A Day Off??

Coming down the Casino overpass near the end of Sunday's Giro Ride. Three TT bikes in a row. 

Friday evening when I got home and turned the car off (Candy had taken it to work and so I got a ride home) the "Low Battery" warning came on. Hmmmm. Now, in the old days I would have immediately assumed that the alternator was bad and that it wasn't charging and that was why the battery had died. Also in the old days I would have checked the charging voltage before rushing out to buy a new battery, but these aren't the old days and time was tight etc., etc., so I had kind of rolled the dice on the battery issue. At any rate, now I wasn't sure what the problem might be. Battery terminals were pristine, no other warnings appeared, car started and ran normally. My experience told me that it could very well be some module somewhere that needed to be reset after the battery replacement - in other words, lousy software. In an abundance of caution, however, and since the "Service Overdue" message had been popping up for the past couple of weeks, I decided we wouldn't drive the car over the weekend and I'd take it in on Monday. I didn't need to be anywhere that required a car anyway.

The weekend was hot and pretty dry and for me the highlights were two Giro Rides and the last two stages of the Tour de France on NBC Gold. Both Giro Rides were fast last weekend. We have the Team Time Trial coming up and so there were a couple more TT bikes in the mix and they were all apparently trying to see how fast they could go. Fortunately, there was no crosswind. Unfortunately, the group split at least once each day. Regardless, I felt like I got in a couple of good workouts, although you couldn't tell from my heart rate monitor that has been gradually flaking out for the past couple of weeks. On Saturday I sprinted hard a couple of times. The last was an all-out effort up the Seabrook Overpass at the end of the ride. I blew up a bit short of the crest, gasping for air, legs on fire, and looked at the computer to see it showing a nice sedate heart rate of 54 bpm. It was obviously time for a new HRM, or a Cardiologist. That afternoon I decided to try a Mio Link arm-band HRM since I have always hated the chest strap and only use my heart rate data out of curiosity. I figured that the skin on my aging paper-thin lily-white forearm wouldn't pose much of a barrier to the optical sensor. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, it was actually a good weekend of riding with some solid intensity here and there with lots of recovery time in-between watching the Tour and some really old Buck Rogers era sci-fi on Comet TV, and a little while in the garage re-setting the garage door opener that had forgotten where to stop a few weeks ago and wondering what was holding up the front part of the garage since the termites seem to have eaten pretty much everything except the old barge-board.

So this morning I decided to take a day off from riding in order to take the car in to the dealer early. Looking back at my Strava data, I see that I haven't taken a day off from riding in three weeks, so I guess I'm due. Fair warning: If I voluntarily take a day off from riding, a rained-out day is virtually guaranteed within the week. I went out early and checked the running voltage on the car and it was up around 14, so I felt reasonably sure I'd make it to the dealership. They called a little while ago and as I'd suspected, the car needed a software update to clear the low-battery warning. Of course, it also needed the usual $250 oil change, a $150 front-end alignment, a $290 repair of a broken piece of plastic for one of the rear seat latches, etc., etc., and I won't be seeing it until tomorrow. Also, new tires appear to be in my immediate future.

Batteries

Front half of the Thursday group regrouping after the turnaround at Ormond

The note on the kitchen counter read, "The car wouldn't start this morning - "Low Battery."  Wonderful. I'd just gotten home from my morning ride. We were still under a "Heat Advisory" because of the combination of summer temperature and particularly high humidity. Not that I'd been planning on taking the car to work anyway, but I knew there would be some logistics involved in replacing the battery. Later, at work, where one of my co-workers had called in to say she would be late because her car battery was dead, I checked the inventory at the nearby O'Reilly Auto Parts store and saw that they did indeed have something that would work for the low, low price of $159, plus tax, plus core. There were some cheaper alternatives, of course, but this one was closer and my only readily available source of transportation that could carry a battery was Danielle's scooter that hadn't been on the road in a couple of months, at least. As soon as I got home went out with my 10mm socket and got to work pulling the battery, which is a simple task except that the moment I disconnected it the alarm, which apparently has its own power source, went off. With no power to the rest of the car, the remote had no effect. The only way to turn it off was to manually lock the door and close it. Naturally, that meant that opening it again was going to involve prying off a plastic cover on the driver's side door and using the metal emergency key that I was hoping was in The Wife's key fob because mine is a replacement that doesn't have that.

and the back half of the group

So then I'm ready to take the old battery to the store, only to discover that the scooter battery is too run down to start the engine and little bitty kick-start wouldn't do it either. So I put the charger on the scooter battery and had to wait an hour or so for it to charge before heading off to O'Reilly's. I put the new batter in, then had to reset a whole bunch of things so that the keyless entry would work and the clock knew what time it was, etc., etc. In the process, the car displayed a message that The Wife's key had a low battery.  So back to the internet to find someplace with the relatively uncommon battery, a trip to Walgreens where I paid approximately ten times the actual cost for two little batteries. That evening I burned the hell out of my arm on the barbeque grill when I reached down to adjust the air intake. Went to bed early.

