Rider Down

Brian Guerrero

The weekend before my recent unfortunate incident with the asphalt one of our area riders, Brian Guerrero, was on a group ride up in Alabama when there was a crash and he was hit by a passing vehicle. When I crashed last week I was lucky enough to walk away with minor injuries, and although VJ is still on injured reserve with reportedly cracked vertebrae, he will no doubt be back on the bike soon. Brian was not so lucky. While I don't know all the details, I do know that his injuries were very severe and included major head trauma. Eric Heyl of Eastbank Cyclery immediately set up a Gofundme site, knowing that even with the best possible outcome there would be major costs for his family. That was quickly followed up by the Herring Gas Cycling Foundation, which had been set up a couple of years ago for just such a purpose, donating its funds as well. I learned this morning that he passed away. Brian was a well-liked member of the Green Team Bayou Country Cyclists club and was a regular on group rides and mountain bike races. Although I didn't know Brian very well, I'm sure I rode with him on a number of occasions. This morning on the news they were showing the video of a hit-and-run on Magazine Street involving a cyclist who luckily escaped with fairly minor injuries. This was someone who was just riding to work, in the bike lane, when she was hit from behind by a car.

It seems I see something like this almost on a daily basis nowadays.  Perhaps it's because there are just that many more cyclists on the roads, or because the news of these incidents travels so far and wide thanks to the internet. Whatever the reason, whenever we go out for a ride now we always have, somewhere in the back of our minds, the knowledge that we just might not make it back home.  I am always reminded at such times of a conversation I had as a child with my father. After learning to fly in the Army right around the end of WWII, he maintained his pilot's license and would sometimes take us out to Lakefront Airport for little trips over the lake, out over the Chandelier Islands, to Baton Rouge, or any number of little airstrips scattered around Louisiana and Mississippi. I remember asking him why he flew airplanes if they were so dangerous (no doubt that idea came from my mother who was never very fond of flying).  He just looked over at me and said, "Sometimes the enjoyment you get out of something is worth the risk."

No doubt Brian was well aware of the risk. That particular crash might have normally resulted in little more than scraped skin and bruises like the ones I received a week ago, had there not been a vehicle going by at just the wrong time. I've been involved in lots of crashes in group rides and races out on the road, and it's been just a matter of luck that a car or truck hasn't been involved in them. Last Sunday, for example, I was careening down unfamiliar roads in Georgia at speeds in the 50 mph range, held to the pavement by tiny patches of rubber pulling me around sweeping downhill curves on open roads. I was focused on the issues on hand, choosing lines through the turns, regulating speed, anticipating the next braking point, dealing with other riders and the occasional car. That was fun and satisfying, and required sufficient concentration that there was no room left for fearing the possible but unlikely things that could always go terribly wrong. I'm not going to stop riding on the road because even though the odds may have shifted a little bit in recent years, I still think they're largely in my favor, and as my dad would have said, "worth the risk."

Six Gap Nine

Early on Saturday I headed up to Dahlonega, Ga. with six Tulane riders and Dustin for the annual Six Gap Century. I was still feeling pretty beat-up from the crash on Tuesday with bandages all over my right elbow and knee, that long scrape on my back, a sore neck, and various bruises in seemingly random places. On the plus side, the weather was looking like it would be warm and sunny. Being right at the end of September, this ride has offered up all sorts of weather conditions over the nine years I've been doing it. This year was the warmest yet, but under the circumstances I wasn't complaining.

The 9-hour drive went pretty smoothly except for the gas shortage in Georgia that caused us to try a second gas station. With premium gas apparently non-existent, the Volvo would have to make do with a tank of regular. This year we were right on schedule and despite getting stuck in traffic going through Atlanta arrived at packet pick-up at around 5:30. They had moved up the criteriums by at least an hour, so when we arrived the Cat. 1/2/3 race was already in progress. I stopped for a minute to chat with Debbie Milne who was launching her "Supra" line of nutritional food bars, which were pretty good. She had just finished winning the Women's race and would win the Women's KOM the next day. We headed over to Pueblo's for dinner and then made the drive over to Gainesville where the hotel was. In order to get to the parking lot in time the next morning we planned on getting up at 5 am, which I knew was not going to fool my internal clock that was still on Central time. To make matters worse, I didn't get a lot of sleep because of some sort of nasal congestion.  I must be allergic to something that was in the air around there.

