Which Way?

Nice TR3 scenery on the way to work.

I could hear the trees blowing in the wind outside as I pulled on both arm and leg-warmers at 5:30 this morning. Another cold front had come through, dropping temperatures just a bit into the upper 50s, and I knew before opening the door it would be a long ride out to the lakefront. I've been on the old Orbea while waiting for a replacement derailleur hanger for the Bianchi. I'd straightened the hanger a couple of weeks ago after it was slightly bent when someone knocked it over at Starbucks prior to a Giro Ride, but then last weekend it spend the whole time in the panel van crammed up against all of the race equipment. It wouldn't normally have been a problem, but there had been this one situation where I'd had to slam on the brakes to keep some clueless person from hitting us. Everything slid forward, including a stack of about 25 traffic cones that crammed into the derailleur.  When I took the bike out of the van Sunday afternoon I could see that the hanger was bent again.  One thing about aluminum derailleur hangers - you don't usually get a second chance.  I put the derailleur alignment tool on it and it was pretty dramatically bent, so I knew I had about a 50% chance it wouldn't break when I tried to straighten it.  Well, I lost that coin-toss.  Anyway, I digress.

So I got out to the lakefront, rode down to the Bayou St. John bridge, turned around and was half-way back when Woody, Jaden and Rob came by.  They weren't really killing it, going about 25 mph, so I jumped onto the tail end as my heart rate went from 98 bpm to 140 in about twenty seconds. We sped up a bit on Marconi, and then when we got to Robert E. Lee, Rob went straight instead of turning (we never found out if he was unfamiliar with the new route or just was heading home), almost taking Jaden and me down. I was back on Woody's wheel right away, but Jaden I think had to make a U-turn on Marconi and then chase back to us, so we eased up to wait for him. It wasn't until we were on Wisner that we were back together. By then I was already skipping pulls now and then to keep from dropping the pace in the cross/tail wind that pushed us up to the 28-29 mph range. We made the circuit around the park and then at Robert E. Lee Jaden sat up, leaving just Woody and me to contend with the 18-20 mph headwind going east on Lakeshore Drive. Woody was doing 90% of the work while I was taking very brief and increasingly infrequent pulls to give him a little break. I think there was a group chasing us not too far behind, but I never actually looked back since all my concentration was focused on staying as close to Woody's wheel as possible. Once we made the loop at Seabrook and picked up the tailwind I never saw the front again.  Woody just motored the five miles back to West End at an average speed of 28 mph with a little kick at the end up to 33.6.

So it looks like I'll be driving up to Fayetteville on Friday with a couple of the Tulane riders for the University of Arkansas race. They're doing a non-collegiate Cat. 1-3 race, so I'll do the TT and RR on Saturday with the absolute certainty of being dropped like a rock on the 10% climb in the road race. Hopefully I will get the replacement derailleur hanger today, so the Bianchi should be back in action. I wonder if I should put my special "Six Gap" 12-27 cassette on there for this one or just make do with the 25.  It should be a good workout either way.