Still Sick

At Endymion Saturday night

It was eight days ago, on the Tuesday morning ride, that I noticed the runny nose. Granted, my nose runs pretty steadily any time the temperature is below 70F, but this seemed somehow a little different. I had arrived at the usual meeting spot that morning right on time, only to find nobody there. Perhaps it was the stiff northwest wind. I rode out to the lakefront alone, meeting up with a few of the other regulars, and we plodded our way east on Lakeshore Drive in a big eschelon that nobody seemed to want to lead. After the loop at Seabrook, however, Matt rode to the front and started ramping up the pace. I was glued to his wheel in the brutal quartering headwind, focused on staying in his draft and wondering how long he could keep it up. Well, five miles later, at the other end of Lakeshore Drive he finally eased up. I looked back and there was nobody in sight. It was a given that nobody was going to ride out to Kenner on the lake bike trail, so we did an easy lap around City Park and I headed home more than a few miles short for the day. By that night the sore throat had started, and when I awoke in the middle of the night barely able to swallow I knew I'd finally caught the cold that had been going around the office for the past couple of weeks. I woke up later that same night to find my shirt soaked with sweat, so I knew I was sick. I felt bad enough that morning that I stayed home from work. It would turn out that Tuesday's ride would be my last bit of training until, well, until I get back on the bike, which hasn't really happened yet unless you count the Friday coffee ride, or a brief and ill-advised excursion I took on Monday morning.

One of the Thoth parade groups

So after Wednesday morning I decided it would be unwise to do any significant efforts on the bike considering the cold dry air and my desperate hope that I might avoid having it all turn into a big old chest cold and possibly bronchitis or pneumonia. Mardi Gras weekend was coming up fast, and since we are off from work both Monday and Tuesday, I had been hoping to enjoy the long weekend. It didn't really turn out that way. Every night I'd go to sleep hoping I'd wake up the next morning and feel fine, and every morning I'd wake up with a screaming sore throat and probably mild fever. Still, it didn't seem to be affecting my lungs. I'd been sucking on zinc lozenges for days hoping to at least mitigate the effects of the virus, and I'd been staying off the bike and skipping all of the parades in hopes of being better in time for Mardi Gras.

In front of Apolline after the parade

I did make it to the Endymion parade, but that's mainly because we drive downtown to the Tulane Tidewater building, park in the garage, hang out in the office until the parade is literally in front of us, and go back and forth whenever we want. I can't say I was feeling too great, but I did still spend a lot of time down on the street. It's a pretty nice parade and the crowd is reasonably thin by the time it gets downtown. The next day, Sunday, some of us were planning on meeting at Apolline restaurant on Magazine Street (Apolline is the club's main sponsor) to watch the Thoth parade around noon.  I really like watching the parade on Magazine Street. That area has a real old time neighborhood feel to it, and the parade itself is always a little more "local" than the others. Fortunately the temperature was much warmer, so I rode down there with Danielle and had a really nice time. The next morning, although I was not feeling any better, I went out on the bike for a short easy ride since the temperature was still reasonable and it was supposed to rain and then get a lot colder later on. I decided to ride around Audubon Park and then ride out along the levee bike path that was just, finally, re-opened from the park to the stables near Jefferson Playground. That's only a 4-mile stretch, I guess, but on this morning it was nice to not have to deal with traffic.

More Thoth

Well, by Monday evening things were going downhill and I knew I wouldn't be making any trips to the French Quarter on Mardi Gras. The cold had finally gotten to my lungs and I was running a bit of a fever. I started taking some Amoxicillin that The Wife had left over and got that prescription refilled. Then I started taking Mucinex-D, the one with pseudoephedrine, along with Advil. It helped a bit, but basically Mardi Gras day was fairly miserable. Things are a little better this morning, so there's hope, but considering the weather I may be skipping another day or two on the bike. We have our training camp scheduled for this weekend in Natchez, so I am at least hoping I'll be over the worst of it by then.

Levee bike path re-opened

Last night we struggled through setting up the event permit and online registration for the Tulane collegiate race. Man, the USAC system makes that process rather tedious. It was compounded by a glitch that we had found the day before that wasn't handling collegiate licenses correctly for online registration. I think we got it all done, but I'll have to wait until online registration opens on March 1 to know if that all worked out.

So last week I rode a total of 68 miles, by far the lowest weekly total in well over a year. That came after a solid textbook-quality 5-week block of 13-14 hour weeks. Oh well. Back to square one.  Again.