Pueblo's in Dahlonega

Anyway, everyone was remarkably, surprisingly, on time and so we had time to stop at the local Starbucks before heading off to find a parking space at the school.  That worked out quite well too, and we easily got a couple of parking spots in the middle of the huge parking lot. There were four of us in the Volvo and another four in a rented minivan for this trip. Ben Bradley had been kind of training for this ride since medical school responsibilities had been interfering with his racing this year, so he was anxious to get down to the starting line early.  I stationed myself just behind the "6-hour" line with Quentin, Cameron, Ben S., and Jerry, and where I also found Adrian and Steve J.

Looking pretty good post-ride

The start was the usual minor chaos, but somehow most of us stayed pretty close together for the first ten or fifteen miles. Ben, Dustin and Sven were up ahead, and I never really saw them once we started. I was happy to find that my left hand wasn't bothering me as much as I'd feared. The right knee was a little uncomfortable, and I knew my neck would eventually be an issue, but in general I felt pretty good. Even so, given the prior week's events, my plan was basically to cause myself as little additional pain as possible. That meant climbing at a relatively easy, steady pace without necessarily trying to keep up with everyone else. I was probably climbing about 1-2 mph slower than normal, which was unfortunate since normal for me is still pretty slow. However, the plan was indeed keeping me largely within my comfort zone, which for me seemed to be around 85-88% of maximum heart rate or in the  vicinity of 160-162 bpm. There were a couple of brief jumps into the 90% range, but they were few and far between. This strategy, while certainly not conducive to impressive climbing speed or finishing time, was successful in keeping me more or less out of the red for the duration. 

Age and ride times - how sad!

This year there was fresh new asphalt on the Hogpen descent, which was a vast improvement over prior years, and although I got stuck behind a couple of cars on the downhills, they were fun as usual. Strava showed a max speed of 55.5 mph, but mostly I was looking at speeds more in the area of 45 mph. The climbs of course were a different matter altogether. For those I spend a huge amount of time in the 4-7 mph range, quite a bit slower than I'd have liked, but I really wasn't in the mood to push it much harder than that on the steep sections. At one point I shifted to the small ring and something kind of jammed up in the drive train and I stopped to see what had happened.  I never figured it out, though.  I think perhaps the chain had gotten jammed up against the anti-chain drop thing or something.  I was afraid that something had either broken or was about to break, since I was still a little paranoid about the bike because of the crash earlier in the week. Anyway, after checking it all out for a minute or two, I got going again without incident.

Damn, statistically significant (F-test p-value: 0.0118)!

The day started out in the mid-60s and ended in the low 90s, so toward the end it was starting to feel kind of hot.  After the last long descent, I finally looked at my ride time and realized how far behind I was actually running. With ten miles to go I didn't need to do much math to know there was no way I'd be finishing near the six hour mark, which I generally consider as my goal.  Of course, this year I'd intentionally thrown that goal out the window from the start, so it wasn't a surprise. Thanks to day's strategy, my legs were actually feeling remarkably good, so the last ten miles that are usually pretty painful were a lot more enjoyable this year.  This is the section of the ride where I'm always passing a ton of riders who did the shorter 5-gap ride and are, in some cases, moving really slowly.  Anyway, I finished up with an official time of 6:13:22, which I guess was OK under the circumstances.  Ben B. just killed the course and finished with the 5th fastest time at 5:21:17 which was pretty impressive. On the long ride back home I started wondering just how many times I'd ridden Six Gap, and how my results have changed, so I went back through the old blog and found a pretty significant correlation between age and finishing time. Sad but true.

Timing the Crash to Perfection

VJ hit pretty hard

Tuesday started out as usual. I met up with the regulars, a couple of whom were MIA, at 5:45 am and we rolled out to the lakefront.  This time of year is always seems to get noticeably darker from one morning to the next.  The night before I had carefully installed some nice fresh handlebar tape with a little more cushioning than what I'd been using for the past few months. I was looking forward to Six Gap next weekend and figured it might make those six hours on the bike a little more enjoyable. Yeah, I know it was just psychological, but sometimes that's all I've got to work with.

The groups all came together along Lakeshore Drive as we approached the Bayou St. John bridge, and soon we were a long line of blinky lights as the pace started to pick up a bit. As it has been for the past year or two or three the right lane was barricaded off at the London Avenue Canal to create a safe lane for the trucks entering and leaving the pumping station construction site. The pace eased up as everyone moved over to the left lane over the canal. I was somewhere around the middle, pedaling serenely along, escheloned a bit to the right against the moderate north wind, planning on staying in the draft until I got really warmed up.

