Weekend Up the River

(Yeah, I left my camera at home so the phone was pressed into service)

The annual NOBC Training Camp is as much a social event as it is a training event. With such a diverse membership, the weekend up at the Natchez State Park is largely spent getting to know new riders, talking informally about racing plans, equipment, etc.  Since I was, and still am, driving around in that big rental Chrysler minivan, and I was cleared to take it up to Natchez for the weekend, I sent an email out to see if anyone needed a ride.  So after work on Friday I folded down four of the seven seats, rolled three bikes, with wheels still attached, into it, and Isaac, Mignon and I headed for Mississippi with room to spare.  It turned out to be a good place to be last weekend because the weather there was much nicer than it was down in New Orleans.  After arriving around 9:30 pm or so, I moved my stuff into one of the cabins with Chuck and Robinson where, thanks to a couple of last-minute cancellations, I had an entire bed to myself.  We ended up sitting around, talking, and drinking wine until nearly 1 am.  Fortunately we were not planning on starting the Saturday morning ride until 9:00. 

Despite the late bedtime, I was up as usual at 5:45 am which allowed for lots of time to make coffee, boil a few eggs and generally lounge around.  It was in the low 40s, but the sky looked clear and the air was dry, so a number of riders went pretty light on the clothing, knowing that it would warm up into the 60s by the time we returned from our traditional ride up the Natchez Trace to Port Gibson.  All eighteen of us rolled out together for the first ten or twelve miles before stopping and splitting into two groups. The front group then picked up its pace, averaging around 22 mph for the next 20+ miles.  The Trace is very deceptive because of the way the road is graded.  Although it looks like it's mostly flat, it is in fact mostly not.  Instead, it is a series of long, long uphills and downhills that often left me wondering if I was really that out of shape or if we were actually going uphill.  Just before the turnaround we get off of the trace and ride half a mile or so to a gas station on Highway 61.  By then we'd dropped a number of people from the lead group and of course the second group was a few minutes behind, so I turned back and rode the other way for a few miles before turning back to ride in with some of the second group.  Somehow, in the interim, Adrian, who had been just behind the first group, missed the turn and as far as we knew was MIA for the rest of the ride. We thought he had turned around and headed back ahead of us while we were at the gas station purchasing nutritious gas station snack foods, but I think he somehow ended up alone anyway.  As usual, the return trip gradually got faster and faster until there was just a handful of us left.  When we got to the place where we turn off of the Trace to ride back to the park I turned around again and rode back on the course for a couple of miles to pick up the others.  A few of us ended up going out again in the afternoon for a few more miles around the State Park road, so I ended up the day with 87 miles.

Saturday evening we all packed into one of the cabins for a big community dinner while watching Chasing Legends and, of course, American Flyers.  By then my legs were feeling a bit sore.

Coach said to work on climbing!

Sunday morning was chilly again but since it was supposed to warm up quickly under a clear blue sky I dressed relatively lightly for our ride into Natchez.  This year we took the back roads, stopping at the Emerald Mound Indian mound before coming into town the same way we raced there back in the 80s for the infamous Race Across Louisiana.  Although it had been nearly twenty years, I recognized much of the road, including the spot where the surprise finish line had been (only the local guys had known for sure where the finish was, as there were no signs or markers prior to it).  We stopped again at the coffee shop and then rode down the bluff (came up just short of 40 mph on that little downhill) and slogged back up the steep climb (in both directions) before making our way back to the Natchez Trace.  There we split into two groups, although I admit I was a little surprised when all but four chose to be in the slower group.  The plan was to let the slower group start first and then have the faster group start five minutes later so that we might all arrive back at the park around the same time.  It actually worked out pretty well.  Adrian, Mignon, Robert and I rode smooth paceline (aside from Adrian's sporadic attacks up the hills) and started catching riders from the earlier group about twenty minutes later.  We passed the remaining riders from the first group just about a mile from the turn, so the timing couldn't have been better.  That ride was only 44 miles, but despite the stops and sightseeing it still provided a solid fifteen or twenty miles of legitimate training.  When we got back the temperature was in the low 60s, the sun was shining, and I was wondering why I was going back down to New Orleans where it had been cloudy and rainy all weekend.

