Road Season Cometh

The weather was finally warming up a bit for the weekend thanks to the promise of clear sunny skies. I rushed out to the Giro Ride on Saturday dressed for temperatures of around 49F but knowing full well it would be above 55 by the time I got home.

Frank and Kenny

As I turned the corner at Canal and Harrison I met right up with about half of the Palmer guys, including Frank Moak and Kenny Bellau, both of whom are rare sightings at the Giro start. It was a little windy, probably 10-12 mph out of the northwest, so speeds heading out to Venetian Isles were slower and more choppy than usual. We were a couple of miles from the turnaround when some of the guys who had been pushing through the wind at the front rather suddenly eased up and started dropping back. The entire group then kind of splintered as if nobody knew what to do without the power guys on the front.  It was almost comical. The ride back offered a few sections of good tailwind, so we had some nice long stretches where we were going 28-30 consistently. I am just starting to feel like I am at least approaching the riding fitness I should have had about a month ago, so I guess that's progress of a sort, although I'm still a long way from being able to spend more than twenty seconds on the front of the group when its going fast.

Saturday afternoon I dragged out the extension ladder, opened an old can of primer, and slathered some of it onto the window frame at the back of the house. Nothing like standing on a ladder for a couple of hours to do a number on tired legs! I'm not really sure when I am going to find time to paint all of that old peeling woodwork, especially considering that we're talking about six 8-pane windows, all in dire need of paint, especially for the glazing which takes forever.

Anyway, on Sunday the Tulane group was planning an outing to Independence for a 60+ mile training ride, so I decided to do that rather than another Giro Ride. I'd ridden some of those roads in various races, century rides, training rides, etc., but wasn't familiar enough with them to really know where the hell we were going most of the time.  Since it was a very mixed group, the pace was kind of all over the place depending on whether you wanted to stay with the front group or chill with the rear group. Dustin had mapped out a route with about a hundred turns, so none of the stretches was more than a few miles long before everyone stopped or eased up to regroup. The weather started out in the mid-50s and ended in the mid-70s. As usual, I dressed for the first hour and then just started unzipping layers the rest of the day, while others started out in basically summer kits and just suffered through the chill for the first 45 minutes or so. To each his own. It was a nice ride on some good roads. Nothing particularly hilly or steep and lots of low rolling terrain with a few kind of long gradual climbs. This was all followed by bar-b-cue for lunch.

After I got home I met up with local rider Bill Brundige who was donating his old SyCip bike to the team. They're starting to acquire a nice little stable of loaner team bikes with four full road bikes available right now, plus one track bike, a few track frames that need to be built up, and a cyclocross frame that needs to be built up. There are also a couple more very bare road frames that could be built up as well.

Anyway, the start of the road season around here will be a criterium up in Monroe next weekend, then the Tulane race that still has a lot of loose ends to tie up, followed Rouge-Roubaix the second week in March. I'll be officiating the Tulane race and also Rouge-Roubaix, and will likely make the trip up to Arkansas for a collegiate race in-between, so I'm definitely getting a little nervous about missing a lot of weekend mileage over the next month.

Disarray

For at least the last month, probably more, my training has been about as unstable as the weather. Every time I think I'm getting back to some semblance of stability a monkey wrench gets thrown into the works and everything grinds to a crawl for a few days. Earlier in the week it was super cold and windy, which made riding fairly uncomfortable. Right now its something like 74F, but tomorrow morning it will be 44. Then you throw into the mix Mardi Gras and stuff and things go from bad to worse. It's frustrating, especially when you've been around the block as many times as I and you tend to start gaining weight about ten minutes after you get off the bike.

