Intermission

Back in the day, and I mean way back in the day, there was something called the "off-season." Sure, there were rumors of riders up in the northeast racing in the cold and mud, but for the most part they were entirely unconfirmed. By the end of October everyone was riding slower and shorter and spending time catching up on long-neglected chores, or studies, or bike maintenance. It was time to re-grease the bottom bracket and headset, patch the pile of flat tubulars, and pull out the long-sleeve wool jerseys and long tights.

Those days are gone.

What was once the off-season is now the scant one or two weeks between the last road race and the first cyclocross race.  Sometimes less.  So this weekend was, as close as I can tell, it. After a nice Friday coffee ride with some of the Tulane riders, I got up Saturday morning in the dark to ride out to the Giro Ride. If I'd been able to see the sky in the pre-dawn darkness I'd have seen nothing but clouds. The hurricane that had plowed into the west coast of Mexico was now an area of rain half the size of Texas inching its way toward Louisiana.  Things were not looking good for Sunday, so I had stuck a packet of HammerGel in my pocket with the idea of maybe putting in a few extra miles afterward.

The typical group was on hand for the 7 am roll-out under a dark, cloudy sky, and one of the guys, surveying the roster, remarked that it would probably be a fast ride.  But it wasn't. Not that it was exactly a casual pace, but it was definitely one of the smoothest, most steady rides of the year.  It seemed that almost everyone was on the same page. Indeed, I had the feeling that the weekend was a kind of intermission for everyone - a time to throttle back a bit between road and cyclocross seasons.  Now, I'm quite sure that most of the riders in attendance had no plans whatsoever of racing cyclocross, but it was just that all of the necessary cues had come together on the same weekend.  There were no nearby races, there were no nearby charity rides, it was the last and darkest weekend of daylight savings time, and it was cloudy and breezy.  For a change I made a few intentional efforts rather than merely attempting to respond to the efforts of the guys on the front.

So as the Giro was winding down along Lakeshore Drive I mentioned I was thinking about doing a few extra miles on the lake trail bike path. When everyone else turned off at Marconi, Ben, Jaden, Grayson and I continued on.  I was thinking we'd ride out to Kenner and turn around, but once we got out there we decided to do the ride around the back of the airport to the river bike path and come back into town that way. That particular route involves a couple of little quirks. One is the gate at the pumping station near I-10 which was closed. That required a bit of a detour in order to get past I-10.  The second thing about the route is that the road around the back of the airport, right at the end of the east-west runway, is gravel.  Fortunately it was in pretty good shape since we haven't had much rain around here in weeks.  Once we got to the river we checked out the levee bike path, but was still closed, so we rode down Jefferson Highway all the way in to Moss Street where we could finally get back on the bike path.  By that point I Grayson was starting to struggle a bit and I figured he was probably about to bonk, but since we only had about six or seven miles to go I didn't say anything.  Well, a little while later Jaden looked back and couldn't see Grayson.  We turned back and found him sitting on the side of the levee.  Jaden gave him something to eat and he told us he's just ride back in easy, so we cruised the last few miles.

Ready for 'Cross

Well, as predicted, it started raining around 3 am this morning and probably won't stop for the next day - or two. With 88 miles yesterday I decided to take a rest day today. Of course, that didn't involve actual "rest."  After a couple cups of coffee I ended up heading down to the basement to transform the Pennine from "rain bike" to "cyclocross bike."  It's a very retro version of a not-quite correct cyclocross bike, but for the kind of cyclocross riding I'm likely to do it will suffice.  First, I removed the fenders. Then I rescued the clincher cyclocross wheels from the corner where they've been all summer and put the on the bike. Since they are 700C and my regular wheels for that bike are old 27" I then had to readjust the brakes. Since I have an antique 5-speed freewheel on the cyclocross wheel that is something like a 15-27, I then had to remove the antique Simplex derailleur and replace it with an equally antique Suntour long-cage derailleur. That completed the transformation, such as it is.

Next, I finally decided to re-wire the light fixture in the hallway that has a bad socket that's been sputtering lately and trying to burn down the house, so I headed over to the hardware store in the rain to pick up three new light sockets so I could re-wire the whole thing, which of course involved a little creativity since they didn't have exactly the kind of socket I needed. That's about when I got the email that my bank account was overdrafted.  Turns out the last couple of deposits I'd made went into my savings account instead of my checking account.

In the middle of all of this, the damned swipe-card door lock on the Tulane cycling center isn't working AGAIN.  Since I'm the only one on this side of Lake Pontchartrain with the key, and since the lousy rainy weather had everyone wanting to put in some time on the WattBikes, there were a few text messages and emails going around and a couple of people coming over to pick up or return the key.  This whole thing with the door lock has been very frustrating.  Kind of like the situation I had with my AT&T Internet.  They are trying the same "fixes" over and over again and expecting a different result each time, which of course isn't happening.  Something's broken but I don't know enough about how the thing works to guess whether it's the lock itself, the wireless connection to the server, or the underlying data that the lock needs in order to know which ID cards are valid for that room.  I guess we're going to have to exhaust every other possibility, more than once, before actually replacing the lock or figuring out what the real problem is.