Recruiting

So after spending all of last weekend off the bike, I got back into the routine on Monday with a mostly solo ride at a mostly slow pace, and then on Tuesday I was out the door at 5:40 am for another long solo ride due to an early morning meeting.  I missed the group one other day thanks to a flat, so I guess I ended up doing more solo riding than usual this week. 

Thursday afternoon was the annual Tulane Activities Expo where all of the club sports and other miscellaneous organizations set out tables and try to recruit new members.  The cycling club had planned ahead this year and had water bottles, bags, pens and stickers on hand with which to lure unsuspecting students over to our table.  I brought the club's pop-up tent, we rigged up a flag using a jersey, and put Graeme on the rollers for the duration of the two-hour event.  As usual, there were a lot of students milling about (there must be over fifty separate clubs for this thing).  We had snagged the primo location, right on the end across from McAlister Auditorium. 

With the tent, sign and flag, we probably had the best visibility of all the club sports there.  We ended the day with over 100 email IDs, including The Daughter, on our sign-up sheet and if we can get 10% of those actually racing this spring it will be great.  I was very impressed with the team effort.
 
So this morning I was back out at the Giro Ride for the first time in what seems forever.  I didn't want to go too hard today since I'll be up in St. Francisville tomorrow morning for our age-graded championship road races.  We started out with a nice tailwind, so although the speeds got up there pretty quickly, it wasn't too much work to sit in.  Along Chef Highway we got a nice rotation going, so I took some pulls there. 

After some nice low humidity last week, I can feel the muggy weather returning today.  Hopefully we can make it through the next month without a serious hurricane threat.  It's been really quiet in the Gulf so far.  Yesterday I registered for the Six Gap Century once again.  The race tomorrow will be the last La/Ms road race this season, although LCCS points are up for grabs at the Chappell Hill race in Texas and later at the Pensacola Classic stage race.  I won't be able to make Chappell Hill for sure.  Pensacola is possible, I think.  Than cyclocross starts in mid-October.  I figure I'll jump into a few of those once I take the fenders off my old, old road bike and put on the cyclocross wheels.  Should be fun.  A number of riders have been riding the course in City Park for a month already. Somehow I feel like I need cooler weather for that.

Just Officiating

With Mark D. out of town for the weekend, I decided early in the week to forgo riding the LAMBRA TT championship.  I usually pull double duty for that race, helping with registration and results officiating, but then also jumping onto the bike, often with virtually no warmup, to suffer through the 40 km out-and-back course north of Laplace, LA.  This year, however, I had ample excuse to avoid the pain and just officiate.  Actually, it felt kind of strange.  The weather forecast had been very sketchy and as I headed out to the course around 6:15 am I was fully expecting rain.  I would not be disappointed in that regard.  The Daughter, who is back in town to work on a degree in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, was in tow to help out this year.  I arrived a little later than usual this year, which is to say I wasn't the first to arrive, but the promoting club, Peake Racing, had lots of volunteers on hand, and since they have been putting on this race for quite a few years now things went very smoothly.  Since pre-registration is required for this race, there wasn't really all that much for me to do.  I printed out a start list as riders began lining up to pick up their numbers.  At 7:50 we started all of the stopwatches, sent the turnaround monitors, and start line volunteers off to their posts, and got the first rider off the line promptly at 8 am.  I wandered over to the finish line to meet Robin, who had been marking the course, and we waited for the first riders to return.  There were only five or six who weren't doing the full 40 km, so once they finished we had a long wait for the others.  By then the turnaround monitors for the 10k and 20k riders were back at the finish line to help with timing. I ran back to the registration tent, which was about a quarter mile away, and grabbed my laptop, picking up the start sheet from the starter so I could begin entering results. 