Take this week, for example.  On Monday I was off work and the weather was good and I treated myself to the luxury of going out to ride after sunrise and logged 30 miles, which is a lot for a Monday when I would usually be doing a short easy 20-miler. But of course while Tuesday was just Tuesday in most places, it was Fat Tuesday here, so I rode all of 13 miles at a pace too slow to qualify as training and undoubtedly not even enough to burn off the piece of King Cake I had at the Royal Run. The rest of the day involved maybe ten or twelve miles on the commuter and a lot of walking around which resulted in an achy back and hips and feet. Wednesday morning was so cold and windy that I slept in, which brings us to Thursday when I got the only real training ride, however marginal, so far this week. This morning I went out with the Tulane group for the coffee ride and promptly flatted after rolling through a patch of glass on Orleans Avenue.  The streets are pretty much covered with broken glass right now. Not wanting to hold up the ride, I told them to go ahead and I'd meet them on Lakeshore Drive after I'd fixed the flat.  So I roll over to the sidewalk, open my saddle bag, and realize that although I'd re-stocked it with tubes after the training camp flat-fest, I'd apparently forgotten to put any CO2 cartridges in there.  Crap.  So I texted Danielle who was with the group, and cautiously rode the rear flat, leaning heavily on the handlebars, another mile or so to Harrison Avenue where I knew they'd see me on the way back.

Anyway, although the coffee ride is always an easy Zone 2 type of affair, I didn't even get those 25 miles, settling instead for a mere 12. In the last two weeks I've missed four days of riding, which is a lot for me, and the riding I've done has been shorter and less intense than normal as well. The net result is that I feel like a sack of cement. Of course, I can try and make up for some of it this weekend by maybe riding a little harder or a little longer, but it doesn't really work that way. The training disarray of the past couple of weeks translates into a lower level of training capability which basically means that if I try to jump right back into the deep end with two back-to-back days of heavy training I'll probably end up doing more harm than good, requiring more recovery time afterward, thus repeating the cycle of inconsistency.

Back to the Routine

Mardi Gras week was pretty nice this year. For a change we had good weather.  Granted, it was a little chilly and a lot windy, but compared to a freezing cold cloudy windy day it was spectacular.

Thoth

Saturday afternoon around 3 pm we headed downtown to the Tulane Tidewater building. The Endymion parade didn't start until something like 4:30, and wouldn't arrive downtown until after dark, but the parking garage wouldn't be accessible once the streets were closed, and traffic would only get worse. Fortunately there was wine and those little mini-muffelettas, and king cake and chips and fried chicken and finger sandwiches and perhaps one or two other things I didn't actually eat while we were waiting. The nice thing about waiting for the parade from a 10th floor office overlooking Canal Street is that you can just glance out the window every now and then, and wait until you see the flashing lights and people on horses before going outside. The parade went pretty much as usual until just a couple of floats before the end. Then everything came to a halt for some reason. By then the crowd was already thinning out and the temperature was dropping, so after waiting for fifteen minutes or so we went back upstairs. Naturally the parade started moving right about that time, so Danielle ran back down to catch the last of it. Now the downside of watching the parade from the Tidewater building and parking in the garage is that you really can't leave until at least half an hour after everything is over and the some of the streets are opened up again. We timed it pretty well this year and didn't get stuck in much traffic at all, which meant we got home around 11 pm or so.

Sunday morning I went out to do another Giro Ride. The wind wasn't quite as bad as it had been the day before and the pace was particularly smooth and steady. I'd swapped out the worn cassette for the one from my race wheel, so the bike felt smooth as silk.  There's nothing like a fresh drivetrain to make an old bike feel like new. Later that day I went out again on the commuter to catch three parades on Magazine Street. The first two were fairly short. The third was Thoth, which is now up to thirty-something floats. The sun was in our faces all day and the temperature was well up into the upper 50s or even lower 60s, so I think I actually got a little sunburned. Anyway, by the time I got home from that I was ready for a break and didn't even consider going out again that evening for the Bacchus parade.

Rex King and Queen, 7am, Audubon Park

Monday morning, since I was off work Monday and Tuesday for Mardi Gras, I waited until the sun was up before heading out for a solo ride on the levee. I rode out to where the construction area starts and then as I was heading back I saw Taco on his way out.  A little while later I saw one of the police cars heading the same direction. Since the river has been high lately they had removed the fence and barricade where the construction area starts, so there are just a few signs there. It was so that they could do regular levee inspections during the high water. Since that part of the construction area has had the asphalt bike path back in place for months, lots of people just keep riding. I wondered if Taco would make it to Williams Blvd. before the police car. I turned back to do another lap of that section and soon saw Taco coming my way. The police had made him turn around. So we had a nice ride back up uptown and did a lap or two around Audubon Park before I headed back home.

