into that category. A lot of the frames in the right price category have those ridiculous long-head-tube "comfort" geometries that make no sense at all for the type of riding I do, especially considering my somewhat abnormal handlebar height preference. The "generic" frame category would include frames like the ones Neuvation sells.  Those are usually rather plain looking but still tempting.

Winter Wind

Ten miles in and my shoulder muscles were already screaming. Granted, the muscles in my shoulder, especially the right one, are used primarily to deliver food and wine from table to mouth. I'd pushed myself out the door this morning into a cold, gusty north wind, with no plan other than to ride the bike. Along with the wind, the night's cold front had also brought a morning temperature in the upper 40s.  It was the coldest it's been so far this fall, and as a result it felt about ten degrees colder than it was.  I dressed extra-warmly, which I never regretted.

The turnout was predictably sparse up on the levee, but it worked out nicely since five is the maximum number of riders that constitutes a functional eschelon on one of these severe crosswind days on the narrow bike path.  Fortunately for me they all knew how to control their bikes. Even so, the ride felt like a massive struggle with my own front wheel, trying on the one hand to keep it in the draft, and on the other to keep it out of the wheel of the rider ahead.  I use the term "ahead" loosely of course, because there were lots of times when the best drafting location had my front wheel even with the bottom bracket of the rider ahead of me. There was no chance to relax, and we were only halfway out when I could feel all of the muscles around my right shoulder and neck starting to tighten up and hurt.  The extra work of keeping the bike pointed forward and staying in the paceline was taking a toll on a shoulder that had not been exercised in six weeks, and although the pace was only moderate at best, I was hurting.  After we crossed the parish line upriver of Jefferson, I came alongside Woody to tell him I was going to sit up and relax for a while.  It helped.  Soon enough, however, I turned around and merged back into the paceline, taking only an occasional pull and mostly just surfing the wheels at the back.

Yesterday evening I'd had a followup visit at TISM, the upshot of which was that the collarbone was healing normally, the callus formation looked good, and try as he might, Dr. Savoie couldn't detect any bone movement at the break.  So with a slightly more-sore collarbone thanks to the manipulation, and directions to "come back in about a month for a final x-ray," I had headed home as the temperature was dropping, knowing already that Tuesday's ride would be a tough one.

Square One

The Sunday Giro

I rode out from the house into the quiet Saturday morning air.  With the streets still deserted I could hear the light "tick, tick, tick" of the computer's wheel sensor each time the magnet passed it. I felt like I was starting back at square-one, riding-wise. This would be, hopefully, my first full Giro Ride since I'd broken my collarbone on the last day of October. Even worse, I'd been off the bike for a full week attending first the USAC Local Associations conference in Colorado Springs, and then the NCURA annual conference in Washington D.C., finally returning home in the wee hours of Thursday morning.  It had been a long week, and even now I'm still playing catch-up.

Looking west near USAC headquarters in Colorado Springs

The LA conference had gone well.  USAC is working on a new insurance and officiating structure for track racing, which is long overdue.  There was, of course, a lot of discussion about doping.  USAC gets about 350 tests a year from USADA, but is trying to add some additional funding so they can do more.  Even so, the most efficient mechanism for catching dopers is the USADA hotline. They are looking closely at the Florida model for that, along with taking a more pro-active approach to information dissemination and working with promoters.  It still costs about $6,000 to do maybe ten tests at an event, so for many races it will be impossible without some sort of subsidy.  Shawn is working on a major revision (mostly structural) of the rulebook that will rearrange things in a more reasonable way, clarify some things that are fuzzy, and, interestingly, officially allow riders to race up a category in time trials. There was also a lot of discussion and analysis of the "new rider" experience.  Where they come from, why they start racing, why they don't renew their licenses, etc.  The top two reasons for not continuing to race:  Distance to races (85 mi. seems to be the key distance), and lack of appropriate categories.  They're working on a curriculum for racing skills clinics and will be offering a Skills Instructor certification for coaches.  There is also now the Race Director certification program where RDs can take the test online to get certified. Since each club gets one free RD license, they should all designate someone for that position.  We listened to the always terrifying discussion of insurance, the only bright light there being a new optional bicycle insurance program that they will be rolling out in 2013 through Markel.

From chilly Colorado I flew over to even chillier Washington for the annual NCURA conference and three solid days of sessions and nights of "networking" that included trying to keep track of the election returns in the midst of the party and, later, in our region's hospitality suite.  Being the Southeastern Region, we had two full bars going so we ended up with a lot of people from other regions.  Anyway, I was pretty wiped out by the time I got a standby seat to Chicago for a long wait for the last leg back home.  I lucked out on the standby seat, since my original flight ended up seriously delayed because of the big storm that came through in the northeast.

So, getting back to this weekend, I felt reasonably good on the Saturday Giro, although it was a little stressful trying to find that balance between staying in the draft while at the same time leaving a little more reaction space than usual between my wheel and the one ahead of me.  The group split on the way back down Chef, and I was kind of glad I ended up in the second group because that old competitive instinct would probably have found me taking more chances than I should have otherwise.  The collarbone is still a little ways from completely healed, but yesterday marked six weeks post-injury, so it wasn't too much of a distraction.  I spent the rest of the day standing behind a table in City Park where I'd been volunteered to sell beer tickets a the annual SPCA New Orleans on Tap beer festival.  I was handling the credit card purchases using an iPhone and Square, which I'm thinking we should get for the NOBC so we can take credit cards at events in the middle of nowhere.

Having survived Saturday, I decided to up the ante on Sunday and put in some extra make-up miles. The plan was to ride the Giro as conservatively as possible, ride back home to refuel, then ride out to the levee and head upriver to around Norco and hopefully meet the LSU riders who were doing their annual Baton Rouge to New Orleans 100+ mile ride, along with a couple of Tulane riders. It had been pretty windy on the Giro Ride, and by the time I got out to the levee around 10:30 there was a relentless gusty southeast wind blowing at 10-15 mph.  I knew the ride back would be long and hard, and I had no good idea of where the LSU ride was, so I rode at an easy sightseeing speed out past Ormond.  I'd figured that the earliest they could possibly get to the spillway was 11 am, and that noon was more likely. I rode around there for a little while and then stopped at the benches in front of Ormond plantation for quite a while to wait, hanging around there until 1:00 with no riders in sight.  By then I was getting pretty hungry and was starting to wonder if they had been seriously delayed.  I finally decided to head back alone in to the headwind.  All the way back I was in the 12-15 mph range.  I saw David and Celeste heading the other direction as I got nearer to town.  I think they were able to meet the group and ride in with those riders, but by then I was looking at over 100 miles on the computer and thinking obsessively about food, and specifically about the big bowl of leftover Halloween candy in the living room.  Tonight should be my final follow-up visit to the orthopedist!