Final Straw

By all accounts it was a good weekend.  A solid Giro Ride on Saturday, followed by a Tulane Cycling party at the house, and then a nice club ride on the northshore on Sunday.  Earlier in the week when Mignon suggested a northshore ride, it sounded perfect.  I'd missed out on a little mileage and intensity that week because of the incident on the levee and crash on the lakefront, and with the Mississippi Gran Prix coming up the next week the timing was good.  We met up at Puccino's at 7 am and I drove across the lake with Tom, which of course meant half an hour of discussing university administration from the perspective of the liberal arts professor, which is frankly something I rarely get to do.  The sky was a bit overcast, but the air was warm, and as I'd been able to do for most of the week I rode in just shorts and a summer jersey.  I love the rides this time of year when there isn't that winter burden of making crucial wardrobe decisions and compromises.  We had over a dozen on hand as we headed off from the Lee Road school with a nice little tailwind at our backs.  My legs were a little tired from the prior day's Giro Ride, which had been surprisingly fast, and in consideration of the inevitable headwind on the return trip I was trying to keep my effort level under control for the first half of the ride.  Since it was a club ride with a mix of riders, we were stopping at all of the intersections to regroup, but there were a few who were already getting impatient by the time we were halfway 'round the traditional 65 mile route, and on that long stretch at the top of the course heading toward Sie Jenkins Road the group split pretty significantly.  Even so, I have to admit I was liking the effort level.  It was hard enough but not too hard and pretty much just what I felt I needed. I pushed it a bit on some of the climbs just to see where I was.  Eventually, of course, a few riders split off to take a shorter route and we turned more and more into the headwind.  As usual, those last four miles straight into the wind on a dead straight road was just a slog.  I got back to the car feeling pretty satisfied with a bit under 300 miles for the week and a plan for an easy recovery ride on Monday.

Well Monday arrived a little on the damp side.  It wasn't quite rain, but it wasn't quite dry.  I went out anyway with the plan to just spin the legs for an hour around Audubon Park where I wouldn't be tempted to go fast. I guess my lower back was feeling just a little stiff, but it wasn't anything I was really thinking about.  After a few circuits around the park the raindrops got a little heavier and so I bailed out a few minutes early for home.  No problem, since all I'd wanted to do was some no-effort spinning.  Back at the house I noticed the two big ice chests from Saturday's party.  They were of course still half-full of partially melted ice, so I decided it would be a good time to empty them out and let them dry. I don't remember them being particularly heavy, nor do I remember feeling any particular strain on my lower back, but a few minutes later when I bent over to wipe up some spilled water I could barely stand  up again.  I guess the combination of some big gear seated climbs on Sunday and the lugging around of tents and ice chests and such from Saturday had taken its toll and lifting those ice chests turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back, or in this case mine.  I took a couple of Aleve, but the back was bothering me the rest of the day anyway.  I skipped riding on Tuesday, and by the end of the day it was feeling better, but then last night I didn't sleep well because of it, so skipped riding this morning as well.  In an hour of so I'm going to ride out to the lakefront.  Sometimes these kinds of things don't seem to hurt when I'm riding and sometimes they do, but I think it'll still be better than sitting on the couch eating Easter candy.  If it hurts, I'll just take it easy.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, there's a little controversy brewing about Lakeshore Drive. The Orleans Levee District decided to open up Lakeshore Drive again to traffic on weekends.  For the past ten or fifteen years, it's been closed to eastbound traffic on weekends, but a group in the eastern part of the city decided it was a racist policy and so they voted to open it back up. For most of us it won't make a bit of difference since the guys who race are there mostly early in the morning or late in the evening on weekdays, when it was never closed anyway, or early in the morning on weekends before the general public is likely to start cruising up and down the street.  A local bicycle advocacy group got the ear of the levee district and presented a plan to turn half of the 4-lane road into a multi-use bike/pedestrian path full-time.  That would probably be more of a problem than a help for riders who train there in the mornings and evenings, and would likely kill the informal training races entirely.  Some signage along the route would be great, and a reduced speed limit even better, but the idea of groups of riders in training ride mode weaving through joggers and dog-walkers is frightening.

So I'm planning on going up to the Mississippi Gran Prix this weekend, one way or the other.  Depending on how this evening goes, it'll either be as a bike racer or an official.  I'd much prefer the former.