Mardi Gras morning started out pretty cold, but I went out anyway to welcome the king and queen of Rex at the start of the annual Royal Run. As usual, it was difficult to get any good photos, but I did manage a couple. The king this year is a tennis player and was a lot more animated than some of the others have been, so it was kind of fun seeing him having such a good time that early in the morning. After the race started I went off to the levee and put in a few miles before heading home to get ready for the usual Mardi Gras pilgrimage to the French Quarter.

We left on the bikes at just the right time to make it across Napoleon Avenue just barely ahead of the Rex parade, riding down to around the Columns Hotel to meet Ginger and some of her friends. After Rex we unlocked the bikes (three U-locks, three cable locks) only to find that Candy's front tire was flat. I changed it and we started heading downtown only to have it go flat just a few blocks later. I put the slow-leak tube back in and pumped it up but she decided to head back home anyway.  As it turned out she didn't get too far and ended up walking most of the way. Meanwhile Danielle and I worked out way downtown after getting across St. Charles during a lull in the parade. Taking Prytania to Camp and then Poydras to Convention Center Blvd. and little-known Badine St. East, we worked our way through the parking lots, eventually locking up on the fence alongside the Jax Brewery.

We made a couple of circuits of Royal and Bourbon streets, taking photos and generally enjoying the atmosphere. There were a lot of people in costumes this year, and it was hard to decide what to photograph. It was kind of photo-op overload. The streets were kind of half in shade and half in bright sunlight, which made it a little tricky to take any really good photos, but I guess I had taken at least 200 by the end of the day because even after narrowing them down and deleting the bad ones and some duplicate ones I still had over 150. They're posted on Picasa. By 3:30 or 4:00 we were pretty much done and headed back via the Lafitte Greenway and Jeff. Davis.

So I woke up Wednesday morning feeling pretty stiff, All of the walking and standing and riding had really taken a toll on my back and hips. I didn't even get out of bed before deciding to skip the early morning WeMoRi. It was still windy and the temperature was in the upper 30s so I didn't really feel too bad about it. Tomorrow I'll try and get back into the training routine. How much longer until Spring?

The Days before Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras Commeth...

The American men of American Men Roofing arrived promptly at 7 am on Friday to tear off the 40+ year-old built-up asphalt roof over the back room. Considering the fact that doing so was the roofing equivalent to opening Pandora's Box, I skipped my Friday ride so I could be around to see of any of them fell through into the kitchen. Amazingly, the old 2x4s serving as rafters held together despite the to very large Americans ripping through the multiple strata of tar and gravel up there. They went about their work with the disinterested efficiency of characteristic of guys who have been there and done that many times before. By 2 pm nobody had fallen through the ceiling, they'd flamed down the new roof, cleaned up the yard, collected the money, and rushed off to someone's daughter's school soccer game.  I briefly considered going out for a ride, but I'd been cold all morning sitting at my computer "working from home" and in spite of the sunny sky, the temperature was still in the low 50s.  Somehow I just couldn't get my ass out the door. As I'd discover the next morning, I should have.

Things are ramping up around here in anticipation of Mardi Gras.  There are parades every night, and most of the day this weekend. Rented mobile homes are parked out front of the frat houses on Broadway and the crowd at The Boot is overflowing into the street. People have been camped out on the neutral ground along tonight's Endymion parade route since yesterday. We'll be heading downtown to Tulane's Tidewater building in a couple of hours where we'll be trapped until the parade, which starts at 4:15.  The last float probably won't pass us down on Canal Street until late tonight.

