Katrina Anniversary

City Park lagoon on the way home with a little rainbow and a blurry, aka impressionist, photo

Today is the 13th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans. If you look back in this blog you won't find an entry for August 29, 2005. The last sentence of the last post I made before the hurricane read, "I think this is going to be bad," and the title of the post was "Looks like the Big One."  It was. The following morning we evacuated, spending the entire day en route to Dallas, and it was another day before I had an opportunity to post again. I was using dial-up internet at the time. Over the course of the next week or two this blog and the NOBC Yahoo Group email list because invaluable tools for tracking down members of the cycling community that had been scattered all across the country. Many lost everything, some never returned, some moved away. Yet somehow, within a couple of months, the Giro Ride and the morning levee ride were going again. In a way, they kept us sane.

Since the last road races of the 2018 LAMBRA season a couple of weeks ago I've been on a kind of auto-pilot, just keeping up my regular riding routine but without any near-term goals in mind. There are some track races coming up in Baton Rouge, and then a bunch of official, and not-so-official, gravel and cyclocross races or events or whatever you want to call them. I'm feeling like I'd like to find a cheap cyclocross bike at some point, but as usual such things are hard to find in the 49-50 cm range within my financial comfort zone. The old Pennine can always be pressed into service, of course, but by modern standards it is too big for me and rather heavy, and currently lacking a 700C rear wheel. The frame is designed for 5-speed and although a 6-speed wheel can easily work, I don't seem to have anything handy like that except for some old racing tubulars hanging in the basement. Perhaps I'll get around to building an appropriate wheel eventually.

With the university academic year having started at the beginning of the week, I'm looking forward to helping out with the Tulane team and have somehow volunteered myself for leading some indoor training sessions once a week once it starts getting too dark and/or cold for people to get out on the road consistently. We'll see how that goes. There's actually been a fair amount of activity already and there are a few new members even though the annual Organizations Expo isn't until this Friday.

Down the road, I'm scheduled to head up to Colorado Springs for a couple of days for the USA Cycling Local Associations symposium, which happened to fall on the same weekend as the Pensacola stage race that I had been kind of thinking about sort of maybe riding. Beyond that, I'm assuming I'll be making another trip up to north Georgia for the 6-Gap Century sufferfest. In a moment of weakness, I recently ordered up an 11-29 cassette for the occasion. It will be interesting to see if I can make it work with the existing derailleur and chain, but anyway I'd been thinking about it ever since I was passed halfway up Hogpen Gap by some guy casually spinning along while I was standing up in my 39x27 on an extended section of 10% grade. I seriously doubt having the lower gear will actually allow me to go any faster, but perhaps it will lessen the suffering just a tad.

This morning I headed out in the dark for the usual WeMoRi. The sky, as best I could tell at 5:30 am, looked cloudy. A couple of minutes later a light rain started to fall. I had no idea if it was just a prelude to a downpour or just a passing shower, so I continued on. Halfway to the lakefront it stopped and the roads were dry. I latched onto the group at 28 mph on Lakeshore Drive and made a couple of efforts when the opportunities presented themselves. On the final stretch along the lake to the finish at Shelter #1 the whole group came together. I was somewhere in the middle of it all as the speed started to increase a couple of miles before the finish. Gaps started to open here and there, and I was just surfing along with whatever wheels were still moving forward. We were probably inside of the last kilo and there was a small cluster of riders with a little gap off the front. Then I heard Eddie Corcoran coming up on the outside, and when he passed me I thought, "He's going to blow past those guys before the finish." He did. As I crossed the "line," aka the crosswalk, I looked up at the sky to the southwest. It was dark and ominous, but it looked like it was going to skirt us to the west so I rode the usual cool-down along the lake before heading back for coffee at Starbucks. Before I got there it started raining, and then stopped raining. I went ahead and got a cup of hot coffee, checked email, and headed back home on wet streets.