I was planning on going back to the registration area after the Cat. 5s finished, but by then it had started pouring down rain.  I sat under the tent at the finish line, with my back to the rain and my rain jacket draped over both my computer and my head, plugging in finish times.  It was a little uncomfortable, and I wasn't able to post results of the earlier groups until after everyone had finished, but overall it went pretty smoothly.  Looking over the results, I am pleasantly amazed at how many riders posted times in the sub-56 minute range despite the rain and wind.  I think we are really in the middle of a shift in LAMBRA demographics that is resulting in a number of very fast younger riders who are finally, finally nudging aside the angry old men who seem to have been dominating the time trials for well over a decade.  It is very encouraging.  My only disappointment was that I had really been hoping that one of the women would go sub-hour this year.  She was only 40 seconds away from that goal.  For the fast riders, of the 7 Cat. 1/2 entries, the slowest time was a 56:29 and the fastest a 53:15.  While the fastest time wasn't quite a record, the impressive thing was the depth of the field this year.  What used to be the gold standard of 40k time trials, the 1-hour time, would have gotten you only 28th place overall this year.  In other words, fully 38% of the entire 40k field went under an hour on a rainy, windy day.  I am impressed. I first did a sub-hour time trial in 1981, but I don't think I ever got much better than a 57-something.  So the NOBC tent and flag are still drying out in my basement and we have only one Louisiana road race still on the calendar for this year, plus one LCCS race in east Texas and another in Pensacola.  Next weekend is our first separate age-graded LAMBRA championship road race, and although a number of age groups were added compared to prior years, it has been interesting and unexpected to hear from those few riders who don't have a race (30-39 Cat. 1-3) that they feel excluded.  Perhaps they can be added next year if this all works out. The original idea was to just do the regular master and junior groups (10-14, 15-18, 40+, 55+, 60+) but the promoter wanted to add some others to boost registrations.

I stepped out the basement door around 5:30 this morning, determined to get in some decent mileage despite the early meeting that was on my calendar.  The sky was till dark, and looking up toward the northeast I could easily make out Orion.  I hadn't been on the bike so early in a rather long time, and I was hoping that my little CatEye headlight's battery would be up to the task of keeping the other levee riders from running in to me in the dark. The air was unusually cool for a late-August morning, and the wind was fairly light.  Up on the levee I was surprised by how many riders were up there, most with vastly superior lighting to mine, evidence no doubt that they ride in the dark routinely.  Along the way I passed two small groups that were heading downriver, but between the blinding headlights and the darkness I couldn't even guess who was in them.  I made it all the way out past the Dip to the first grain elevator before I finally had to turn back, holding a steady 19-21 mph for most of the ride.  The regular Tuesday group flew past on its way out somewhere around the parish line as I continued my solo ride, the second in two days.  I arrived back home just a few minutes past my 7:30 am target.

Rocky Racing

On Thursday I was thinking I'd be driving up to Shreveport alone.  By Friday evening there were two bikes on the roof and three bodies, about thirteen wheels, another bike and five or six bags stuffed into the Volvo headed Northwest. With Matt and Mark for company the drive went smoothly and we rolled into the LaQuinta around 10 pm I guess.  On tap for the weekend was the annual Rocky Mount weekend.  This year it was presented as an Omnium starting with a road race on a new 31-mile loop that incorporated the traditional Rocky Mount climb.  The finish, however, was a good twelve or thirteen miles farther down the road this year. To make things interesting, we had USADA on hand this year as part of the new RaceClean program. I was surprised that they kept such a low profile, testing only riders from the Cat. 1/2/3 road race.