So this morning the thermometer was reading 41F, although I think it was more like 39 in some spots, when I headed out to meet the Giro at Starbucks. It was full tights and winter jacket weather by my standards. It was also a New Chain ride, since I'd replaced the chain and chainrings Thursday evening before rushing off to catch the Muses parade down on St. Charles Avenue. When I stood up to cross S. Claiborne Ave. I got the not unexpected bad news. At least three of my most-used cassette cogs were toast and the nice new shiny Campagnolo Record chain was skipping over the teeth pretty badly. My bad.  I had set up a warning on Strava or Garmin Connect to tell me when the old chain reached 3,000 miles but had put off getting a new one for another 1,500 or so. Basically, I had a choice of the 17 or 12 cogs.  For some reason, which I would discover later, the bike wouldn't shift to the 11.

So the ride started out fairly calmly.  There were a few people missing, of course, thanks to the prior night's parades or today's plans or just the cold weather.  In fact, I was halfway through my Americano by the time anybody else showed up at Starbucks.  With my limited gear selection as a plausible excuse, I was quite content today to hang around the back of the paceline, occasionally letting bigger guys move ahead of me when they pleaded for the better draft. We had an increasing wind at our faces most of the way out to the turnaround, which kept the speeds on the low side and made it easy to sit in. This morning's visiting rider was Eric who was on a TT bike but seemed quite capable and fit in nicely, mostly near the front. Yeah, I should have taken some photos, but it was cold and it's a pain with my gloves on.

Once we started back I was expecting a super-fast drag race down Chef Highway, but for some reason that didn't really happen until we were a couple of miles from the Goodyear sprint sign.  I just plopped it into the 12 and slow-pedaled in the ample draft of the group, which started to disintegrate once we'd been going 30+ mph for a couple of minutes.

It was a nice, albeit uneventful, Giro Ride and  riding along Lakeshore Drive I was already thinking about that legit French almond King Cake from Maple Street Patisserie waiting for me at home when my dreams were suddenly interrupted by a god-awful sound coming from Jim's bike, just to my right. The rest of the group continued on as Jim ground to a stop, so I turned back to see what the problem was, thinking he'd pinch-flatted on the potholes near Franklin Avenue and bottomed-out his carbon wheel.  As it turned out, that wasn't the problem at all.  Instead, he'd put a rusty old 10-penny nail right through his tire and Mr. Tuffy. I extracted it with my gloved hand, with some effort, and luckily the hole wasn't so big as to require a boot.

On the way home the police were already diverting traffic, including me, on Marconi where the Endymion floats line up, even though none were there yet. so I had to detour over to Canal. It wasn't a problem, but really, why not let the bicycles ride through? Along Canal the neutral ground was already lined with people who had been camping out there to claim their spots since at least yesterday, many with neatly delineated "property lines" marked with survey tape on the ground. Tomorrow I'll do another Giro Ride and maybe make it over to Magazine Street for Thoth.  We'll see.  It's looking like it will be a dry but cold Mardi Gras this year. Better than the cold and wet one we had last time.

Long Parades and Strong North Winds

The Bianchi is still kind of in pieces right now since I haven't found the time to pull the cranks off to check the bottom bracket and reassemble everything with the new chain and chainrings. The derailleur jockey wheels were a real mess, and since I was out of mineral spirits that I use for cleaning that sort of thing, I had decided to wait until I could pick some up. After work yesterday I took care of that and also stopped by the bike shop to get a CO2 inflater since I apparently lost mine somewhere between my last flat in Natchez and Monday night. A little while later I was back on the commuter bike to ride out to the Columns on St. Charles Avenue with Danielle to watch the Druids and Nyx parades. I had heard that Mignon was in Druids with the Amelia EarHawts Cabin Krewe, and one of Danielle's professors was in Nyx.

It was comfortable riding out there around 7 pm, but I'd worn my winter riding jacket because I knew it would be getting colder as the night wore on, and indeed it did wear on. Druids went pretty smoothly, getting to where we were in front of the Columns Hotel around 7:30 I guess. The crowds were just the right size last night - not too many people, so easy to move around.  Amazingly, all of the ladders were neatly lined up about six feet from the curb, which is probably the first time I've seen that.  That allowed enough room for people to stand in front of them without getting squashed up against the ladders every time a big band came through. We found Mignon easily when the EarHawts marched or danced or strutted by.