Corsairs!

So Thursday's levee ride had, for some unknown reason, a pretty big turnout. I guess there were twenty or so at one time or another, so that kept the pace fairly brisk. Woody was on his TT bike, but he was just shadowing the back of the paceline trying to get comfortable on the bike. The LAMBRA Team Time Trial Championship is a week from Saturday and so there have been a few more TT bikes showing up than normal lately. I was feeling OK, but for some reason, possibly the prior day's WeMoRi, my legs were loading up really quickly every time I hit the front, so I was taking short pulls to try and limit the damage. This morning I took it nice and easy on the levee, stopping at Zotz on the way back for an iced coffee. This weekend may turn out to be another double Giro Ride weekend for me. After a couple of weeks with practically no rain, it looks like we'll be back to a more typical weather pattern by Sunday when the wind finally shifts back around to the south, more or less. Meanwhile, I've been enjoying Erin's photos from the Oshkosh fly-in.

Fast Summer Giro x 2

It was full gas the minute we hit Hayne Boulevard on Saturday. I knew it was going to be fast, but my legs were having a hard time believing it. Earlier, when we had turned onto Lakeshore Drive and I felt the 10 mph tailwind and looked around at the three or four riders on time trial bikes, I thought "this is going to be fast." It was.

The "warm-up" stretch along Lakeshore Drive that is usually completed a nice easy conversational pace was instead done at a speed that constituted a definite breach of protocol. That was the first clue. The second clue was was the kind of clue that is like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. We hit Hayne at 30 mph and the speed just kept going up from there. I was sucking wheels like a pro, but within a couple of miles the long string of riders was already starting to fracture, and before we got to Bullard there was already a split. Naturally I was on the wrong side of it, but the riders behind it weren't giving up easily. When we hit Bullard Big Phil was on or near the front and there was a car somewhere in the intersection. We slowed down a bit and Phil somehow had to bail out to the right, going right into the corner gas station. I looked back and saw him coming back onto the road and thought he at least had a chance of catching, but a few seconds later the pace picked up again. The guys in front didn't know. I looked back again and knew he wasn't going to be able to catch. The front of the second group hand pretty much given up hope of catching the break, but we were still going 28 mph. After we made the right onto Paris Road, Pat rode up to the front and got them to ease up long enough for Phil to catch. The break was just a spec way off in the distance by then anyway.  Even so, there was still enough horsepower in our group to keep our average speed on Chef Highway at 27 mph. Despite the headwind on the way back, we did a lot of it at around 25 mph, at least until we got back to Hayne Blvd. where it finally eased up a bit.

Sunday morning at 6:10 am I headed out to Starbucks for another Giro beating. To blocks from home I passed a couple of girls passed out on the sidewalk in front of a house. It looked like they'd just bailed out of an Uber and didn't make it to the front door. One was basically naked. I just shook my head and continued on since there was a woman dog-walker heading their way and besides, I hadn't had my coffee yet. Priorities, you know. When I got to Starbucks I checked the weather and saw that the wind was already at 10 mph from the WNW, so it was basically going to be a repeat of Saturday. With the Team Time Trial coming up in a couple of weeks, there were a few strong riders on their TT bikes. I knew what that meant.

For some reason I was a little more motivated this morning, so I stayed closer to the front on Hayne Blvd. It was even faster than Saturday, with an average speed of 32 mph for the 5-mile stretch. The rest of the way out was not much different. The average speed all the way out to Venetian Isles was 28 mph which was almost the fastest we've had this year. Things were a little easier on the return trip. By then it was getting pretty hot, around 90F, so combined with the headwind, there was a lot keeping things from getting out of hand. I was still feeling OK and somewhat uncharacteristically got into the paceline at the front for a while. For the first time in a while I went through a full large water bottle and most of a small one. Must be summer now.