I was racing the 55+ race, while Mark would be doing the 40+ and Matt the Cat. 4.  We would all be doing two laps of the nice rolling North Louisiana course.  The 55+ Road Race had a surprisingly good turnout, which is why I had decided to ride in my age-appropriate group instead of the 40+ race.  For the most part, the first lap and most of the second lap were pretty tame.  I was in it as much for the workout as for the result, but on one of the first climbs I must have aggravated whatever I pulled in my left ribcage area a few weeks ago.  It was hurting whenever I'd have to breathe heavily, so I slipped to the back for quite a while until it settled down.  The race didn't seem to really start until we hit the Rocky Mount climb on the last lap, and although there wasn't really an attack there, it was fast enough to drop a number of riders.  Across the top, the front group looked back, saw the gap, and put the hammer down, and for the next nine or ten miles the pace stayed pretty fast with mostly everyone taking pulls.  Then, with a few miles to go, the cooperation disintegrated.  I hate when that happens.  I found myself spending a lot of time on the front trying to keep the pace from getting embarrassing (this stuff shows up on Strava, you know!), but wasn't getting much help other than one or two brief attacks.  With about two miles to go I eased off hoping someone would pull through.  I wasn't expecting much, but 20 mph would have been nice.  Instead, everyone behind me started freewheeling.  I looked down at the speedometer, then over at the guy coasting next to me and said, "Twelve miles per hour?  Really?"  Still no response.  I ramped it back up to 20 and finally there was some sign of life, followed by an attack that was chased down and then a lull back down to 15 mph.  By then we were at about the 1 km sign and the sprint pretty much started soon thereafter.  We topped out at only about 35 mph on the flat road across the dam with me coming in second.  Afterward I learned that both Mark and Matt had also come in second in their races.  Three 2nd places in the same car.  Damn.  I wonder who was driving the 1st place car.

A couple of hours later there was a 3.2 mi. TT starting at the finish line and going backwards on the RR course.  It was pretty flat but by then there was a significant quartering headwind.  One of the race volunteers had kind of messed up my TT start time spreadsheet and, pressed for time, the officials just posted the start list in order of RR finish, showing stopwatch start times with a handwritten note about a 10-minute offset.  Lots of us, include I, got the math all wrong on that, which meant we were expecting our starts to be 20 minutes later than they actually were.  I think I got about 5 minutes of warmup, and lots of people missed their starts. As usual I struggled through the TT with an unremarkable 25.5 mph average speed, dropping me down to about 5th on GC.  Situation normal.

So as usual the criterium were on Sunday on a nice course around a community college.  Well, the course was nice for most, but not really ideal for me.  There was one section with three turns in quick succession, which I like, but after that was a long, long gently curve about a quarter of a mile long.  The 55+ race started at the ungodly hour of 7:30 am, but on the plus side, it was still nice and cool. The race itself wasn't too much unlike the road race, except that the first lap started out fairly fast with an average speed of 26.5 mph.  A few riders were shelled, but things settled down to an average of more like 24 after a while and somehow we ended up with only four riders in the lead group.  I did a ton of work trying to keep the pace from getting too embarrassing, although my legs were a bit sore from Saturday's efforts.  Once again, the pace dropped down to practically a standstill, which is to say 18 mph on the last lap with maybe 500 meters to go.  Go figure.  So I jumped early, with the rather predictable result that I was passed by two riders.  The 3rd place moved me up to 3rd for the Omnium, so I took  home enough cash to cover my entry fee and lunch at Subway.  Later in the day I pulled out a $20 and entered the Cat. 1/2/3 criterium, mainly for the exercise, with the intention of sitting on the back as long as possible. 

Well, that didn't last long.  The race started fast with the first three laps averaging around 27 mph, which wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been sitting on the tail end of the whip.  As it was, I'd come coasting and braking into the tight turns, dropping down to 20 mph, and then have to sprint all-out up to 31 mph to stay in the draft as the accordion closed back down.  I had neither the warmup nor the legs for an hour of intervals and neither did Stanley on whose wheel I was riding and who had already ridden the 55+ and 40+ races that day.  On the fast part of the 3rd lap Stanley blew, a gap opened, and there was no way I was going to be able to close it into a headwind, so for the next five or six laps I just rode steadily until I was lapped.  Now you would think I would know better than to get right back onto the tail end of the paceline, but at that point I didn't want to risk screwing up the race for the riders in contention by maybe getting in over my head closer to the front.  A few laps later Ben dropped to the back obviously pretty well blown after working hard for his teammates.  I was on his wheel when he blew and again there was no way I was going to bridge up to the pack.  Fortunately I soon found myself with a couple of other riders, so we were able to recover a bit and ride steady until we were *again* lapped by the field (I was glad the officials didn't pull us since I obviously needed the training!).  By then I think there was a break off the front or about to get off the front and it didn't seem quite as difficult to hang onto the tail end of the group, so I ended up rolling in at the back after the pack sprint started.

