Not Quite Yet

A very calm Thursday morning ride on the lakefront bike path

The mornings this week have been a little cooler - cooler enough for a base layer and occasionally a pair of arm-warmers. However, it has not quite yet been what you'd call cold. It's looking like we'll get a brief taste of "cold" pretty soon, though.  Although it's 77F down here at the moment, at 4 pm on Friday, the forecast for tomorrow morning is calling for 57, which wouldn't seem too bad except that it will be accompanied by winds in the 18-22 mph range. That should make the morning ride somewhat interesting. On Sunday there's a cyclocross race here in New Orleans at Audubon park, and for that we're looking at an early morning temperature of 46, which qualifies as "cold" in my book. Luckily the actual racing, in which I will not be participating, doesn't start until 10:00, by which time it should be substantially warmer.

So last Wednesday I made it over to Baton Rouge with a few of the Tulane riders for a little velodrome time. There was a nice group of at least fifteen when we finally arrived after crawling through rush hour traffic just to get out of New Orleans at 5 pm. A number of riders were entirely new to track, so we started out with some simple little paceline work. I found myself to be quite uneasy in that group and was leaving a pretty good gap between myself and the rider in front of me. My problem wrist was hurting a bit more than normal, probably because I was white-knuckling the bars a lot more than usual. They did a couple of short scratch races and a miss-and-out, neither of which I did.  Instead, I rode laps in-between the races. I really, really didn't want to be taking any chances of crashing again when my wrist was obviously still hurt. Immediately after the first sprint in the miss-and-out there was a crash near the back of the field that took two of the guys down. One walked away with a whole lot of road rash.  I guess the rider in back wasn't ready for the pace to ease up or perhaps one of them forgot he was on a fixed gear and tried to coast.

Teamwork (Ben's bottom bracket was creaking so much they pushed him for a while so as not to wake up the neighbors.)

The cyclocross race on Sunday is supposed to have a flyover that they will be building, or finishing building, on Saturday.  Since I'll be officiating I'm planning on going over there to check it out and make sure it isn't too sketchy.  I expect they'll do a reasonably good job with it, but wouldn't want any surprises in the morning.

Thursday morning's ride was remarkably smooth.  For some reason it seemed like nobody wanted to go too hard. Perhaps it was the time of year and the really great weather we had that morning. This morning we did the regular TU coffee ride.  It seems like we are hanging around the coffee shop longer and longer each time.  I didn't get home until almost 9 and had to rush to work.  Still better than watching the news, which frankly I have been avoiding as much as possible for the past two months. If someone would just email me when it's safe to go back to watching it without causing a dangerous elevation of blood pressure, I'd appreciate it.