The block of concrete

After the bridge the front of the group swung over to the right to get out of the left lane, I think maybe in-between some of the traffic cones marking the cordoned off truck lane to the right, and as usual the rest of the group followed. I remember thinking we were getting back into the right lane a little earlier than usual, but we were going only 20-22 mph and it didn't seem like a problem. The next thing I knew it felt like I'd hit a brick wall and was sliding along the concrete with VJ, who had been behind me.

As the friction between my skin and the road ground me to a halt, I sat up and thought, "What the hell just happened?" I took a moment to assess the damage.  I'd hit pretty hard and bumped my head just a bit, but nothing seemed to be broken.  Just to the left of me was VJ, was still flat on the ground. I looked back and immediately saw the culprit. A big rectangular block of concrete was lying in the middle of the right lane. It looked like a section of rectangular concrete curb about the size of two large bricks. I'd never even seen it. I think that the riders toward the front  had come back into the right lane beyond the chunk of concrete and hadn't even seen it so nobody called it out, but with the crosswind coming from the left, the rest of the paceline, along with myself, must have been moving into that lane just a bit earlier, with each rider going a tad farther to the right than the rider ahead of him. Obviously my timing had been perfect and I'd just nailed the thing without even seeing it, and then VJ had crashed into me as I was going down, or more likely, over. I guess I must have done a solid block with my left hand before flipping over onto my back. VJ had taken the brunt of it on his head, however, and was a little concussed. We dragged ourselves and bikes to the curb as one of the contractor's pickup trucks that had been on it's way to the worksite stopped behind us.

Tire Track or Road Rash?

VJ finally recovered enough to sit on the curb, but then had a very brief seizure or just fainted, at which point we called 911. It could have been worse. I lost a lot of skin from my right knee, left shin (probably from the bike), and right elbow, along with a few other random minor cuts that included my lower lip and left  hand. I must have really jammed my left hand because the heel of my hand and wrist are still pretty painful when I put weight on them. Luckily, none of the road rash was very deep. Meg was on the ride and she met VJ at University Medical Center's ER where he got some X-rays and perhaps a CAT scan. From what I heard he may have cracked something in his lumbar region, but seemed to be in pretty good spirits a couple of hours later.

That afternoon I had to get checked out in one of Tulane's new 12-passenger vans so I could drive them for the cycling club when needed. I was surprised and disappointed to find that they not only expect people to drive no faster than 60 mph on the interstate, but have also installed GPS tracking so they can enforce that.  I consider driving 60 mph on rural interstate to be extremely more dangerous than driving at the speed limit, which is 70 in most places, but 75 in some areas of Louisiana and Texas. Also, of course, that means over an hour more time on the road for most of the team's road trips, meaning even later arrival times. It seems that the long-awaited passenger vans for Club Sports are not going to be very useful.

Broken 3T Handlebar

Last night I pulled the fork out of the Bianchi to make sure the steerer looked OK, which it did. The crash broke my handlebar, so I was planning on using the road handlebar currently on my track bike until I can get a new one. Then I discovered that the shifter clamp bolt on the right lever was stripped and seized.  I ended up having to drill it out.  Luckily, I have an old Campi shifter from which I can salvage a replacement bolt (although it won't be Ti or Al or whatever the one on the Super Record one was).  The shifters are about at the end of their useful lives, and the new versions aren't very compatible with the older derailleurs, so sooner than later I'll be in for new shifters and derailleurs that I can't really afford.

This morning I went out on the Orbea to assess the damage.  I was happy to find that the legs felt fine and the scraped up knee and elbow didn't seem to be problems at all.  The left  hand, however, was pretty painful over the bumps. At present my plan is to take it easy riding the rest of the week in order to give the hand as much time to heal up as possible. It's not like I'll get in better shape for climbing Hogpen Gap between now and Sunday anyway. I know one thing for sure, though.  While I had earlier been contemplating putting some serious effort into the Six Gap ride this year, plans have changed! I'll just have to play it by ear and see how I feel by Sunday, but I'm thinking a sub-6-hour time is going to be pretty much out of the question.  I'm also thinking of bringing a bottle of Advil with me.

September Lull

Tulane Cycling Friday ride

While I kind of hated to miss last weekend's Pensacola Stage Race yet again, I guess I had some semi-valid reasons. Since we didn't get back from Destin until Tuesday, I would have had to basically turn right back around and drive back to Florida, likely leaving the rest of the family without a car for the weekend unless I found a ride. Then of course there was the cost issue. It's not that the $70 (plus service fee, plus the $10 rental of a chip, plus gas, plus two hotel nights, was particularly unusual. It was more that we'd just spent a long weekend in vacation mode and there were other expenses looming on the horizon this month, one of which being the annual Six Gap (it's not a race) Century.