Meanwhile, in the other races, Mark won the Cat. 4 criterium handily, moving up to 2nd for the Omnium, and in the Cat. 4 criterium Matt finished 2nd which put him in 3rd for the Omnium.  He had originally planned to skip the TT and Crit, so he had done the TT Merckx style and finished out of the omnium points for that stage.  All-in-all a reasonably successful weekend for the three of us.

Bayou Country

The LAMBRA Team Time Trial championship near Vacherie, LA and a nearby criterium in Thibodaux found me doing a lot of driving and riding through the sugarcane fields down in Bayou Country.  The aptly named Bayou Country Cyclists put a lot of effort into their events, so I figured things would go fairly smoothly.  I was scheduled to do the team TT with Steve, Pat and Chuck, and was expecting that we would be able to post at least a respectable time for the 36 mile out-and-back effort.  Things got off to kind of a bad start at registration as the older of the LAMBRA computers choked on the Excel workbook that had been put together with the newest version of Excel.  I had brought my own laptop as an emergency backup, so I converted the workbook to an earlier version and put it on a flashdrive.  Somewhere along the way the program crashed yielding a 'recovered' version of the file and more problems. In the end, I moved the whole thing over to my laptop but by then it was missing an unknown number of registrations and we were already out of time.  Fortunately the actual number of teams was relatively small, so we made up a hand-written start list and they got things going about half an hour late.

My team got in a very brief little warmup and before I knew it we were heading down the road with sugarcane on both sides, pushed along by a nice little quartering tailwind.  We settled in fairly quickly at around 27 mph, which considering the tailwind was rather slow, but we knew the ride back would be a whole lot harder.  After nearly getting blown off the road when an oncoming wide-load of pre-fab house pieces came by, we finally made it to the turnaround with a nice round 27.0 mph average speed just as we caught the team that had started ahead of us. Unfortunately, we were also about to be caught by the team that had started behind us.  Even more unfortunately, we lost Chuck at the turnaround when he had some sort of flare-up of knee tendinitis, compliments of a couple of weeks of riding in Colorado.  So now we were down to just three with 18 miles of mostly headwind left to go.  I was feeling less than spectacular, but while we had all four in the rotation I was able to recover well in-between pulls.  As usually happens in a TTT when you get down to just three riders, the next weakest rider, Pat, got into difficulty immediately.  Chuck had been the only rider big enough to provide much draft for Pat, and now he was trying to eek out shelter behind Steve and I.  I could read the handwriting on the wall.  For the next five miles or so our speed was all over the place as we tried to figure out what we could reasonably sustain for the rest of the ride. After a few rotations Pat was really starting to suffer, and when he'd come to the front our speed would drop.  The next guy would ramp it back up, which no doubt just twisted the knife.  Pat then wisely decided to sit on and try to recover, so for most of the rest of the way back it was just Steve and I pulling.  Of course that dropped us down into the 22-23 mph range at which point any hope for a good time went out the window.  On the plus side, Pat was able to hang on and even recover enough to start pulling again over the last few miles.  The return trip average speed was a rather dismal 22.4 mph.  We were second in the Master 40+ category, thanks to the fact that there were only two teams entered.