This morning after a night of thunderstorms it was still raining when I went over to Champs Collision to retrieve personal effects from the old Volvo.  Meanwhile The Wife already has us lined up to check out a new car that will probably but the brakes on my equipment purchases for years to come.  The insurance company will be giving us around $8k for the totalled car, which is probably less than the down payment I'll be making for a new one.

Damned Clicking

It was a long weekend during which I racked up a total of 6 miles.  Yeah, 6.  I tagged along last weekend with the Tulane Cycling team for its first conference road race of the year.  It was a learning experience.  Normally, when I travel to area races it's all pretty simple.  I can procrastinate until about Wednesday evening, then make a hotel reservation at the cheapest place in the correct Zip code, throw stuff in my bag Friday night, and hit the road before sunrise on Saturday.  Travelling to a collegiate race with 16 other people proved to be a little more complicated, especially with Mardi Gras smack in the middle of the pre-race planning period. The team was able to secure one 7-person minivan from the university, so we would need to rent another 7-person van and load up Kenny's truck as well.  How we were going to squeeze in the seventeen bicycles was just one piece of the puzzle.  So first off, nobody wants to put five 2-night hotel stays on his personal credit card, which is apparently what Club Sports expects. 

On Wednesday the week prior to the race I found someone who could put it on a Tulane corporate card, but of course the hotel needed a signed credit card authorization form.  That was supposed to get faxed to them the Thursday evening before Mardi Gras. When I checked back with the hotel on Monday, it hadn't so I ended holding the rooms on my own credit card since nothing was going to happen until Wednesday because of Mardi Gras.  Then there was the rental van.  Although I was able to go through Tulane's corporate account with Enterprise, I had to put that on my personal credit card too.  Somehwere within the week we had to get three students certified by the university to drive, which entailed an online test and a driving test.  The policy is that nobody can drive for more than 250 miles.  We were going to Austin, which is an 8-hour drive on a good day.  Somehow they got certified (I already had been).  The plan was to put a 4-bike hitch rack on Kenny's truck and stash at least eight bikes in his truck and the rest in one of the two vans.

By Friday morning three riders had dropped out of the trip due to school, so we were down to 14.  I had picked up the rental van that morning and headed over to the Reily center at noon to meet the other van and Kenny and figure out how to load everything up.  Kenny and I were both bringing our bikes in hopes of doing a ride between the road races and the team time trial. We departed about half an hour late, gas card in hand, with eight of the bikes, ten or eleven of the riders, and most of the luggage.  The rest of the bikes would leave in the rental van a couple of hours later.  We arrived in Austin around eight or nine hours later, with the second van only an hour or so behind (they apparently had fewer culinary entanglements).

Driving to the course Saturday morning the thermometer was reading 31 degrees, but luckily the wind was still light and the sky was clear, so things warmed up nicely. We didn't have any Category A riders on this trip, but the B teams, both men and women, were looking good.  As it turned out, we won both the Men's and Women's B road races and took third in the Men's B as well. Things were running late, of course, so Kenny and I were able to get in one whole 6-mile loop before the Team Time Trial where our Men's B team won. The whole time, Kenny's bike was making this loud clicking sound with every pedal revolution. There had been a couple of crashes in the road race, plus a couple of flats, so some time was spent on repairs.  The Men's B team then proceeded to win their team time trial.  Afterward there was a lot of negotiation involved in the evening's restaurant choice. The only thing on which there was consensus was that we should try for some authentic Bar-B-Que.  Option A turned out to be pretty far away, had a 1-hour wait at 6:30 pm, and didn't take anything but cash, so we headed for Option B which had good reviews.  As we drove up what we saw was strange.  It looked like a gas station.  Indeed, there was a gas station in front, but there was also a traffic jam caused by people looking for places to park.  The place turned out to be great.