So on Friday I did the usual Coffee Ride with some of the Tulane riders and set my sights on the Giro Ride for Saturday.  Friday afternoon was a little complicated since we, as in the Tulane team represented in this case by me, were selling the big trailer that the club got a couple of years ago and never, not even once, used. Will, from 4D Fitness, was buying it, and met me to go take care of the title transfer.  Thankfully we had gotten hold of the title without too much trouble, so all of that went pretty smoothly. Then we went back to University Square where the trailer had been parked for over a year.

Right off the bat we discovered that we couldn't raise the trailer nose high enough to latch it onto the hitch on Will's big truck.  Fortunately, he found a couple of chunks of concrete lying around and MacGyvered it using a car jack. Then we discovered that the side door was locked.  I had no recollection of where the keys might be, however, and then just to make things more difficult the power at my office was out.  So using a tiny little LED flashlight in my dark office I hunted unsuccessfully for keys.  A couple of days later I researched old emails from 2012 and discovered that apparently I'd never actually had those keys, which at least explained why I couldn't find them. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to know where they are either. My guess is we'll have to replace the whole door latch.

The guy from Switzerland, appropriately named Sven,
on the Independence ride.

Soooo anyway, the Saturday Giro was pretty normal - maybe a little bit easier than usual since a few of the regular riders were in Pensacola.  Late that afternoon I decided that I really needed to do a ride that wasn't flat since Six Gap was coming up, so I went ahead and joined the small group that was planning on riding out of Independence, about an hour away. Theoretically this was a Tulane ride, but really it was a Dustin ride. The only actual Tulane people were an exchange student from Switzerland riding one of the team's loaner bikes and me. Three of us drove up there in my car, arriving quite a bit later than the planned 7 am roll-out, a fact about which I did not feel guilty in the least. I mean, really.  7 am when you know people are going to have to meet up and then drive at least an hour?  At least it was still relatively cool when we finally got on the road around 7:30.  The ride itself was pretty nice since there were only five of us and the pace was fairly controlled. They guy from Switzerland didn't have any trouble, and with only five people there weren't any of the big-group complications like having to wait for riders lagging behind or having to chase down riders who want to go faster. We ended up with 65 miles and an average speed of 19.2, so moderate distance and moderate speed with about 1,900 feet of easy climbing. All of that was followed by a visit to Pontchatoula on the way home for Mexican since the Bar-b-que place in Independence was closed. I felt pretty good for the ride and was glad I'd made the drive instead of doing another Giro Ride.

Monday morning there was some rain around.

Monday morning I decided to do an easy ride on the river levee to check out the progress on the bike path. Basically, I didn't see any.  The barricade at Moss Road had been torn down again, but just up the road from there I could see a big backhoe working along the batture. I took that as a good sign since cleaning up the batture should be one of the last things to do for the contractor, other than putting down the centerline stripe on the bike path, which still isn't there.

This morning it was a little breezy for the Tuesday ride. I rolled out the house an hour before sunrise to meet the group at Fontainbleau and it felt almost cool for a minute or two as we rode into a moderate east northeast wind. By the time everyone came together on Lakeshore Drive there were, I guess, 25 riders. Up at the front things must have started coming apart on the way back with the tailwind because right away I could see a couple of riders pretty far down the road. As has been happening lately, VJ, who I think had been up there with the lead group maybe 20 seconds ahead, kept pushing the pace a bit after West End, and considering that the group had gotten pretty strung out toward the end of the Lakeshore Drive stretch it wasn't until we were past Causeway that things kind of came back together, except maybe they didn't because next thing I knew Matt and Brian were off the front again, which precipitated a half-hearted chase, which precipitated a split in the group that, of course, I was behind.  After contemplating the odds for a moment I finally went around and made a big effort to bridge, getting within about five seconds as I maxed out around 32 mph with Max on my wheel. I motioned him to go, and he was able to close that last little bit as I eased up and waited for the rest of what was left of the group. A little while later Max came back.

After the turnaround I looked up and realized that most of the group had turned around early and was already pretty far up the road. We were riding into a headwind and holding anything over 23 mph was a bit of a struggle, so a few of us who had been abandoned got together and plodded away, very gradually closing the gap an inch at a time. It wasn't until around the Suburban canal that we finally made contact again.