Sunday morning I was back on the road to Thibodaux for the criterium.  The forecast was showing a steadily increasing chance of rain all day and the radar was just basically an unpredictable mess of green and yellow.  When I arrived at the course I realized it was on the same streets where we'd had a criterium back around the mid-80s.  It had rained for that race and I remembered that the streets had become so slick that they were not safe and some of the races had to be cancelled. As I set up the finish line camera I mentioned to Lane, the Chief Referee, that if it started to rain it was going to turn into the Ice Capades.  At the time, though, things looked pretty promising.  The Masters race had a small field, which seems to be the status quo this year, but they were all good riders so I was expecting a decent race anyway.  The course was very tight and technical with eight turns, some of which were very close together.  That made it rather swoopy and fun, even though it took me a few laps to get comfortable.  As usual, the Acadiana guys started taking turns attacking, but between Donald, Ed and even myself, they were getting covered fairly quickly.  The course was technical enough, and the straights short enough, that the speeds were staying relatively low, getting up to 27-29 on the straights but dropping down into the low 20s through the turns.  I was really starting to enjoy the course when, about ten minutes into the 40-minute race, my rear tire started going soft.  I backed out of the group and stopped at the pit for a wheel change.  Unfortunately, the next lap was a prime lap and when I went back in the group came flying past me a little too fast for me to catch the draft.  I got up to one of the Acadiana guys who was dropping back, but then he just sat up.  I was badly in need of some recovery time and couldn't mount the sprint it would have taken to make the bridge so the front three or four riders started pulling away.  I was thinking my race was over, but then Peter Stevens showed up from behind and started taking pulls with me. There's no way we would have had a chance of catching if Steven hadn't started pulling like that.  We were holding our own with maybe a fifteen second gap up to the rest of the race and after a few more laps it seemed that the front group eased up a bit.  Suddenly it looked like there was hope again.  I took one long pull and we somehow made the bridge.  I saw Ed glance back and I could swear I heard him say something like, "Damn!"  Luckily, nobody attacked right away because if one of them had I don't know if I could have hung on.  After another surge or two it was done to just four of us, although I was thinking more about how lucky I was than about how I could win the sprint.  On the last lap I saw Donald starting to move up on the right and started to follow, but Charles got the wheel first.  I went left but there was no protection there so I ended up behind Ed at the end of the line. With the finish line maybe 100 meters past three tight turns in a row, I knew I'd be lucky to move  up even a single place.  Coming around the last turn I was ready to give it a shot when Charles dug a pedal and Ed and I had to hesitate as we contemplated our off-road options.  Somehow he didn't go down, but that moment of hesitation had opened too big of a gap and it was all over.

So maybe an hour later I lined up for the Cat. 1/2/3 race which had the best turnout of the day.  I figured I would sit in near the back for the first half of the hour-long race and then see if there were any scraps I might be able to pick up in the second half.  Well, I never got that far.  The race started out pretty well.  The pace was not much faster than the Masters race had been and I was pretty comfortable hanging out near the back.  A small break went off the front, but it wasn't really clear that it was going to stick and the pace remained about the same, hitting 29-30 on the straights but dropping to the low 20s through the turns.  We were about ten miles in when there was a crash a few riders ahead of me when one of the Herring guys tangled with a crack in the road.  I had to hit the brakes, along with a few others, and take the long way around the next turn, but after a couple of laps of chasing we got ourselves back in the draft.  Unfortunately, that was when we started to feel the first raindrops from the ominous black cloud that had been steadily approaching the course.  Frank immediately said he was out, as was Woody who was still sporting stitches below his eye from his training ride crash.  The turns, as I'd expected, turned to ice, making it impossible to race through them.  Even at 15 mph you could feel your tires squirming and slipping on the ancient concrete, which had been worn down so that just the tops of the click gravel rocks were showing.  We rode a few more laps really slowly before the referee stopped the race.  The radar didn't offer much hope for the rest of the afternoon, so the race was cancelled and the promoter returned everyone's entry fees. It was fun while it lasted!

The forecast for the rest of this week looks very wet around here.  I felt really lucky to get out this morning for a ride before the rain started.  I'm planning on making the Rocky Mount omnium up in Shreveport this weekend, although I haven't made any arrangements and funds are rather lacking.  Situation normal.

Dominos

I hate it when this happens.....

We were only 8 miles into the morning levee ride with a big group.  After a few fast surges, the pace had eased up a bit to 24-25 mph. Brian pulled off and started dropping back down the right side as the speed dropped maybe another mph.  Wheels started to overlap. I was about third or fourth wheel and felt someone hit my rear tire.  I said something like "Hey!" and was about to make a comment about it when I heard the crash. Apparently Robert had hit my rear wheel and then bounced over into Brian, taking about four carbon spokes out of Brian's rear wheel.  I think Woody must have been behind Robert.  After that it was just dominos.  Most riders landed in the grass, but Woody wasn't so lucky and hit pretty hard on his left forehead. His helmet took most of the impact but he had some cuts around his eye socket.  Max rode down to his car at Williams Blvd., just past the curve in the photo, and came back (on the levee!) to pick up Woody and the two other bikes that were no longer functional.  Word is that Woody got 18 stitches at Ochsner but is otherwise OK.

