V2V - VII

Post-ride at Varsity Sports in New Orleans

The month-long string of dry days and nice riding weather was coming to an end. Indeed, as I write this on Monday afternoon it's still raining and the news is full of photos of flooded streets. So the weekend cool front was going to fall apart after the weekend, making Sunday a must-ride day. Looking at the various Facebook posts and Strava files, it seems like everyone had some big mileage on his or her plate. Wes was leading a small group on one of the semiannual Tour de Lac rides around Lake Pontchartrain, a distance of around 200 miles, Sunday morning. A number of local riders logged something in excess of 100 on Saturday. Alison C. put in 124, which admittedly is pretty normal for her. I felt a little guilty for doing only the Giro Ride on Saturday.

Sunday was the 7th annual Varsity to Varsity (V2V) ride from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. This is a collegiate ride started by LSU and subsequently joined by some of the Tulane riders. As a point-to-point ride of around 105 miles, it poses some logistical challenges.  For the LSU riders, they need a way to get home. For the Tulane riders, they need a way to get there for the 7:30 am start. That's where I come in. This year we got two minivans from the university's new shared motor pool (they're long-term rental from Enterprise) on Saturday afternoon, so at 5 am on Sunday morning I found myself walking from home to the university parking lot, just a few blocks away, in order to hop in the van and drive down to the cycling facility on Broadway Street to load up bikes and riders. As often seems to happen, the ten riders originally signed up for the ride had dwindled. A couple had backed out, a couple were already in Baton Rouge, and a couple had already gotten their bikes transported to Baton Rouge. As a result, my van had only three people and two bikes in it, including myself.  The other van had two people. Anyway, we arrived at 7 am in time to pick up some coffee and drop everyone off at Varsity Sports on Perkins. After a group photo, we Quentin and I headed back for New Orleans.  The plan was to pick up our own bikes, meet back at the university parking lot, return the minivans, and head upriver on the bike path and River Road until we met the group coming down from Baton Rouge. Once I got onto the interstate I kept looking in the mirror for Quentin, but wasn't seeing him.  How could he be going that slowly?  He'd been talking with someone as I pulled out but couldn't have been more than a few minutes behind me.  I was halfway back when he called to say that they had shut down the interstate right behind me because of an accident and he'd had to make a long detour.  I ended up waiting about twenty minutes for him at LaPlace since we needed to put gas in the vans anyway.  While I was there, Wes' Tour de Lac group rolled in for a rest stop.  Coincidence.

Heading back downriver to New Orleans

By the time we were on the bikes we were a good 45 minutes behind schedule and I was wondering if we'd make it much past the Spillway before meeting the group. Once we got up onto the bike path, though, I started thinking otherwise.  We had a pretty nice tailwind, which meant the group, which would be riding at conversational pace anyway, would have a pretty significant headwind all the way down to New Orleans. If that wasn't enough, Quentin was riding a borrowed TT bike and wearing a skinsuit and TT helmet.  There's a whole story behind that, of course.  Anyway, right after we started he noticed the bike felt strange, as if one crankarm was longer than the other.  It turned out that someone had installed the crankarms wrong so that they were a good five degrees out of parallel. For the record, he ended up riding about fifty miles like that. Not that it was slowing him down. For most of the ride upriver I was just sitting in his draft as we cruised along at 25 - 27 mph. The net result was that we got in a good 45 miles before meeting the group somewhere well past Reserve and practically where I'd met them the prior year when I hadn't been delayed.  Along the way I nearly crashed when we were riding on the levee bike path in St. John parish and came to an unexpectedly sharp right-hand curve going 27 mph.  I ran out of asphalt and launched out over the levee on the river side, miraculously staying upright, but having put a lot of pressure on my right wrist.

The rest of the ride back to New Orleans was pretty steady.  I suggested we take the St. John section of bike path in order to get off of River Road for a little while. Once up there I went up to the front and told them that when the asphalt ended at the parish line there wasn't a road back down to the street level, so we'd need to ride down the grass.  Well, that apparently didn't get communicated to anyone else and so when they hit the gravel they just kept going like lemmings, which kind of shattered the group.  After a little while a few of us rode down the grass and got back onto the road, soon coming across the rest of the group that was stopped to change the inevitable flat tire.

So I ended up with about 90 miles for the day, some of which was pretty brisk, which made for a good ride on the first day of standard time and last day of the October drought.