Destin

Destin Harbor. East pass and the Gulf of Mexico to the right. Town of Destin to the left.

Destin, Florida has been a popular vacation destination for New Orleanians for generations. I was so young when I first visited that I don't remember it, but suffice it to say that we probably arrived in something like a 1959 Pontiac when the interstate system was still a gleam in Eisenhower's eye. Back then it was indeed a "sleepy fishing village," on the outskirts of which were a couple of small motels and the Silver Beach cottages. The outskirts at the time were barely half a mile from the edge of town, which itself was basically a one mile stretch along US 98 overlooking the well-protected Destin harbor on one side and Choctawatchee Bay to the north. We would return there many times over the succeeding years, sometimes in the middle of summer, but more often around Easter vacation time. By the time I finished high school there were a couple more hotels, including a modern-looking Holiday Inn, but beyond that to the east were miles and miles of untouched sand dunes and pristine beaches with the finest, whitest sand you will ever find on planet earth. As a result, I have been terribly disappointed with virtually every other beach I've ever visited. After high school graduation a few friends and I drove to Destin towing my "ski boat" with I think a 40 hp outboard and spend three or four days water skiing in the deserted eastern end of the harbor. Soon thereafter the entire area was discovered by developers, originally from Dallas, and things started to change. A little later the Hilton operation bought a huge tract of land in the adjacent county to the east, co-opted the name of the city, and established the "Sandestin" resort.

There was rain.

Today most of the dunes around the city are long gone, replaced by high-rise condominiums and the shell road down by the harbor is basically a carnival boardwalk. Thus, my trips to Destin are always a little bittersweet. This trip, in fact, wasn't really to Destin itself but to the Tops'l resort just to the east of the Hilton. At nearly ten miles from Destin itself, it represents the eastern edge of "development."  Fortunately the old 4-mile Village remains mostly intact as a buffer and residential community nestled among the high dunes to the east, providing the only glympse of how things used to be closer to Destin before the bulldozers moved in.

Sand beaches do not get better than this.

Anyway, despite a less than encouraging weather forecast I clamped the old Orbea to the roof of the car and we headed east on Friday for a little vacation. My penance for this particular luxury would be missing the age-graded road championships in St. Francisville, so I was determined to get in a few miles while I was there, even if it meant riding in the rain. This is not really the greatest place to ride a bike.  Highway 98 is to be avoided at all costs, and Old 98 is narrow and full of vacationers and hotel and restaurant staff. Over the years I've worked out a reasonably safe approach to riding when I'm there.  The key thing, of course, is to hit the road early - somewhere in the 6:30 -7:00 am timeframe - before the tourists start looking for donuts and coffee. There's a mile or so along 98 in a narrow bike lane before crossing over to "old 98" which of course was highway 98 before the built the 4-lane "new 98" mainly to service the Hilton.

Beach people

New 98 is now a practically unbroken six or seven miles of chain restaurants and retail operations, including a big outlet mall. Fortunately a few of the restaurants aren't bad. When the created the New 98, they closed off a section of the old highway to create a little park, which was probably just an excuse to make it impossible to take the old more scenic highway instead of the new one. For cyclists that means you can take old 98 most of the way to Destin, but then must cross over new 98. For a few years, I had to ride a couple of miles on the new highway, but now the retail developments alongside the highway have their own little winding service road, complete with the required traffic circles, speed bumps, and faux-brick pedestrian crosswalks. On the plus side, it's not too bad of a ride and makes it easy to get into Destin proper. Once in Destin, I do a couple of out-and-back type laps along the bay side of town where, thankfully, things have not really changed all that much.  There are a number of modern homes along Indian Bayou Road, and a couple of real mansions on Bayou Road, but a lot of the older houses are the little cinder-block type houses that were always there and that remind me of the kinds of houses that military personnel retired into. Indeed, there are a lot of retired military in Destin thanks to its proximity to Eglin AFP and Hurlbert Field.

Looking west toward Destin

So bright and early Saturday morning I headed out for Destin, eventually logging around 50 miles. The rest of the day was rainy and I just hung around the very nice condo suite while the girls "went to the grocery" which ultimately took them about five hours since there were so many retail outlets to explore.  I was extremely thankful I'd decided not to go with them.  Sunday morning started out looking pretty nice, but I was only five or six miles out when the first little rain shower came through. Somewhere in Destin that turned into a pretty significant thunderstorm.  I was of course drenched and riding through semi-flooded streets, but the temperature was still warm and I had my rear blinky light, so I did pretty much the same ride I'd done the day before. The rest of that day was fairly rainy, of course, but not too bad. We went into Grayton Beach for dinner at the old restaurant there where the food was mediocre at best, the service inexperienced, and the prices painfully high. Oh well.

