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.