A Team of One

"What do we do now?" Cat. 4 team weights its options.

Sporadic efforts to assemble four compatible riders in the same place at the same time having failed miserably, by Friday night it was clear that Steve J and I were not going to have the requisite 4-person team for Saturday's LAMBRA Team Time Trial Championship. Various likely suspects had turned up sick or injured or out of town or unwilling, and by dinner time we'd run fresh out of old guys. Since I was going to be carting a large box of medals up there anyway, we decided late that evening to ride it as a 2-man time trial, just for the exercise, which was fine with me since you can't really drop your teammate when there are only two of you.

I made the easy 45-minute drive to the out-and-back course we've used for the past few years, arriving early enough to get a prime parking spot across from the registration table. Turnout was pretty low, but by the time the start list was posted it was obvious that everyone who showed up would be getting a medal! Well, except for us, of course. The 4-man NOBC Cat. 4 "dream team" was on hand and all signed up and zipped up and fired up when one of them got the call. It was from his wife. She had gone out for a walk or ride or something with the kids and was locked out of the house. Worse, one of them had a doctor's appointment that morning. Even worse, it was his fault because the hidden emergency key was missing. Luckily, Steve is a Cat. 4, so a quick swap kept the team in the race, but of course left me even more out in the cold than I'd been to start with. Actually, it was kind of a relief since I'd be able to do the 30 miles at whatever speed and effort level I wanted, and with no pressure whatsoever since I'm long past trying to impress anyone with my time trial abilities, or lack thereof. Also, I'd be starting last, so there would be no teams flying past to comment on my slowness. My only incentive was to get back to the finish line without holding up the results too badly.

Bayou Beer Garden

The day was almost perfect for a team time trial, assuming one had a team and was good at time trials. The sky was clear and the wind was light. I bolted the aero bars onto the Bianchi but didn't bother to remove water bottles or anything. My only concessions to the time trial were aero helmet and skinsuit. From the start I rolled up to 26 mph and then immediately backed it down to 24-25 where it felt more comfortable. By the time I was four miles in, and with a light tailwind, I decided that I'd keep the heart rate under 90% of max and just keep it smooth and steady. The team that had started ahead of me was never really in sight, given the two-minute intervals, so for the next 26 miles it was just me and the fog line and the computer. Rather nice, actually. The headwind on the way back dropped my speed down by a couple of miles per hour at the same general heart rate, so I finished up with a blazing average speed of 22.8 and an average heart rate just over 87%, so all went according to plan and my legs were none the worse for wear. The Cat. 4 team, meanwhile, lost Steve somewhere on the return leg, and came up a mere 6 seconds short of the gold medal, for which they are still getting grief.

No Giro Ride today

That afternoon there was a particularly heavy rainstorm that hung over the city for hours (10-11 inches of rain in 3 hours) and overwhelmed the pumping system, flooding much of Mid-city, Gentilly, and Lakeview. After telling everyone that all of the pumps were working at capacity, it was later determined at an emergency public city council hearing that in fact a number of pumps were off line for various reasons. It probably wouldn't have mattered much as far as the severity of the flooding went, but the City Council and the Mayor, almost all of whom are up for re-election or otherwise looking for work in the coming year, desperately needed some scapegoats despite the fact that they are, in fact, ultimately the responsible parties. As a result, a number of people will be losing their jobs, some of whom might deserve it, some of whom definitely don't. The public is still depressingly ill-informed about how the drainage system works and what its limitations are and all, but of course this is the era in which facts don't matter any more and everything is judged by emotion and hearsay and social media posts, so the mayor is taking no heat for the people he appointed and then fired and the city council is taking no heat for not being on top of the drainage situation and, in the end, nobody is offering any viable concrete solutions since that could cost actual money that the public is not likely to cough up anyway. But I digress....

Riding down Carrollton early Sunday morning

By Sunday morning the floodwaters had receded and the streets were mostly, kind of dry, so I headed out for the Giro Ride, hoping against hope that the Starbucks was in operation (it was). The streets in mid-city along Carrollton were covered with mud and there were a bunch of flooded cars around the I-10 underpass that had been pulled out of the depths of what becomes a lake in these situations, and the neutral ground was full of cars that the locals had wisely moved there before the water had gotten too deep. Shortly after I and a number of others arrived it started raining pretty hard and after fifteen minutes or so riders started bailing out and heading home. I waited around a while with the Westbank guys, and once the rain stopped I rode with them as they headed back through Metairie for the Huey P. Long bridge. Ben L, who had driven out to the Giro, met me on the river levee and since the rain had ended by then we headed out toward the Spillway, picking up Steve Johnson along the way. On the return trip where the bike path drops down to street level at St. Rose in order to go under some pipes and stuff, Ben touched my wheel and fell, fortunately, into the grass. He was completely unscathed since we weren't going very fast, but in the fall  his computer had popped off of his bike. We searched for it for quite a while and never could locate it in the tall grass. Otherwise, it was a nice 60 miles, albeit a lot slower than the Giro would have been. There was a lot more rain later on in the day, and the next day, and the day after that, and today, but a long as it's not a hurricane I'm not complaining too much.

Yesterday evening I went over to the little WHIV radio station as the guest for the weekly Out Spok’n show. It was just basically a conversation with Janneke about local bike racing. They had had a good six inches of water in the place on Sunday but were up and running. The show must go on.....