Alone Again

The Wednesday morning levee ride didn't happen today, unless me riding alone counted. After getting rained out on Monday, I planned on making the 6:15 am Tuesday ride, although given the still-unresolved levee bike ride crisis I wasn't too sure what would happen.  Unfortunately I got out there a few minutes late.  This sometimes happens for my first morning ride after a weekend road trip.  In this case I spent some time unsuccessfully searching for my missing headlight underneath the car seat, only to have Danielle show up and tell me it was upstairs in her room because she had removed it before we put the bikes on the roof of the car last Friday.  She decided to go do intervals out by Audubon Park, so I would be riding alone.  By then I had about five minutes to get to the levee, which I knew was impossible.  Well, as it turns out the traffic going upriver on River Road is pretty light at that hour and I was able to ride on River Road past the construction zone during which time only three cars passed me.  When I got up onto the levee I could see the cluster of blinking red lights that was the morning ride.  It was about a minute and a half up the road, so I knew that no amount of time-trialing was going to allow me to close that gap once they started rolling.  Even so, I could still see them half an hour later, but past Kenner the gap grew to the point that they were gone.  I turned around at the Destrehan bridge as they were coming back and rode back with the group listening to Howard harassing Brian, apparently for not staying on his wheel each time he would hit the front of the paceline and surge 1-3 mph faster than the consensus speed.  Before getting back to the new end of the bike path near Ochsner we regrouped and basically took the lane on River Road on the way back. It seemed to work pretty well since traffic wasn't moving very fast anyway.

Well, things were different this morning.  I got out to River Road at 6:40 and there was not a bike to be seen.  There were, however, lots of cars travelling upriver at around 35 mph.  There was no way I was riding alone on that shoulderless truck-laden road under those circumstances, so I waited until I could cross over to the river side to ride on the strip of grass between the temporary construction zone fence and the road.  That would have been fine except for the fact that much of it was soaked with water.  It was rideable, barely, and I could see lots of bike tire ruts in the mud the whole way, but it was not fun.  Fortunately it is only about a mile long so after six or seven minutes of impromptu cyclocrossing I was back up on the bike path. The path was deserted other than the strong north wind and myself.  I guess it was good that it was windy because otherwise I might have just soft-pedaled the whole ride.  As it was, I was struggling to maintain 17-18 mph most of the way out, sometimes unsuccessfully.  The ride back offered up a little more in the tailwind department, but of course I had to contend with that last mile in the muddy, soggy grass.  By the time I got home the bike was a bit of a mess, enough so that I took the hose to it in order to remove the dried grass and mud despite the fact that I probably never exceeded 10 mph.  So the lesson learned today was that riding on the grass alongside River Road is not good when it's wet, which is probably most of the time.  It's almost enough to get me up even earlier to meet the WeMoRi.  Almost.