Weather...or Not

You know, sometimes you start out on a nice fresh new week with a plan, only to have it squashed by Mother Nature and that little part of life that does not involve the bike.  This was one of those weeks.  After last weekend's rather disappointing race performance, followed by Monday's long but easy holiday ride, I was back to the routine on Tuesday morning for the long levee ride.  My legs still felt inexplicably tired with some lingering soreness that I could attribute only to age-related recovery sluggishness. This aging thing is really a PITA!  So anyway, that was one decent 35 mile training ride.  I was looking forward to Wednesday when I usually have a chance to ride in the morning and then follow it up in the evening with the training race.  Well, having seen the weather forecast the night before, I got up early Wednesday morning and checked the radar on my phone before getting out of bed.  There was a lot of very bad-looking rain just west of the city.  For some reason my phone wasn't loading the animated weather map, but since the weather here this time of year is almost always moving from southwest to northeast I guessed it would be raining by sunrise and went back to sleep.  Of course it didn't actually rain and I could certainly have ridden.  I should know better.  The rest of the day was threatening weather but the worst of it was just barely bypassing the city to the north, so I was thinking I'd be able to ride after work.  Naturally, it rained after work, so Wednesday was a loss.

I drowned my sorrows with a couple of glasses of $2.99 wine that night.  Thursday morning I got up early out of habit and was all ready to get dressed to go out and meet the Thursday levee ride when I remembered I had to take The Wife to the hospital for a 7:45 am appointment to have the staples removed from her hip surgery.  Naturally, the weather was nice that morning.  The staple removal went fine and she was cleared to return to work next week, so that was nice.  I was thinking maybe I'd get out for a few miles after work.  Nope.  It rained again shortly after I got home, so that made two days off the bike.  I finished off that bottle of wine instead.  So this morning I didn't check the radar and went out around 6:30 under a cloudy sky, determined to get in some mileage.  I felt like I'd been off the bike for two weeks as I rode down Carrollton Avenue toward the lake.  It wasn't until I was past Causeway on the lake bike path that I finally started to loosen up a little bit.  I guess the tailwind didn't hurt either.  I decided I was going to ride all the way out to the western edge of Kenner where the bike path basically ends.  Once I passed the Casino at Williams Blvd. I noticed that the asphalt was getting more and more wet from a recent rain shower, and a little while later I started feeling some light drizzle falling.  I made it out to the end, turned around and had just gotten going again when the rain got a little heavier, but I guess it wasn't moving to the east much because a couple of miles later it was relatively dry again.  Anyway, I was glad to get in a couple of hours on the bike even through that will be just a drop in the bucket of missed miles this week.

The Tour de Louisiane is coming up next week and the handful of club members who help put it together are now in the "oh shit" stage.  We have a meeting this afternoon to see what has fallen through the cracks.  As usual, very few have pre-registered yet, so I sent out some reminders this morning.  It seems that every year it gets more and more expensive to put on a reasonably safe event and harder and harder to break even.  There were a few years back in the late 70s and probably even into the early 80s when I put about $300 out of my own pocket into the race, prizes were all merchandise from the bike shop, and that was about it.  Now we're talking about an event that requires $10-12k in cash, minimum, with a field size only a little bit larger.  On the plus side, it's been great working with the town of Covington where the criterium will be held.  They have made a nice poster for the race that they will be putting up around town, and the police department, fire department and mayor's office are very supportive of the event.  We had to make a little change to the crit course that will shorten the sprint and require us to move the finish line down a bit, but I think it should still work out OK for the field sizes we will have.