Lakefront Storming

Five to go - before the storm hit

The forecast didn't seem too much out of the ordinary for Wednesday. Then again, weather forecasts in July around here are not particularly reliable. It can be clear and sunny in one place, and five miles away some pop-up summer thunderstorm can be flooding the streets. Regardless, I was optimistic about the last race of the Wednesday evening series out on Lakeshore Drive as I loaded up the car before heading to work in the morning. I rushed out of the office at 4:30 that afternoon, headed for Lakeshore Drive. The sky was overcast, and radar was showing some storms scattered about, mostly north of the lake. Problem was, they were drifting in our direction. I arrived at the race site, got out of the car, and pondered the situation. The wind was already picking up, and the sky to the north was dark and grey. I backed the car up to the windward side of the finish line so we could tie off the tent to it like we'd done the week before. Then we got the camera and computer and clock and everything set up and were ready to go in time for the first race at 6:10, which we intentionally started a few minutes early with the idea of keeping on schedule by the end of the night so it wouldn't be too dark. I already had the linescan camera's fps setting dialed way down because the cloud cover was already blocking a lot of the sunlight.

One of the earlier races

The first race went off pretty nicely. For some reason there weren't too many riders who were lapped, so we got those results done quickly as riders lined up for the second race. I checked the radar.  Yikes! It was not looking good. The wind was already starting to increase as the weather closed in from the north. We calculated the number of laps very conservatively for that race, so that the winners finished a few minutes short of their scheduled 30 minutes. Fortunately, most of this race had stayed together, so results again were relatively uncomplicated. The finish line camera was still working fine, despite the darkening sky, but it wasn't really needed except to confirm a couple of bib numbers.

The third race, however, was going to be a different story. As we lined up the riders along the unprotected Lakeshore Drive, it was clear that we were going to get hit by a pretty good squall. The only questions were when and how badly. We told the riders that if the weather got bad we would be ringing the bell early. A lap or so later the weather got bad. A wind gust blew the new LAMBRA laptop off the table (miraculously, is survived) and spectators rushed over to hold down the tent as the rain started getting worse. The waves started crashing over the seawall. I gathered up the computer and put it, still connected to the camera and power supply, into the open back of the station wagon. It was not the first time I'd had to do that. Luckily, the camera itself was holding steady thanks to the big sandbag weight I had hanging from one if the tripod's legs. The rain got worse, the sky got darker, the wind got windier. A lap or two later I made the call. We'd be ringing the 1-to-go bell on the next lap. The 40-minute race was now more like a 25-minute race. Lance and Sam had been off the front almost from the start, but this time Sam came by alone. Lance must have gone down somewhere, but after a few more riders passed, he appeared in full chase mode. A few riders dropped out. Then the power quit - apparently the generator ran out of gas?  My antique tape recorder had already failed during the prior race so I grabbed the little Sony digital one that I always seem to screw up with. I hit the 'record' button and started calling out numbers as the riders finished. There was a big gap, so I hit the 'pause' button, or that's what I thought. Actually, I'd hit the 'play' button by mistake and missed the next few riders entirely. Fortunately, Michelle and Angela were doing great with scoring, so results were pretty clear and the only real problem was that the paper was pretty wet and a few numbers were hard to read. There hadn't been enough time for anyone to get lapped. Volunteers had already stripped off the top of the tent and stuffed it and the frame into my car. It was still raining pretty heavily as I disassembled the camera and packed everything up as best I could and crammed everything into the car for the drive home. I called ahead and got Candy to order a pizza. Back at home I unloaded everything in the rain and set it out in the basement with the box fan blowing on it. The tent top went into the dryer (on air-dry), and I went upstairs and opened a bottle of pinot noir, and waited for the pizza to arrive before firing up the computer and wait for Townsend to send me the final results to post to the LAMBRA website. 

Just the Words

I've been carrying around the camera, plus the phone that has an arguably better camera than the actual camera, all week and keep forgetting to pull either out of my pocket. Perhaps some of that has been because the rides were hard, or seemed hard - hard to tell sometimes!

