Rolling and Bowling

The Sunday Giro Meeting

Things have been rolling along pretty much on auto-pilot lately, which has actually been kind of a nice break from the usual chaos.  On Friday my office had a "Staff Retreat" in an apartment at the Lower Pontalba Building on Jackson Square. I'm sure these sorts of things are helpful for a lot of people, but personally they always seem a bit contrived.  I'm pretty sure The Baroness would never have tolerated such a thing. Afterward we headed over to Fulton Alley for some bowling and adult beverages. I have never been much of a bowler and in this case I was rather worried about my right shoulder which has never fully recovered from that crash that broke my collarbone.  As it turned out, it was only moderately painful, which unfortunately eliminated the only credible excuse I could come up with.  The net result of this unfettered, lopsided and unfamiliar activity was some moderate soreness and a pulled muscle somewhere on the inside of my leg that bugged me for the next three or four days.  It was probably a good thing that it rained Saturday morning so I didn't do the Giro Ride.

The Sunday Giro was good, with a pretty good turnout and relatively nice weather.  My memory of the ride itself is pretty much a total blank except that we had a new rider in the group who had recently moved here.  She is doing a Fellowship at LSUHSC in trauma and turned out to be a good rider with some solid abilities and track experience.

Since I knew it would be raining that morning I send out an email to see if anyone wanted to try out the WattBikes at the Tulane Cycling training center we've been putting together.  A number of people showed up and I ended up spending most of the day there, although I never actually did anything you could call "training."  I had wanted to see if we could set up a group ride on the WattBike software so that it would display everyone's data together on the big monitor, but the borrowed USB ANT+ dongle didn't seem to be cooperating.  I went ahead an ordered one for myself, which arrived yesterday, so I tried it out earlier today just to see if it worked.  It looks like it will work pretty well, although we definitely need to buy a cheap laptop to keep at the center for this sort of thing. Speaking of Tulane Cycling, we have been getting  a few inquiries lately from incoming students, which is great to see.  Hopefully we can hit the ground running this year and the training center will help keep some of the new riders from dropping out of sight once it starts getting cold and dark this winter.  It should be interesting.

So this week has been pretty standard, except for the fact that I rode out to the lake on Tuesday and Thursday instead of driving out to ride on the river levee.  On Tuesday, three of us met on Carrollton at Fontainbleau at the ungodly hour of 5:45 am, which unfortunately is likely to be the status quo for a while.  The reason is that we were meeting another small group, some of which were also exiles from the river levee rides, that was coming from Metairie.  The plan was to meet up somewhere on Lakeshore Drive or on the Lake Trail bike path.  That worked out pretty well, although we decided on the way back to change our route a bit so we could be sure to meet them on Lakeshore Drive in order to skip having to ride that extra bit on Robt. E. Lee.  We tried it again this morning and met the Metairie group right at the west end of Lakeshore Drive at about 6:10 I guess, which was perfect timing. We had a good 42 mile ride and I got home just a bit before 8:00, so this plan should work OK until the levee is finished, if I live that long.

Stuff you see around a university

On Wednesday I again rode out to meet the WeMoRi.  I am finding it really hard jumping into that ride and going from 18 mph to 30 mph all of a sudden.  It takes me half of the lap around City Park to recover from that.  Anyway, it's still a better workout than I'd likely do my myself. Since they ride so early I have to leave home at 5:45, and as a result I'm on my way back home a lot earlier than usual.  This time I decided to stop at Starbucks on the way back, which was nice.  I can see that becoming a regular stop for me on Wednesdays if I keep doing this.  Once it starts getting darker in the morning I may have to re-think my options, however. Tomorrow I'm meeting Ben at 6:15 for an easy coffee ride out to the lakefront.  We are planning on meeting up with a new medical student who just moved to town from Colorado and seems susceptible to being talked into doing some collegiate racing.

At some point recently we finally got notification that the NOBC's 501(c)3 status had been re-instated by the IRS.  That took a couple of years to happen after we lost it because nobody knew we were supposed to start sending in tax returns a few years back.  Luckily we have an ex-president who is a CPA and was able to deal with them for us.