Sunday morning's criterium, the location of which had been changed on Friday evening, was at a middle school and looked like a pretty nice, but short, course with a little hill on it.  Lap times were barely over one minute, which caused havoc in the D race with lapped riders.  I had walked over to the finish line before the first race to ask about the points primes that are listed in the collegiate rule book (up to six of them in a Cat. A race).  The officials had been hoping to ignore them, so I ended up in charge of judging them.  Luckily I had my iPad with SloPro on it, so that came in very handy since I had to judge something like eighteen sprints, four-deep. We won the Cat. B women's criterium, got 4th in the women's C criterium, and I think 3rd in the Men's B criterium.  Of course, we haven't seen the official results yet, other than what was written on lined paper at the race.  It was actually a fun and successful weekend.  A number of our riders were doing their first races and I think everyone had a good time.  After more negotiation we finally settled on a Mexican restaurant around mid-afternoon, and then continued the long drive in heavy traffic back East, arriving just before midnight.

But wait.  There's more.  We were only an hour of so out of Austin when The Wife called.  Someone had crashed into the car as she was driving down Carrollton Avenue and the damage was not trivial.  There were airbags involved.  So Monday morning was spent returning the rental van and then re-renting the same van myself, and of course not riding.  When I got up this morning and found the street wet from rain I thought to myself, "There is no way I'm missing another day."  I headed out for the levee, caught a train, met up with a smaller than usual group and we headed up the river.  Now I was hearing some damned clicking noise coming from my own bike with each pedal stroke.  Bottom bracket?  Seatpost?  Pedal?  As I was contemplating the various possibilities, I heard "Flat!" behind me.  I knew it would happen.  It always does when the levee bike path is wet.  Most went ahead while a couple of us stayed behind.  Zack had deep-dish carbon rims but only a short-stem tube.  A long-stem tube was not to be had.  Luckily, Tom had a little packet of glueless patches, so we finally got going again only to find the rest of the group fixing another flat.  We went ahead to get in a few more miles as Donald appeared, finally turning around at the little dip. Then, on the way back we ran into the Tulane group fixing a flat.  Again it was a deep-dish wheel and only short stem tubes, and again Tom saved the day with his glueless patches.  I need to get me some of those!  Anyway, I probably got in ten minutes of decent training time during a 90-minute ride.  Oh, and that damned clicking?  When I finally got close to home and out of the wind on the quiet neighborhood streets I discovered that it was just the plastic tab on the end of the stretchy cord that holds my rear light onto my seatpost.  My leg was hitting it and it was tapping against the post.  Sheesh.

The Illusion of Power

It has been a busy pre-Mardi Gras weekend around here.  The threat of rainy weather for Fat Tuesday seems to have ramped up the general level of parade-going urgency. That same threat was probably responsible for the large turnout for the Saturday Giro Ride.  Well, that and the fact that the temperature was in the 60s. My mileage last week was already sagging, and so I talked The Wife in to picking up The Daughter from the airport so that I could make the Giro. 

Saturday morning felt colder than the thermometer would indicated thanks to a strong wind. I woke up early and decided to go ahead and hit the road anyway.  The sky was cloudy and I was a little overdressed because I knew it was going to remain both cloudy and windy all day.  Riding through City Park I passed the City Park Stables where the huge Budweiser trucks were parked.  Those are the ones that bring in the Clydesdales and related equipment.  They seem to be part of almost every major parade.

The Giro started out fast and pretty much stayed that way.  All the way out Chef Highway I had a tight grasp on the bars as I balanced between the white line and the rumble strip, alternatively sprinting and coasting.  The crosswind accordion effect was in full force.  I looked way up ahead and knew I should be up there, but once we really got rolling it would have taken a major effort, and I figured I was getting a pretty good workout doing paceline intervals anyway.  On the way back one of the guys had a flat near the back of the group and only a few of us stopped, but it was just as well since the rest of the ride was basically tailwind by that point.  I think my maximum speed was up around 38 mph that day when we were flying back down Chef Highway with a 20 mph tailwind.  Don't you just love that illusion of power that a strong tailwind provides?  Enjoy it while you can, because you're really not that strong.

Saturday evening we went over to Tulane's Tidewater Building on Canal Street to watch Endymion, which was great.  Getting out of there afterward in the car was, however, pure torture.  I think it took is half an hour to go three blocks.