TrackStanding

End of the Saturday Giro Ride

I spent much of the weekend standing around at the Baton Rouge Velodrome helping to officiate the LAMBRA track championships.  Fortunately, I had time on Saturday morning to make it out to the Giro Ride. 

Despite the August heat, Saturday's Giro was a fast one.  After the usual conversational warmup along Lakeshore Drive, it didn't take long for the pace to get up into the upper 20s where it stayed for most of the day.  We did the 17 mile outbound section, which included a couple of slowdowns for turns, at an average speed of 28 mph.  Knowing that I probably wouldn't be doing any riding on Sunday, I wasn't holding back as much as usual and found myself on Daniel's wheel when he started an insanely long sprint for the turnaround out at Venetian Isles.  When we crossed the 200 meter mark at about 33 mph I dropped off.  It was enough.  The return trip was more up and down speed-wise, although of course there was the obligatory 33 mph sprint for the Goodyear sign and then the sprints to the tops of the overpasses.

When I got home I had about an hour and a half to refuel and get the car loaded up for the trip to Baton Rouge.  I knew it was going to be a hot weekend at the track.  Turnout for the races was on the light side this year.  I think the heat had something to do with it, but then again we also had three of the local track riders up at MTV for Masters Track Nationals. One of the 4D Fitness guys, whose sponsor was sponsoring the track races, organized a group training ride that probably pulled away a few more riders.  Anyway, there was still some good racing going on, and I was glad to have the finish line camera to break a particularly close tie in one of the Cat. 4/5 races.  I definitely would have called it the other way without the camera, probably because one rider was out of the saddle and leaning way forward, while the other, whose tire actually crossed first, was sitting much farther back. 

In the women's races there was one particularly strong woman who had very little track experience.  In the 200 I commented about how much she was fighting the banking in the turns.  When she would put in a big effort she would look down at the ground and get pretty squirrely around the turns, which is not uncommon for new riders.  (I can remember ending up on the wrong side of the blue band during a flying 200 a number of times myself.)  She ended up in the match sprint for first and second and was leading when the other girl got really close right on the sprinter's line (the girl in front was in the lane) when the sprint started around the 200m line, touched wheels, and went down hard on her head and shoulder.  She had a pretty good concussion and, as it turned out, a probable AC joint separation, but at the time we were more worried about her neck since she said it hurt.  She never really moved at all until the ambulance arrived.  Of course we had people holding her head to make sure she didn't move.  It was quite a few minutes before she was coherent enough to respond well to questions.  Fortunately she checked out OK for the stuff I was most worried about and they send her home around 2 am that morning from the ER.  She called the next morning to make sure someone would pick up the medals she had already won.


I spent the night down the street at Chris L's house and we were back at the track before 8 am on Sunday setting up for the morning races.  Those all went well and I was back on the road for home shortly after noon.  It was so  hot that I just couldn't make myself go out for a ride that afternoon.  So this morning I went out to the levee and did a nice moderate ride and was pleased to see that the construction zone was not blocked off.  Later in the day I got an email saying that it would probably be mostly open for the next couple of months before the really heavy construction started. 

Detours and Virgin Asphalt and an Anniversary

Solo breakaways in team time trials are not encouraged.

It's been a hot week down here in the Crescent City, but that didn't stop a good turnout for one of Kenny's bandit time trials out on Lakeshore Drive last Tuesday.  This one was a 10+ mile 4-man TT for which I'd been asked to join Steve, Rolan and Pat for twenty-five minutes of after-work gear-mashing (four hyphens in one sentence!).  In order to give the appearance of being motivated, and also to enhance my already finely honed drafting capabilities, I bolted the aero-bars onto the bike the night before.  After work that day I briefly considered riding out to the lakefront, but the thought of going out on public roads wearing a TT helmet was just more than I could handle, so I threw the bike into the car, turned up the A/C and drove out there in luxury.  I'd already ridden 42 miles that morning, so there was no guilt involved in that decision. 

