Early Morning

Early morning winter rides.

There was a time -- long, long ago -- when I did most of my riding in the afternoon. That generally meant dealing with traffic and impatient commuters, steaming summer asphalt, and missed days due to unexpected evening commitments. Eventually, the realities of life and work forced a shift to morning training sessions. At first they were relatively short, typically around 20 miles, and I could head out at 6:30 am and still avoid the frantic efforts to get to work. Of course, working at a university allowed for a little flexibility in that regard, something that I consider a major benefit. There was a time when I could be competitive with a weekday training plan composed mainly of 20-mile solo rides, but as the races got faster and my telomeres shorter, the training rides started getting both longer and faster. Luckily, by that time the river levee bike path had been constructed, and although I initially used it only for recovery days, after a couple of years there was a consistent weekday morning group up there and I started riding with them almost every morning. When the bike path was expanded upriver of Jefferson Parish, the group started doing longer rides on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the 6:40 am rides became 6:15 am rides. Often, especially in the winter when it was cold and dark and windy, I would be in full TT mode, racing the two miles from my house to the levee. The Tuesday and Thursday rides that had started out as moderate or easy paced group rides started to attract more riders and, all of a sudden it seemed, they became serious fast affairs that got me home with 40+ miles on the odometer and sore quads. That format remained in place for a number of years and I had it pretty much down to a science, but then things changed.  The Corps of Engineers started working on the levee. Those early morning rides on the levee could get a little frightening when it was pitch dark or foggy and the guys at the front were still hammering away at 28-30 mph. The occasional pedestrians or other cyclists would cause unpredictable moments of chaos in the paceline, sometimes resulting in a crash, but we continued anyway because it was still better than the alternative.

Last year I started driving out to the start of the ride, which by then was being pushed relentlessly farther and farther upriver. That meant an even earlier wake-up. I hated it, but I did it because the alternative was even less attractive. Eventually the levee closure got so far upriver that it just wasn't worth driving out there any more, mainly because of the amount of time it would take to drive back home in rush-hour traffic. And so I started heading out on my own in the morning, riding out to the lakefront and to the Lake Trail in Jefferson. I needed to ride six or seven miles through the city in order to get out to, and back from, the lakefront, and that exercise consumed more precious morning minutes. Others who lived uptown were forced into the same situation, so eventually we started meeting up in order to ride out and back together. That meant an even earlier start time of 5:45 am. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We chose that time so that we would meet up with another group of river levee exiles coming from Jefferson Parish at the west end of Lakeshore Drive. Coincidentally, the WeMoRi (Wednesday Morning Ride), which started out near the lakefront and had been steadily growing, also started at 5:45, so rather than get up even earlier in order to meet them at 5:45 I compromised and decided to leave home at 5:45 and meet that group on Wednesdays at the Lakefront. So that's the current situation.  Everything from Tuesday through Thursday revolves around 5:45 am.  It's dark at 5:45 am most of the year, so I now have a super bright rechargeable headlight so I don't ride straight into a pothole on the way out to the lake, but I still hate riding in the dark, especially when it's cold, but that's pretty much my standard ride this winter. It took a few months, but the various groups have settled on their alternatives to the river levee, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we meet up with two different groups, plus a few others, on Lakeshore Drive, which typically makes for a group of, I guess, 10-15 riders racing down Lakeshore Drive in the dark. It demands a great deal of trust in your fellow riders, at least the ones ahead of you.

On the plus side, sometimes the morning sky out by the lake looks pretty amazing.