Danielle and Shannon

Finally on Monday the weather was a little better. I pulled on my still-wet shoes and did another repeat of the 50-mile ride I'd done the previous two days. The only notable riding incident was a rather embarrassing fall I took right in front of the condo when I was heading out one morning. As I clipped in with my right foot, my left foot slipped on the brightly painted concrete and I fell like a sack of rocks right on my lower back, still clipped into the pedal.  Unfortunately for me this happened right in front of a family that was loading up a car. They thought I'd killed myself, of course.  My only thought was to smile, say I was OK, and get the heck out of there as quickly as possible. My back still hurts. Anyway, the rest of Monday was fairly sunny and windy, so I spent much of it hiding under an umbrella on the beach.  It was a little too rough and full of seaweed to make swimming very appealing, and years and years of bad experience have taught me it's not worth getting sunburned on a three-day vacation.

So it was a pretty nice break over Labor Day weekend, and I was pretty good about avoiding the non-essential work emails. Naturally that means I'll be pretty swamped for the next few days while I attempt to catch up.

Missing Races

A bright red sky on a Friday morning. Good thing I wasn't going sailing.

Tomorrow I'm heading east, in the general direction of Hurricane Hermine for a little family vacation at the beach, which I assume will be festooned with red flags for a day or two. I'll be missing the LAMBRA age-graded road race in St. Francisville on Sunday.  I hate missing that race since it's a relatively short two-hour drive from home and is on a really nice course and it usually nicely organized by the local club. Of course I'll be bringing my bike to the beach, and am planning on slipping out early in the mornings to battle the wind and traffic. Hopefully I'll be able to get in some reasonable training rides. The hurricane should be well inland by the time we arrive, and most of the rain should be in the northeast quadrant anyway, so I'm not expecting much trouble getting out on the bike. The added benefit of riding early in the morning when at the beach is that I get to miss at least one overeating opportunity, otherwise known as breakfast.

Hermine became a hurricane about half an hour ago.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty routine - lots of group rides. There were a couple of pretty magnificent sunrises last week.  It's that time of year when sunrise starts to coincide with the time we are out on Lakeshore Drive. It's also the time of year when the stars are still out as I leave home in the morning. I always have trouble getting out of bed when it's still dark outside.

Last Wednesday I went out to meet the WeMoRi as usual. It was kind of windy that morning, even more so this morning, and I'd hit the road a few minutes early, so I met the group just east of the Bayou St. John bridge after circling around a few times.  They had been riding into a headwind on the way out, so I guess they were running a couple of minutes behind schedule. It felt like a pretty hard ride to me for some reason. Being near the back of the group makes it extra hard because things always string out a lot on a couple of the turns, which basically means it's a full-on sprint for half a kilometer in order to regain contact, and a draft.

WeMoRi Cool-down on the lakefront

On Tuesday we were hammering down Lakeshore Drive heading west shortly before Elysian Fields when one of the guys in front of me unexpectedly and suddenly slowed down. A couple of us had to make evasive maneuvers to avoid hitting him. I assumed he'd flatted.  Later that day Matt called to tell me that Keith had actually started to have a seizure and had to stop.  Fortunately, someone stopped with him. Apparently he hadn't had any such issues in years, so it was kind of a surprise, but from past experience he could feel it starting and was able to stop safely.

This afternoon is the annual Tulane Activities Expo, which is basically an opportunity for the team to sign up some new recruits. We did a little Facebook campaign, and for my $30 investment got a reach of 1,943 people with a targeted promotion. No telling if that will actually result in more team members, but I figured it was worth a try anyway.

A smallish Sunday Giro Ride group heads out from Starbucks

So next up for me will be the race weekend in Thibodaux with a team time trial followed by a criterium. That will be the last LAMBRA road event for the season, I think.  I'll probably skip the Pensacola stage race again this year, mainly because it's the next weekend after my trip to Florida and also because of the added expense coming on the heels of a family vacation. I'm still planning on doing Six Gap, and maybe some of our track championships, and there are a few other possibilities out there before the cyclocross races start up at the end of October. Meanwhile, we're all just keeping our fingers crossed that the next storm coming over from Africa doesn't turn into a hurricane event for us.  We don't need any of that.