One of the young Juniors
was lapped twice before
finishing his first lap

Last Wednesday's lakefront races went fairly well despite a downpour during registration. Fortunately the summer pop-up thunderstorm drifted away and dissipated before the racing started. Turnout was actually almost normal, which was surprising considering what things looked like at 5:45 pm. As usual the first race, which includes Cat. 5, Women Cat. 4/5, and Juniors, was chaos. When you have riders mixed together with such a wide range of abilities, the race quickly becomes one long unending string of individual riders or small groups, most of which are gradually being lapped by the leaders. Scoring something like that is a nightmare, but I think we got it pretty much right that time, even though there were riders lapped twice in a 20-minute race on a 1+ mile course. We didn't have time to determine most of the placings (lots of lapped riders) before we had to start the next race, so those results weren't ready until after the final race of the night. The other races are considerably easier to score, but by the time the last race, for Cat. 1/2/3/4, finishes it's dark. We pulled Michelle's Jeep up with the headlights aimed at the finish line, which helped a bit. I had the frame rate turned down really low on the camera, and remembered to force the camera rather than rely on the auto-record motion-sensing, since that doesn't seem to trigger reliably when it's dark. The images were still plenty dark, but the numbers were definitely readable.

So last weekend I had no actual obligations, and ended up riding the Giro both Saturday and Sunday. Both days it was super fast on the way out, but not so fast on the way back. We had a new rider, Cliff, who recently moved here with his wife who is on faculty at UNO. The speed on Hayne and subsequent gaps caught him by surprise on Saturday and he was off the back pretty soon, but ended up finding people to ride with anyway. He came back on Sunday, though, and fared well. After Saturday's ride, I had been thinking that Sunday would be a lot easier. It wasn't. Somewhere after Hayne Blvd. a big gap opened up in the middle of the pack and it split. Naturally I was on the wrong side of that split. We were still going pretty fast, but were just holding the gap all the way to Chef Highway. When we turned onto Chef I could see the group ahead of us spread out across the lane and told whoever was nearby. "Here's our chance. We have about one minute to catch them before they start rolling again." Alas, there was some hesitation and thirty seconds later I could see the paceline starting to string out again, which meant that someone had already put the hammer down. I took off and was soon joined by Jaden and then by VJ, both of whom did 99% of the work while I tucked low at the back staring at my computer that was reading over 90% max heart rate despite the substantial draft. After a mile or two at 32 mph we finally pulled into the slipstream of the front group. On the return trip there were some complications with flat tires that kind of took the wind out of everyone's sails. I didn't complain about that.

It's like this project is a hobby and they just work on it in their spare time.

This morning I did a nice easy solo recovery ride on the levee. I stopped for a minute to take a photo (which is on my camera, which is at home) of a bunch of Egrets and even some Roseate Spoonbills taking advantage the food available in what must have been a drying up little pond on the batture. Later, on my way to work, I took this photo of the never-ending 5-year underground plumbing repair work on Pine Street. The locals have resorted to spray-painting messages on the Sewerage and Water Board's barricades and traffic barrels. Can't say as I blame them.

Hammerdal and a 5-day Weekend

Almost dark and off the back but not feeling too bad about it Friday night (Boedi's photo)

I knew it was going to be a complicated week. A nephew and his family were scheduled to arrive at the house on July 4th. My brother and sister-in-law were coming a day or two later. Another niece and her family would also be arriving for the weekend. So lots of family that included small children pretty much guaranteed trips to the zoo, aquarium, and insectarium, plus big get-togethers for meals.

None of them had checked with me beforehand about my bike racing plans which were now, of course, very much up in the air. Dustin was putting on the Hammerdal Criterium series starting Friday night which included criteriums on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I'd been feeling increasingly desperate to inject more intensity into what masquerades as my "training program." After missing a lot of weekend riding due to officiating responsibilities I was starting to feel pretty badly out of shape, both mentally and physically, and I knew the only thing that could start to pull me out of that hole would be some actual races that didn't involve jumping on the bike minutes before the start after having been officiating the earlier races. So first, I decided to take Thursday and Friday off from work. I figured I could probably slip over to Hammond, just about an hour's drive away, on Friday night without being too unsociable. Saturday, however, was another question altogether so I put that race tentatively off the table unless the gods smiled on me, which they didn't. Sunday morning everyone was scheduled to be heading back to Orlando or Austin or Jackson, so I figured I could make those races.

Thursday turned out to be a marathon that started with a walk down to the start of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line. After the long ride down to Canal Street, we hit the Audubon Insectarium, followed by the Aquarium, followed by lunch, and then the streetcar ride back home. I was tired by the end of that day.

Lunch at Satsuma on Maple St.

