Winter Camp

We pulled up to David's house at 5 pm on Friday and a few minutes later we were on our way up to Natchez State Park for the LSU/Tulane cycling winter training camp.  A few minutes after that David started remembering the things he had forgotten to bring, which included such items as the crockpot he was planning to use for dinner on Saturday and, more troubling, his riding shoes.  Fortunately, Kenny was planning on driving up early Saturday morning with a couple of other riders and stopped by David's place to pick up the stuff.  D and I had already made a grocery store run for the planned six or seven riders we were expecting.  Unfortunately, riders were dropping out like crazy at the last minute and we ended up with exactly two actual team riders, plus Kenny and myself.  Basically we ended up paying for one cabin that we didn't really need.  On the plus side, however, the weather forecast that had looked really bad earlier in the week had been revised and we were expecting a little cool front to come through Friday night followed by two days of very nice riding weather.  We were not disappointed in that regard.

Despite a rather rainy drive up to Natchez, we arrived early enough to get together with the LSU riders in the next-door cabin for a while, lube the chains on the bikes that had been on the roof of the car, and get to sleep at a reasonable hour.  The plan was to start breakfast at 7 am and hit the road at 8:30.

Saturday morning it was still a little cloudy and the roads still wet, but the rain was gone and the temperature was in the shorts-or-knickers range.  We scrambled up a big batch of eggs and everyone was ready to ride by 8:30.  Unfortunately Kenny had listened to his Garmin which had directed him down the unpaved Tate Road (this happens to everyone coming to Natchez State Park from the east), and we were also waiting for Curtis Moroney, who lives in Natchez, to join us, so I guess we were half an hour late getting started.

The planned ride up the Natchez Trace and then back around the Church Loop was designed to be more about practicing paceline than intensity and in that regard it worked out well.  The Trace is all silky smooth asphalt with minimal traffic (I think it was half an hour before we saw a car), and all of the hills are graded, so there's nothing particularly steep.  This makes it fairly easy to maintain a nice double paceline, which we did for most of the ride.  Toward the end, Danielle's legs were about cooked thanks to a serious lack of mileage over the prior few weeks, so she was really struggling on the climbs as her quads started to lock up.  I dropped back to keep her rolling and minimize the gap, which worked out pretty well. After we got back to the cabins for showers and food, Kenny, David and Danielle took off on a beverage run to Natchez, which is about twelve miles away, while I hung around to watch the LSU team play foot-down in the grass beneath the dam.  Meanwhile the Saints were having their own struggles with Seattle.  That night we all got together for a big pasta and salad dinner at the LSU cabin, followed by an interminable game of To the Moon that was so exciting I fell asleep and eventually wandered off to bed.

Sunday morning the temperature was cooler - I guess in the low 40s at sunrise.  The sky was clear blue, however, and by the time we where half an hour down the road we all knew we'd overdressed.  The plan, which had been changed the night before, was to take the long way around to Natchez, coming into town by way of Cemetery Road which runs along the high east ridge overlooking the Mississippi, make a trip through the old historic cemetery, and stop for coffee at the Natchez Coffee Company on Franklin Street.  Unfortunately, we took a wrong turn along the way, backtracked and missed the correct turn again, then finally found our way to the correct road(s).  I had ridden most of the route the year before, but had not taken the Cemetery Road route.  As it turned out, Cemetery Road was unpaved for the first couple of miles.  Luckily it was nice hard-packed dirt most of the way, so it wasn't a problem at all.  After a half hour stop at the coffee shop, we returned via the Trace, making for a ride of just under 50 miles.   The group stayed together at a moderate to easy pace nearly all the way back, but after turning off of the trace a few riders split off the front.  As we entered the park I decided to bridge up to them, which was about the time they decided to race all the way back to the dam. I caught one of them who had been dropped about half-way there and we bombed the downhills, bud didn't catch the other two until they eased up near the cabins.

So it was a really nice weekend of riding, even if the mileage and intensity was dialed down a bit from a more typical January weekend.  I was kind of looking forward to a recovery pace ride this morning but another front came through around dawn and it rained until around 1 pm, which was about when my pants started to dry out from my commute to work.  Tomorrow should be sunny and colder. Since they have closed off the construction area on the levee and are apparently threatening people who jump the fence with arrest, I will probably go out tomorrow and see if it's feasible to ride the mile past the construction area on the grass, or perhaps if there's a group, on River Road.  Riding alone on River Road in the dark, however, is not, in my opinion, an option that is compatible with survival. I am hoping that riding the grass is a reasonable possibility because my other options are to play in traffic on Carrollton Avenue or drive out to Jefferson Playground, which would cost me quite a bit of precious early morning riding time (and sleep).  We'll see how it goes, I guess.