Donald Davis is in town from Pensacola and he had called me about meeting up Sunday morning to ride out to the Giro.  So at 6:10 I was riding around in little circles on Pine Street wondering why he was late.  He and his son in law finally showed up about ten minutes late. Donald had survived the entire Rouge-Roubaix course on Saturday, but had two flats riding through New Orleans in the dark.  Anyway, we still arrived at Starbucks in plenty of time or coffee.  It was even more windy than it had been on Saturday and I knew the group would get blown apart sooner or later.  It turned out to be sooner.  We hadn't gone three miles down Hayne Blvd. with a 15-20 mph crosswind before the pack split. The whole ride I kept wanting to take a photo, but taking my hands off the bars wasn't worth the risk.  There were more than a couple of "Oh shit!" moments when the wind caught my front wheel and tried to blow me across the road.  Naturally Mike Williams was out there on a fixed gear TT bike with a disk wheel weaving all over the place. 

I was glad when we dropped him on Hayne, but then Donald had another flat approaching Chef Highway and he caught back up.  I was sticking with Donald since I knew he was out of tubes and CO2.  The pace ramped up gradually as we battled the headwind and crosswind out to Venetian Isles.  A little while later Donald's tire started going flat again.  By then we were on the way back and only the Tulane riders and I stayed with Donald to help.  We finally found the tiny piece of glass that had been causing the problem embedded in the tire, put in my last tube, and had a pretty good ride back, eventually catching up with some of the other riders who had themselves had another flat.

After the ride it was off to catch some of the Thoth parade on Henry Clay Avenue and then a quick lunch since The Daughter had a flight out at 5:30.  When we got home and checked on that flight, however, we found it delayed by two hours because of the winter storm, so she would miss a connecting flight in Minnesota. After numerous phone calls with Delta the best they could do was get her on a flight Mardi Gras morning almost two days later! Oh well, I guess we'll hope the weather holds out around here so we can catch a couple more parades tomorrow night.

From Superbowl to Mardi Gras

As the horde of hungover Superbowl fans departed the city Monday morning, so too did the spectacular weather.  I was able to get in a nice recovery ride, meeting up with a couple of the Tulane riders along the way, and even innocently rode the bike in to work before the clouds really started to close in.  By mid-afternoon it looked like we were in for the long haul, rain-wise.  It wasn't  until around 10:30 pm that it finally stopped and I could take the dogs out for their regular little night walk. The trees were still dripping water and the streets were soaked, and I wondered if I'd even be able to ride in the morning.

When the alarm went off this morning I reached over and pulled up The Weather Channel on the phone to check the radar.  Amazingly, there wasn't a spot of green anywhere around, and glancing out the window I could see that although the streets were still wet, they were plenty dry enough to ride.  Up on the levee the turnout was very slim but included a rider who was in town from Denver visiting family.  Kenny and Howard joined in a little bit down the road, so we ended up with six or seven.  The word was that there was more rain approaching from the west, so we decided to turn around a The Dip in St. Rose.  That was fine with me since I was going to have to turn around early anyway in order to make my 9 am meeting without having to rush around too much. As it turned out, it was a good thing we had planned to turn back early.  About a mile from St. Rose we had the first flat.  A few of us waited while the rest decided to ride the last mile to the Dip and catch us on the way back.  That flat got fixed, we headed out, and found the rest of the group fixing another flat just before the turnaround.  The rest of the ride was a series of intervals --- 5 minutes riding, 5 minutes fixing flats.  It was almost comical. 

You run into all types on the streetcar around here, even Sir Paul.

By the time we fixed what we thought was the last one, which was the 7th flat of the day, I was watching the clock tick ever closer to 9 am and knew I'd be in a mad dash to get to the office on time.  I later heard from Tom that he'd had yet another flat on his way home, making our total for the morning eight.  There's something that they mixed into the asphalt on that bike path that continuously sheds tiny arrowhead-shaped shards and whenever it's wet they become extremely efficient at penetrating bicycle tires.  Somehow I escaped without a puncture today, but I'm sure that when I check my tires this evening I'll have to dig a few of those things out of the tread.

Last night I finally re-aligned my derailleur hanger (I finally sprung for the alignment tool).  It was a bit out of line in both vertical and horizontal planes, although I'm still having occasionally sluggish downshifting.  I changed the little piece of housing from the chainstay to the derailleur, but I guess the problem lies elsewhere, no doubt the portion from the shifter to the top tube. It's never simple, is it?