Friday was busy as well, but since I had to bring a bunch of the LAMBRA equipment to the Friday night race, I had to be on the road around mid-late afternoon. That didn't turn out to be much of a problem, so I loaded up the car and got to Zemurray Park in plenty of time to unload and help get the finish line set up. The oddly named race (Hammerdal is a town in Sweden from which one of the city's founders, Peter of Hammerdal, came from) was held at a nice local park with a winding 1 km road around a little lagoon. As such, it wasn't really quite a criterium since there wasn't anything resembling a corner on the whole thing, but the sweeping curves around the lagoon proved to be sufficient to cause a few crashes anyway. Friday's events included just a Cat. 4/5 race and a Cat. 1/2/3/4 race, with a fixed-gear race in-between. With the Cat. 1/2/3/4 race not starting until after 7:45 pm, it was going to be dark by the time the 1-hour race was over. For the really old guys with cloudy eyes like me, that just added another layer of concern on top of the multiple cash primes that would make it hard to hang onto the back.

Jim was bloody mess after his crash, but showed up and raced Saturday and Sunday, placing 5th and 6th, anyway.

Despite getting a reasonable amount of time to warm up, this race didn't go well for me, but I knew teammates Jim Booth and Chris Brown would probably do fine. When they announced a Prime on the first lap, I knew I was in trouble. As expected, the race started out like it had been shot out of a cannon, with the first lap averaging 28 mph despite having started from a standing start. It didn't slow down much after that, either, with attacks and primes coming one after the other. Halfway through the second lap I was already coming off the back, and I wasn't alone. I got together with Butch, who not coincidentally is my age, picking up one or two others over the next few laps. We were about 20 minutes into the 60 minute race when we heard the lead motor coming up behind us. Fortunately the officials hadn't pulled us, so we jumped onto the back of the pack when it came by. That lasted seven or eight laps until there was a big long surge and we were popped off the back yet again. By then it was pretty dark, so it was probably just as well. Meanwhile, a break had gotten off the front. When they came around and lapped me (again) I jumped onto the back for a few wonderfully smooth and fast laps while they pulled me back up to the pack that they then lapped themselves. I hung with the pack for a little while, but was soon off the back again, getting pulled in time to help the officials with the lap cards and bell. Somewhat disappointing, but not all that unexpected. Two laps before the finish we heard that there had been a crash on the back side of the course. A couple of minutes after the finish Jim Booth came riding up looking like he had been dragged through a cheese grater. It looked worse than it was, but it was visually impressive nonetheless. He's gotten caught on the outside of one of those fast sweeping curves and ran out of asphalt when the rider ahead drifted wide. Meanwhile, Chris placed 7th, which was impressive since there was a two or three-man break off the front.

The obligatory snoball stop

Saturday was Zoo day, followed by lunch at New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood, and then snoballs at Panola, and then a lot more food with everyone over at the house where I perhaps drank a little too much wine for someone who was planning on getting up at 5:30 am to race. Sunday's races started at 8 am with the Masters race and ended with the Cat. 1/2/3 race at 10:30. I was planning to leave around 5:45 am. James, my nephew, was planning to head out with his family for Austin around 5:30. Things were going on schedule until he discovered his car wouldn't start. So we jumped it from mine in the dark and got him on the road, although I was giving him only about a 20% chance of getting back to Texas without having to buy a new battery (he did indeed have to get a new battery en route).

These races went somewhat better, which is to say I didn't get dropped. Since that was basically my main goal, I was pretty satisfied with it. The Masters race was considerably slower than the Friday night race had been, although I was very much in survival mode near the back for most of it, finishing mid-pack well behind a small breakaway. The 1/2/3 race was actually a lot of fun even if my game plan was basically to follow wheels at the back. There were a lot of attacks, but fortunately for me there was also some omnium points team strategies playing out that resulted in periodic lulls. Of course a few riders got off the front, but the resulting team considerations kept the pace in the pack kind of under control. Right after seeing the 2-to-go lap card, the motor passed us and the pack was lapped by the leader, which meant that we were unexpectedly on our finish lap. I guess only about a third of the riders realized that because there wasn't really much of a sprint. Still, I felt good about how I was feeling after riding two races that morning, so I'm logging it as a successful weekend even if it isn't reflected in my placings. After my race I rushed to the car, put the bike on the roof, and rushed back to collect up the camera, tripod, a ton of traffic cones, the race clock, and anything else that would be needed for the upcoming Wednesday races and Team Time Trial. I was rushing because I needed to get to Audubon Zoo for a Tulane event at 2 pm. Somehow I made it, although I have to admit I was pretty wasted by then. At least there was a lot of food and wine and snoballs!