Visitors

Thursday on the levee, heading back from the turnaround.    

The awesome cooler weather that graced us with a nice long visit recently was great, until it wasn't any more, which was around last Wednesday. The evening before, I'd gotten together for dinner at High Hat with Roger Brown, a high-school classmate from Jesuit who was visiting town from Chicago. That morning I went out in the really, really dark and met the WeMoRi which for some reason didn't seem to be killing it as much as usual. With an early meeting at work I had to skip my usual twenty minutes of lounging around at Starbucks and instead rushed through a quick shower and pedaled off to work, once again beating the odds by not getting run over by any cars, trucks, buses or dumbass wannabe "track" cyclists commuting on brakeless fix-gear bikes with time trial handlebars set so far forward it would make Graeme Obree cringe.

Ripped that thing right off with my awesome arm power.

That evening Rich Hirschinger, visiting from L.A., came over to borrow a bike while he was in town for a conference. Rich rides with the Velo Club la Grange, so I was particularly pleased to be able to repay the club in some small way for lending me a bike some years back when I was in L.A. for about a week watching Danielle's UI team compete at gymnastics nationals. Also, he's a Tulane Biology alumnus. Anyway, as I was removing the Keo pedals from my Orbea in order to install Rich's Speedplays, I inadvertently ripped my Thompson seatpost apart with my awesome upper body strength. Oops. Fortunately, it was easy to resort to Plan B, which was to set him up on the old Cervelo instead. That worked out OK, although the shifters are so worn out and finicky that there was a time or two when he couldn't shift into a high gear when he needed it, at least until I explained to him the secret handshake required.

Rich came out for the Thursday levee ride, which was nice and smooth and uneventful. By then you could feel the humidity moving back into the city, and I knew that our brief respite from summer would soon be over. Afterward we stopped for coffee at Zotz and I filled him in on the Tulane Friday Coffee Ride and Sunday Giro Ride info, since he was planning on making both of those. I also mentioned that U2 was in town for a concert and I think he'd snagged tickets within about an hour of that. He did show up Friday morning for the Tulane ride, which included a coffee stop at Fair Grinds. That evening I went out to the Airport to pick up Danielle who was finally coming back for the semester.

Ray and I got back a good five minutes before the lazy puncture-ridden main group. No, we weren't going that fast.

The Saturday morning Giro was a little messy. There are a lot of rides and things going on this time of year, including the Pensacola stage race, so although there was a good-sized group on hand, we were missing a few of the regulars. Anyway, that didn't keep things from getting fast on Hayne Blvd. Unfortunately, it remained fast after the turn onto Paris Road where they are doing all sorts of road construction that forces us to ride through some bad patches of asphalt, so of course someone pinch-flatted. Most of us waited, although a small group kept going, never to be seen again since they didn't wait around at the turnaround. As we started back, Ray and I rolled casually ahead as the rest of the group emerged from the shade of the pee-pee tree and attempted to avoid having to actually pedal their bikes. Soon, our pace started creeping up and before I knew it we were in 2-man time trial mode, which in this case was more like 1.5-man time trial mode, with me taking much shorter pulls than Ray. The whole time I'm expecting the group to come flying by at like 30 mph, but every time I looked back I saw nothing but empty road. So we went all the way to the turn-off onto the service road, at which point we eased up. We were all the way to Hayne Blvd. before I could see the group starting to approach from behind, and then they were gone again -- someone had flatted.  So we ended up riding the entire way back alone. I turned around on Lakeshore Drive and went all the way back to the fountain before finding the remnant of the main group. Strange Giro.

Heading out for the Sunday Giro

Sunday's Giro had a particularly small group, which of course meant there weren't as many places to hide from the wind. We had a nice paceline going most of the way out on Chef Highway, which was nice, but by 8 am it was clear that the summer humidity was back in full force. Unaccustomed to this level of humidity, Rich was going through his water at a fairly rapid rate, and as the pace ramped up on the return trip I could see that he was starting to suffer a bit. When it got fast leading up to the Goodyear Sign sprint on Chef Highway, Rich came off the back with a couple others. It turned out that my old Campi 9-speed shifter wouldn't give him access to anything smaller than the fifteen tooth cog because he didn't know the trick of pushing the paddle lever all the way out so the worn-out shifter could complete the earlier shift. I sent the other Rich ahead to slow the front of the group so I could make sure he didn't miss the turn onto the service road, at which point I told him how to make the thing actually shift. I guess those shifters have, conservatively, 40,000 miles on them.

Next weekend is Six Gap, so assuming that the Tulane guys get things lined up travel-wise and we're actually going, I figure I will be taking it easy this week. Regardless, I think the legs are probably due for a little recovery time.