So this week we shift from Superbowl mode straight into Mardi Gras mode with parades resuming tonight and continuing pretty much straight through to Fat Tuesday on Feb. 12.  This city is on a roll.

Super Weekend

New Orleans has been working overtime for months in order to put on a great edition of the Superbowl squeezed right into the middle of Mardi Gras season (Mardi Gras is just over a week away), and other than the fact that the half of the Superdome lights just went out, I have been pretty impressed.  To make matters even better, the weather this weekend was practically perfect.

Saturday was a memorial ride for Justin Addison over in Covington. The actual ride was just a short seven miles out and back to the site of the accident, so a pre-memorial ride was quickly organized.  We started out at the Tammany Trace trailhead just off of I-12, and when it was pretty cold at 7:30 when I arrived up there with Dave.  I knew it would warm up quickly, but I also knew that ride north on the shady Tammany Trace would be really cold, so I piled on the clothes anyway.  The ride itself was probably around 45 miles at a moderate pace, considering the wide mix of riders that was on hand. We finished that ride up a little early, so we kind of wandered down south of Covington for a while, eventually returning to St. Paul's campus for the ride.  It was actually great to see a number of riders there who I hadn't seen in a while.

Today I headed back across the lake for the regular winter training ride.  Mignon had lined up a small group that would leave fifteen minutes early, making for a kind of "handicap" training ride.  It would be forty miles before we caught them after we started another ten minutes late.  There was a nice group from the S3 team on hand, and they had started their ride earlier at the Tammany Trace caboose, so they were all in for a ride of around 95 miles.  By the time we got started the temperature was already climbing under clear blue skies.  There was hardly a breath of wind, making for nearly ideal riding conditions.  We had a good group and hardly ever needed to regroup despite a fairly respectable pace that averaged 21 mph for the 66 miles that I rode, which included a number of very slow miles as I rode back to pick up dropped riders or rode ahead during the store stop.  I was feeling pretty good today and pushed pretty hard on some of the little climbs, but otherwise just stayed in the paceline.  I was harassed all day by balky shifting on the Bianchi.  I think the rear derailleur cable must be hanging up somewhere.  I had re-used the cables that I'd gotten from Matt with the Campi components, so I'll have to check over that whole cable and see where the problem is.  I also need to look into the rear wheel's freewheel which is occasionally not wanting to release.  I suspect a sticky pawl or something, but will need to check on how to disassemble the Mavic hub. Speaking of equipment, we had one potentially serious problem and one narrowly averted problem this week.  On Friday we met up with the Tulane riders who were doing an easy recovery ride like we were.  All was going well until Graeme and a couple others decided to do a little sprint.  I was watching from behind when I saw Graeme's right foot flailing around in the air and then his bike making a sharp turn down the levee (fortunately, the grassy side).  Of course I assumed he'd accidentally clipped out.  He had broken a worn out cleat on the velodrome last summer.  After we got him back on his feet (his leg and ankle were hurting him) I walked over to his bike as was surprised to find that his rear wheel wasn't attached to his bike.  It must have come out of the dropout during the sprint, which would explain how he clipped out of a perfectly good pedal with a perfectly good cleat.  I guess I was still thinking about that Saturday afternoon when I looked at my own cleats and was rather shocked to find one of them so worn down that a part of the tab at the front had actually broken off.  I figure I was just a sprint or two from disaster.  Luckily I had a new pair of cleats handy

Meanwhile, back at Tulane, the dormitory folks have suddenly decided to enforce the restriction on bringing bikes into dorm rooms, causing three of the team riders to have to lock their bikes up outside.  Not good.  I wrote a couple of emails to the appropriate people requesting an exception for them, so we'll see what happens there.  Telling me that bicycles in dorms constitute fire hazards just boggles my mind.  I guess they just assume that everyone would leave their bicycles lying in the stairwells or something.

Earlier this week I was thinking that my mileage would be significantly down for the week.  I had three days with early meetings, and had to cut both of my usual long rides on Tuesday and Thursday short.  Somehow I still ended up with a bit over 250 miles, so I was happy about that.