Easy Holiday Week

NOBC City Ride

It was a week of weather issues that provides, conveniently enough, ample excuses and disincentives to make for some nice easy holiday rides. Tuesday evening's "cold front of the week" found me in the dark heading for the lake on Wednesday, naturally running a bit late and struggling against a brutal northwest wind to meet the WeMoRi.

Foggy Giro - on the lakefront

Although I knew I was a little behind schedule, I was still surprised to see the blinking lights of the group coming at me shortly after I had turned onto Robert E. Lee Blvd. I sprinted for the next cross-over but an oncoming car forced me to nearly a stop just as the break flew by. I sprinted again, this time from 9 mph to 28 mph, just barely catching the draft and rapidly plunging into hypoxia. A couple of riders split off the front along Wisner in the semi-crosswind, but surprisingly the rest of the group didn't materialize until well after the City Park Avenue sprint. That's when I found out that the group had turned around early on Lakeshore Drive because of the combination of darkness, rocks and debris blown onto the road by the cold front, and probably also the brutal wind. At least that explained why I had run into them so early. Anyway, I got in my fifteen minutes of Wednesday intensity and then the pace settled down to conversational mode for the second lap around the park. I stopped for a while at Starbucks, where they were in a panic because the expresso machine had broken down, before making my way back home.

Monday - that little spot is an eagle

Later in the day I started organizing (I use the term loosely) an after-Christmas Friday city ride. I had no idea who would, or could, make such a ride the day after Christmas, but I really wasn't up for a real training ride, so I proposed 20-25 miles at conversational pace through the city, ending at the Morning Call in City Park for coffee and donuts (ahem... I mean "café au lait and beignets."  We just called them donuts back in the day before they became so trendy). We had a nice turnout and took a more scenic route than the usual training rides, winding through Old Metairie out to the Lake Trail and Lakeshore Drive, then down to the Quarter via Franklin Avenue, and finally back to City Park by way of Esplanade Avenue.  It was a really nice ride and I had no trouble at all taking care of three beignets in short order. By then we were all starting to get chilled from sitting around in damp riding clothes, so I was glad to get back on the bike and back home to a hot shower.

Although I had initially been holding out a little hope for a ride on Saturday, the weather forecast was not offering a lot of hope in that regard. By late evening I was pretty sure the Saturday Giro would be a wash-out. I guess it was, although there were a few people who spent five hours riding in the rain out to Slidell and back anyway.  I am not quite that crazy, myself. Instead, I went over to Tulane after dinner and rode the WattBike for an hour or so while watching American Flyers. Coincidentally, one of the cyclists from back in the day recently posted some photos on the Midwest Dino Riders FB page of himself riding this rigged up bike with a huge camera mounted to the front fork. The equivalent today can be attached to your handlebars. The movie itself is a little weak, but some of the racing scenes in Colorado were taken from the Coors Classic and are actually pretty good.

So by Sunday the weather was much warmer and less windy, but looking out the window in the morning I could see a good bit of fog, so I went with arm-warmers and toe-covers despite the 68F temperature.  Yes, it was 68 degrees before dawn two days after Christmas. By the time we started the Giro the fog was getting thicker and thicker, and so basically the whole ride was in the fog. Naturally, that meant that the roads were wet too, so by the time I got home I was pretty well soaked through.  It was a good ride, though. A lot of the usual horsepower was absent, or in the case of Woody, recovering from a cold or the flu and sitting in the draft, so the pace was steady. I ended up doing a fair amount of work as a result. While I may be reluctant to spend much time at the front when they are hammering away at 29 mph, the steady 24 mph we had on Sunday made it relatively easy.

I'm off from work all week, so rather than my usual short easy Monday ride, I instead did a slightly longer easy Monday ride. A cold front had come through overnight, so the streets were still a little wet, but it wasn't really a problem until I got out to the lakefront bike path in Metairie. Since the bike path there is alongside the levee rather on top of it, water drains across it from the levee for hours after any significant rainfall. I had really underestimated just how wet that bike path could be, but I was already committed, so I continued on out to the casino and back with water spraying up my backside and onto my bare shins (temps were just in the 50s). I was already starting to get cold as I turned around to head back east since my 16 mph pace wasn't doing much to keep me warm.

Along the way I saw a bald eagle taking off from the grassy area between the bike path and the levee, but never got close enough to get a good picture. Once again I got home chilled and wet. The temperature is supposed to be dropping all afternoon today, so I guess we'll have a couple of days of winter again until the wind shifts back to the south and brings the rain and fog again.  Meanwhile, The Daughter was driving back from Idaho to Olympia right through a snowstorm centered, appropriately enough, on Deadman Pass. I'm sure there was a lot of white-knuckle driving through the mountains, especially when the snow wiped out the tire tracks. Anyway, I've been spending my time trying to wrap up some LAMBRA stuff. In fact, the trophy I ordered for the winning team in the annual LCCS points competition arrived just an hour or so ago. I need to work on some proposed revisions to the bylaws, get the officials' seminar finalized for Jan. 31, schedule a LAMBRA business meeting, probably for the same date, etc.