Forecasts

Nothing to see here. Move along, move along!

Well, while things in the tropics were certainly nice and quiet for the first half of hurricane season, it appears that mother nature is trying to make up for lost time right now. There are five systems currently being tracked. Luckily, none of them is headed straight for us here in New Orleans. Unluckily, the forecast for the next few days at least is looking more and more soggy. Looking out the window of my office here on the 6th floor all I see are dark skies, rain, and lightning.

The city just issued a flood alert. There's something new in the Gulf (Invest #95). There's a Cat. 4 headed for the Carolinas. There's another storm that will likely become a hurricane shortly headed for the Caribbean. I guess it was just good fortune that the front tire on my commuter was flat this morning and I resorted to taking the car, because it's not looking like this rain is going to stop any time soon.

At least last weekend went nicely enough. On Friday I tagged along with the Tulane coffee ride as usual. Dan Bennett was in town, so he and Wayne Sharp joined us. Naturally we spent the whole time telling stories about the old days. Dan also came out for the Giro on Saturday but turned back early when the pace started to go kind of ballistic. It seemed like a pretty fast Giro to me. On the way back a few of us stopped as most of the group blew through a red light at Michoud in front of a turning truck that was on his horn the whole time. Our reward for doing the right thing?  A three-mile chase that dropped all but three of us. If Taco hadn't come to the front and finished it off I don't think Gavin and I would have caught.

Dan and Wayne

On Sunday the Tulane team was doing some skill training over in Pontchatoula, followed by some bar-b-que at Dustin's house. That was mostly an easy ride - some basic paceline and cornering practice. It did get my heart rate going at one point when a big old dog-missile suddenly launched from a house along the road and blew straight through the middle of the paceline. It was a miracle that nobody went down, although I'm pretty sure we came as close to a major pile-up as possible without actually creating one. My collarbone was twitching for hours afterward!

As if the expected rainy weather wasn't going to play enough havoc with my training routine, I will be heading up to Colorado Springs on Thursday for the annual USA Cycling Local Associations Symposium. That will keep me off the bike for three days for sure. After that, there's the Six Gap Century that we'll be doing again the weekend of the 29th. Speaking of that, I went ahead and put that new 11-29 cassette on my training wheel the other day so I could kind of break it in a bit. My chain is just a tad short for the large-large combination, which is to say that it will shift to the 53-29, but it putting a lot of strain on the derailleur. The chain that's on the bike now is at about 2,100 miles right now. I'd normally wait until it was a bit over 2,500 before changing it, but by the end of the month it should be about there anyway, so perhaps I'll pick up a SRAM chain and swap it out before. Kind of hate to leave any chain miles on the table, but it will still be cheaper than ripping the derailleur off the bike somewhere at the bottom of a Georgia climb.