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| "Ain't dere no mo!" Saturday's northshore ride, coming over the firetower hill that doesn't have a firetower any more. |
So I decided to do the NOBC northshore ride on Saturday, having mapped out a nice and reasonably hilly 75-mile route sure to find disfavor among the tri-bike crowd. I was looking forward to the terrain, but secretly hoping that the ride wouldn't turn into a hammer-fest. After all, it's almost November and time for a little change of scenery and lowering of intensity. Early that morning I stepped out the door into the warm, 100% relative humidity fog. The humidity, I had expected. The fog, not so much. Needless to say, the fog was only worse on the 24-mile long Causeway over Lake Pontchartrain. Fortunately they hadn't put restrictions on the bridge, so although it required constant attention, we didn't lose much time. Arriving at the Lee Road Ballpark we found a nice small group ready to go. Just as I'd been hoping. It was slightly cooler than mid-summer, of course, but the cold front we'd been expecting was still far away and moving at a pace that could best be described as "glacial." The ride itself was great. We had a nice steady pace, despite a few short faster segments and a brief stop at the Enon store, and we were all back to the cars before noon. That was good because I had to go to the Tulane football game at 2:00.
I'm not really a football fan. When you go through grammar school and high school as the shortest kid in the class, you don't get many opportunities to hone your football skills. In fact, you don't really get many chances to touch the football at all, and when you do get a chance, some kid twice your size slams into you. However, since we live just a few blocks from the stadium, and The Wife seems to enjoy watching the game, I just make sure my phone is fully charged before I go. So on Saturday I had just enough time to eat and shower before walking over to the stadium, which of course was when it started to rain. I think I counted 25 Tulane students in the stands. At least it wasn't hot. Up above, the long-awaited cold front was slowly approaching, kicking off a lot of rain. We didn't get through the first quarter before they stopped the game because of lightning and made everyone empty the stands and huddle underneath. The nearest lightning was at least six miles away, and I never heard so much as a single clap of thunder. Still, we were stuck there under the BigAssFan for about 45 minutes during which time I drank a hot beer. Eventually we returned to our wet seats and suffered through the game against SMU as Tulane expertly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Later that night I finally installed a new single-speed freewheel on the old commuter. I'd replaced the chain a few weeks ago and every time I put pressure on the pedals, like when climbing the overpass, I could feel it grinding. When I removed the old freewheel and looked at the teeth, they were worn down to the shape of shark fins, so the new freewheel was definitely over-due by a long shot.
On Sunday a lot of the regular Giro riders were planning on doing the Tour de Jefferson. I wasn't particularly interested in either paying the $50 entry fee or just crashing the 45-mile ride since it spent a fair amount of time meandering through Metairie. By then the cold front had pretty much arrived along with a steady 15-mph northeast wind. So I decided to instead do an easy 50 miles on the levee out to the Spillway and back. Mignon met me along the way as the last of the clouds moved out. The return trip was largely into an unrelenting head/crosswind, and since neither of us wanted to do much suffering, I think we averaged about fifteen miles per hour.
The rest of Sunday was earmarked for Halloween decorating. Every year Candy comes home with even more decorations, many of which require electricity, which leads to me spending a lot of time worrying about whether the twenty various contraptions are going to overload the single outlet supplying power and burn down the house. So this year I tapped into the one circuit that I installed myself (and therefore know it doesn't include any knob and tube wiring from the 20s or random other connections) and ran a new line to a new outlet in the basement from which I could run an extension cord under the front steps to power all that stuff in front of the house. I would have put the new outlet in a better location but didn't have enough wire on hand for that (but had miles of outdoor extension cords). After that I spent hours hanging plastic skeletons from trees and crawling around underneath the shrubbery with electric pumpkins and things while providing the local mosquito population with blood. It is not really something I enjoy doing, but by the end of the evening the four plastic bins in the living room were empty and you could probably see the orange glow of my front yard from the ISS. So other than the 20 mph wind, and the crawling around in the dirt with the bugs, Sunday was beautiful.
Meanwhile, over in Colorado Springs, Derek Brouchard-Hall, the COO of USA Cycling, rather suddenly announced he would be stepping down at the end of the year. Actually, he didn't announce it and neither did USAC. Velo-News announced it, much to the dismay of all of the Local Associations and members who had not been given any kind of heads-up. Rumor has it that Derek will be doing something else cycling-related, but that announcement hasn't come out yet. Of course that opened the floodgates for anyone and everyone looking to blame someone for the decline in traditional road racing. Just for the record, I think Derek did a great job under very difficult circumstances. Most people don't have a clue what USAC actually does, what its responsibilities are, and how hard it is for them make positive changes at the grassroots level where the ground is constantly shifting underfoot. I'm in contact with people at USAC on a weekly basis and as far as I can tell they work their butts off.
So now I come to this morning, Monday, October 22, which is the first morning this fall that I've pulled on the old arm-warmers. It was actually below 60F, just barely, when I stepped out the door into the dark for a much-needed recovery ride. My legs were sore from something. Perhaps cycling, perhaps something else, but at any rate I was not looking to do them any more harm. Unfortunately it was still pretty windy out there, so although it was slow, the ride wasn't quite as easy as I'd have liked. On the plus side, that new single-speed freewheel I installed on the old commuter felt incredibly smooth on the ride in to work!
2 comments:
Fire towers have not been manned for quite a while. The state went to looking for fires by airplane. During my college summers I worked for Indian Creek Reservoir and one of the daily duties was to calculate the level of "fire day", i.e. how likely there might be a wild fire. It was based on a few parameters - humidity calculated by dry/wet bulb thermometers, how long since the last rain (rain gauge used to keep daily track of the rain) and wind speed (which was calculated by looking at the tops of the trees blowing - very scientific.) The information was then radioed to the sites. So, yes, I was once responsible for making the guys manning the fire towers climb those steps. - Mark
BAWSE Cross 2 was held in Gentilly Terrace, a neighborhood right in the middle of the Gentilly planning district. If you look at parish lines east to west, it's pretty much right in the middle of New Orleans. I do agree that New Orleans is nowhere, though.
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