I was trying out a new used camera I'd gotten just hours earlier via ebay.  It is the identical model to the Nikon AW110 I've been using.  My old one's memory card slot broke a while back so it usually couldn't read, or even find, the card, dramatically limiting the number of photos I could take since the internal memory is relatively small.  Otherwise I really like the camera because it's waterproof and presumably shockproof, which it just the thing for a camera that spends most of its time in jersey pockets. Unfortunately I hadn't had a chance to adjust all of the settings the way I like, and apparently the lens was a little dirty, so some of the photos didn't turn out as nicely as I'd have liked. On the plus side, at least I didn't have to learn how to operate it or set it up.

The Nyx parade followed immediately behind Druids, but there was a long delay at one point when one of the big double floats miscalculated the turn onto St. Charles and apparently had to back up and try again. To make matters worse, Nyx now has, I think, forty floats, which is really a bit much for a weekday night parade. This krewe tried to be very inclusive and indeed seems to have both of the locally predominant skin colors equally represented, but the floats and costumes are generally uninspiring. It's basically like a shortened truck parade all dressed up like a regular parade. Anyway, it was fun, but by the time they were up to float #30 I was starting to look at my watch and then down the street to see how many more floats there were. We nonetheless stayed to the end, which was around 11 pm, I think, before riding back home.

Low Mileage

After last week's pretty good riding opportunities, this week is already looking really bad. When I woke up on Monday and looked out the window I could barely see the other side of the street because of the dense fog. Still groggy from sleep I made the unwise decision to skip riding. If I'd thought about it for a bit I would have realized I was going to need all the saddle time I could muster this week. An early meeting on Tuesday would require me to cut that ride short, and then rain was predicted for Wednesday morning. To make matters worse, this is the week leading up to Mardi Gras, so there could be some evening excursions to parades that sometimes have undesirable repercussions the next morning.

Around 3 or 4 am this morning I could hear thunder and rain.  The forecast for 6 am had something like a 90% chance of rain with strong winds, so I wasn't surprised. The night before I'd switched the old Pennine out of Cyclocross mode back into Rain Bike mode, changing out the antique long-cage derailleur for an equally antique short-cage one, installing the classic old steel fenders, swapping out the 'cross wheels (well, "wheel" since I destroyed one at the last race), and adjusting the brake shoes to account for the old-style 27" rims. If it wasn't actually raining in the morning I'd be all set to at least get in a few miles.  Well, it was actually raining in the morning so I bailed. A couple of hours later the front had moved through and now it's windy but with almost clear skies and a temperature in the 60s .... and of course I'm at work in front of a computer. I did think to throw the Garmin and some shorts in my bag on the off chance that I actually get up the motivation, and find the time, to get on one of the WattBikes at some point today. Hope springs eternal.

With over 34,000 miles plus whatever Matt put on it before
I bought it from him, I guess the big ring isn't looking all
 that bad, but it's still definitely time for replacement.

So since I didn't ride this morning I went downstairs and got a small start on some work I need to do on the Bianchi. On the top of that list is installing a new chain and new chainrings. The old chain is showing about 4,600 miles on it right now, so I guess there's a good chance I'll be in for a new cassette by the time I'm done. At least I got the really messy stuff done - removing the chain and pulling off the chainrings and derailleur jockey wheels, which by the way were pretty cruddy after all the riding I've been doing on wet streets lately. I'm going to pull the crankset off and at least have a peek at the bottom bracket bearings to make sure they aren't dried out or rusting, but it spins OK at the moment so I don't think there's any significant damage there. I've been hearing a little clunk once per crank revolution for the last week or so, so I'll probably clean things up and get a little green LocTite between the shell and the bearings and otherwise grease anything else that might need it. If I get really energetic I may take a look at the headset bearings as well.  Next will be replacing cables, but that is going to involve also cleaning up the right shifter that has not been engaging the thumb shifter very well for months. I'll probably be on the Orbea for a couple of days if I don't want to pull an all-nighter, which I probably won't be able to do anyway because inevitably I'll be missing something I need to finish the job and will have to make a trip to the shop.