With some minimal warmup I joined the rest of the NOBC team as we waited patiently in line for our start.  We had decided that I'd lead it out at a moderate speed in order to keep from having anyone blow up due to lack of warmup.  Kenny said "Go" and I clipped in smoothly and accelerated onto Lakeshore Drive.  After about ten pedal strokes, and still with my hands on the brake hoods, I glanced back to make sure everyone was in place. Yikes!  The rest of the team was still practically at the start line!  Rolan had flubbed clipping in.  I slowed down and waited, and when we were finally back together I started ramping it up again.  The next time I glanced down I saw 28 mph, and although we had a light tailwind I thought that was maybe a bit optimistic so I backed off just a touch before pulling over.  Those first few miles felt pretty nervous since I haven't been in a paceline on TT bars since some time in 2012.  We were only a mile or two out when I dropped back to discover that we'd lost Rolan.  I'd been counting on him to provide a lot of the horsepower.  He has a bit of a heart rhythm problem and apparently his heart rate started to spike above 200 so he wisely backed out of the paceline.  Unfortunately that put Pat, the tallest rider, on my wheel. Even so, we held a fairly respectable pace out to the turnaround, but as we started back without the benefit of the tailwind I could tell that Pat was starting to suffer.  While we had averaged around 27 mph on the way out, we were starting to see numbers closer to 23 on the way back. Pat and Steve swapped positions, but Steve isn't a whole lot bigger than I so it probably didn't make much difference.  We were about halfway back when things started to come apart a bit and we had to slow to 20-22 mph for a little while.  The pace was kind of up and down the rest of the way and we finished with a time of 25:01, probably a good 30-45 seconds slower than we could otherwise have gone.  As usual, I had a relatively easy time of it since I was getting the best draft of the group.

I ended up skipping the Wednesday training race, as apparently did most riders, and instead trimmed hedges at home where I dropped at least three pounds of sweat.

So Thursday morning we found the levee bike path blocked off where they had started the two-year construction project for the Pump to the River drainage project in Jefferson Parish.  It wasn't too difficult to bypass it on River Road, although there is one stretch that can be pretty sketchy because of traffic and dump trucks.  They still haven't even started replacing the bike path on the levee between the Corps of Engineers building and the parish line, so this kind of added insult to injury.  The police chief said that the contractor was already complaining about being harassed by cyclists trying to sneak through the construction zone. 

When one door closes, another door opens.  Meanwhile, the re-paving of Broadway, which has been a major headache for the past couple of months, is nearing completion.  There is nothing that warms a cyclist's heart quite like a long smooth stretch of virgin asphalt like that, especially when the road surface it is replacing was practically unrideable. I might even be able to ride to work that way.  It has always been the most direct route, but I have never used it because it was so rough and had so much traffic. They were putting down some of the last sections today near the river where I work, so it looks like it will be essentially complete by the time the students come back for the fall semester in a few weeks.  Of course, this being New Orleans, the huge machine that lays down the asphalt had already broken an underground water pipe.  No surprise there.  The only question is how long it will take for them to fix that and whether or not it will introduce a big new bump into the otherwise silky smooth asphalt.

They just announced a plan to resurface part of Nashville Avenue, taking out one of the two traffic lanes and replacing it with a bike lane.  Nice. I will almost be able to ride all the way from my house to the lakefront via bike paths.  I'll probably still take Carrollton Avenue and battle with the cars, but it will at least be an option. 

Mark McMurry, who is up at the Major Taylor velodrome for Masters Track Nationals, was 4th in the 500 today.  He had been in 2nd place until the last two riders, both of which beat his time.  I think he got a medal in the flying 200 as well, and just missed out in the Matched Sprints.  Mike Williams lapped his 70+ field in the Points Race.  I presume he'll take home a couple more medals from that age group.

Oh, almost forgot.  This is 9th anniversary of this blog - 1,839 posts.