TUCA Camp Weekend

As always happens before a road trip, all sorts of complications at work and home started popping up by Thursday, and even by Friday morning I didn't know for sure when I'd be able to leave town. The roofer called in the morning and scheduled a 3 pm meeting to look at the leaking roof, so once that was locked in, I was pretty much committed to leave work by 2:30. By "leave work" I mean literally leaving a lot of work undone. Ergo, this week is going to be rough. Anyway, the roof is going to be upwards of $2,300.

It wasn't until around 4 pm that we started fighting our way out of New Orleans, but once we got past the city and onto I-55 things smoothed out, so we made it up to the cabins at Natchez State Park right in time for dinner, which had just been put together by the riders who'd gone up earlier in the day. This year it was a combined Tulane and LSU camp, so we had I think 14 or 15 riders on hand. Jamie had come in from Jackson, to which she recently relocated, to join us, which was nice since I got to have my own bed in a different cabin, which would prove to be invaluable Saturday night. The most amazing thing about the whole weekend, however, was the weather. Temperatures ranged from the upper 50s to mid-70s, with a clear sky on Saturday and partly cloudy sky on Sunday. Other than the 15 mph south wind, it was nearly perfect for riding.

So Saturday's ride actually worked out pretty nicely. Naturally, I went out over-dressed since it was still January and how can you not be wearing at least knee-warmers in January. I ended up with a lot of stuff crammed into my pockets.

It's always a challenge when there is such a wide range of abilities. We had a 60+ mile route mapped out, which included a mile or so of gravel, divided into basically two loops that met in the middle.  About halfway through the first loop we turned onto Church Road, which was that nasty chip-seal.  The group split right away, with plans to re-group at the end of the road. I guess the front of the group got there well over five minutes ahead of the end of the group, so we decided to route some riders a slightly shorter way to Natchez, while the others took the turn-off onto the gravel road and added a few miles.  Amazingly it worked out perfectly with the two groups meeting up at the entrance to the Natchez Trace within a few minutes of each other. A subsequent attempt to practice paceline riding was like trying to teach cats to team time trial, but anyway we arrived back at the cabins more or less together. Later that afternoon we went out on the grass and practiced some of the usual bike-handling skills and sprinting.

Saturday evening started out with dinner (more pasta of course), and then they started playing one of those group card games. That went on late into the night, although after a couple of glasses of wine I headed back to the quiet cabin.  I'd had a flat tire on the Saturday ride, and when I got back to the cabin I found it was nearly flat again, so I swapped out the tube with the other one I'd brought, checking the inside of the tire, but finding nothing. Well, that was the start of a lot of tire changing.

Sunday morning I didn't get very far before the tire went flat again.  I again ran my finger inside of the tire, pulled out a couple of very small bits of rock or glass that didn't seem significant, and put the slow-leak tube I'd taken out the night before in there. We rode into Natchez for coffee, after which one group headed straight back to the cabins while the other group took off on a longer loop to the southeast. Well, of course the tire went soft yet again. I nursed it along for a few more miles but finally had to stop and borrow a tube from Quentin.  The pace on this loop had been relatively brisk since it was just the faster riders, and so I was spending a fair amount of time hanging out at the back of the paceline thanks to the combination of low tire pressure and low leg power. It was fine, though. Eventually we turned onto State Park Road, which was full of rough pavement, holes, and fresh road repairs that consisted of asphalt with loose crushed rocks on top. As we turned into the park, about three miles from the cabin, I felt the tire going soft again. I thought I'd be able to make it all the way back, but after everyone passed me it just went completely flat and after squirming down a couple of downhills I called Danielle to come pick me up. Somewhere along the way I lost my CO2 inflater.