Predicting Turnout

Cruising through campus at 6:15 am on a Friday

You know, I've doing this bike riding thing for a pretty long time - like since the Nixon administration - and I've yet to be able to predict when people will show up for a group ride, or race, and when they won't. Back when I started, I guess it was the summer of '71, I distinctly remember showing up for a group ride at a parking lot on Causeway Blvd. where we were supposed to car-pool over to the northshore. It was cold and rainy. I pulled into a parking spot in the deserted lot and wondered, "where is everybody?" Well, it turns out that most people just won't go bike riding in the cold rain. It was one of many bicycle related learning experiences. What it wasn't, however, was predictable. Since then, there have been lots of other times when the riders showed up anyway, despite bone-chilling cold, 30 mph wind, and/or pelting rain. There have also been times when the weather was great and yet nobody showed up.

Like this morning. It was a pleasant 65 degrees here in New Orleans this morning for the 6:30 am Tulane Coffee Ride. The wind was light, the roads were mostly dry, and there was zero chance of rain. I'd gone out the door a little early since my normal ride time is 5:45 - 6:00, so took the long way around, cruising down Carrollton and St. Charles before turning into campus and riding the deserted walkways over to the Reily Center where I rode around in little circles looking at my watch and wondering why nobody what showing up. Still wondering. So I headed back through campus, across St. Charles, through Audubon Park, to the levee bike path where I did a nice easy recovery ride. It just didn't make sense to go out an deal with morning traffic all alone on a recovery day.

In fact, it was a recovery day that I sort of, kind of, maybe needed after doing a fairly credible effort on the Thursday morning levee ride. In addition to a few of the regulars, we had both Howard and Matt on hand, which kept the pace pretty respectable, at least on the way out. Since I missed riding on Monday because of an early meeting, I'd been feeling kind of mileage-deprived all week, and the fact that we'd shortened Tuesday's ride due to it being cold and windy and having only a few people show up, wasn't helping. Speaking of weather, it's supposed to rain buckets tonight, and maybe through Saturday morning, so the best I can hope for there is a Giro Ride on wet streets. The worst is a Giro Ride that doesn't happen because it's still raining. It should be better by afternoon, although the wind will be blowing at 10-15 mph. There's a cyclocross race up in Ridgeland Saturday and Sunday. Given that I know what the course looks like, and it'll definitely be wet on Saturday, I think I'll be staying close to home on Saturday. Not sure about Sunday. The weather is looking to be pretty great by then around here with temperatures in the 60s and 70s, light winds, and low rain chances.

Kenneth posted some video of the WeMoRi. If you've never ridden it, here's a sampling:

Wednesday night water main work. Here we go again.....

Meanwhile back at the homestead, we had another water main leak out in front of the house Wednesday morning. I saw the water when I went out for the WeMoRi at 5:45 am. By the time I got back around 7:30 it was already looking much worse. I called the Sewerage and Water Board, and also reported it online, since I knew it was going to escalate. This leak was right on the other side of the manhole cover from the big water main break they had repaired last January.  Just two day earlier they had finally replaced the asphalt from that leak. Yes, it took ten months for them to fix the street. The day before I had contacted them about removing the four big orange traffic barrels that have been sitting in front of the house since last January. They're still there. Fortunately, they showed up on Wednesday and by the time I got home the street was closed off and there was a ten foot high pile of mud next to a ten foot deep hole with a couple of men inside. The leak was repaired and by 9 or 10 pm they were packing the mud back into the hole. So now we have a big muddy mess, again, that I guess will take another 9 or 10 months to get fixed. This time there are no traffic barrels or anything, so it's a nice little surprise for people coming down Pine Street at night, I guess.

The Long November Weekend

Finishing up the Saturday Giro, heading into lake fog.

It wasn't until Thursday night that I knew we'd be doing a "holiday Giro" Thanksgiving morning. It's the kind of thing that everybody assumes will happen but nobody wants to commit to. So I was pleasantly surprised to see fairly solid turnout under the circumstances. Most people have some kind of family commitment on Thanksgiving, so the 7 am Holiday Giro works out pretty well. As is typical for that sort of thing, there were just a few people working the front that day, with most riders content to just tick off the miles back in the draft at a more comfortable effort level, all the while fooling themselves into thinking they were burning off calories that they hadn't yet actually consumed. In my own case, I was expected at my sister's house for a family Thanksgiving lunch, which for me was a turkey leg and at least one too many glasses of wine.

On Friday the only ride that was planned was apparently a secret, so I waited until the sun actually came over the horizon before heading out for forty-odd solo miles on the levee. There was this nice little tailwind behind me all the way out that made for a really pleasant ride until, of course, I turned around. It actually wasn't all that bad except in comparison to how nice it had been in the opposite direction. Later that day I got busy on some things around the house, one of which was taking a look at one of the two expensive pendant lights in the kitchen. It had stopped working a while back, and then suddenly started working again, and then stopped again. It wouldn't be the first time I'd wrestled with it, and knowing how much of a pain in the butt it was going to be, I'd been putting it off for a long time. The thing was clearly designed by designers who didn't give a rat's ass about how reliable or repairable or easy to install it might be, just as long as it looked pretty. I have to admit, it does look pretty, but like all things that are pretty, it came with a price. The entire thing hangs on a super-thin coaxial power cord that is secured at both ends by tiny little set screws, with other tiny little set screws to make the electrical connection to the super-hot halogen light bulb. After getting it down from the ceiling I made a connector for it so I could test it on the kitchen counter, and after some experimentation determined that there was a short somewhere in the cable or the electrical connections at either end of the cable. A complete dissection revealed the likely problem, which was that the heat from the bulb had basically melted some of the inner wire insulation and caused a short. I could hear the transformer clicking on and off to protect itself. Fortunately I had a spare length of cable. Unfortunately, replacing it would require the skills and patience normally reserved for brain surgery. I left it spread all over the kitchen counter so I could think about what would be needed.

On Saturday morning I did another Giro Ride, which turned out to be pretty hard, especially after a few guys at the front basically attacked the turn off of Hayne Blvd. and opened a big gap that the few of us willing to work were never able to close. Anyway, I kind of rushed back home afterward because there was a noon surprise party for my sister and I had to make a run out to the airport immediately before that to pick up my brother and his wife who had been visiting their kids in Texas and were stopping over in New Orleans for the party before returning home to Orlando. It all worked out pretty well, and although the early morning weather had been kind of wet and gloomy, by noon the sun was out and it was quite nice for the little event in Audubon Park.

Sunday morning I was up around 3:30 am to get them to the airport for a 5 am flight, and a little later to get me out to my third Giro Ride of the week. I'd been hoping for a northshore ride on Sunday, but the weather forecast was not encouraging and I couldn't get anyone to commit. I probably would have done a long northshore ride, even if there had been some rain, if I'd been comfortable I'd have some company. Riding by myself on country roads in the rain, however, was not going to happen.

Working again ... for now.

As it turned out, the Sunday Giro got a good soaking with rain on Chef Highway ahead of the next cold front. It's supposed to be in the low 40s tonight, so it will be long tights and base layers again for the Tuesday morning ride. After getting home, cleaning the bike, throwing the clothes in the washer, and taking a shower, I got back to work on that pesky pendant light. After much tedious work I finally got it all back together and working. I'm not entirely sure that Underwriters Laboratories would approve of the whole thing, but I'm pretty sure that it will be OK for a little while at least. I ordered a couple of LED lights for it in order to reduce the heat that the halogen bulbs generate, although I'm not really sure how hot the LEDs actually get. I'm assuming they run significantly cooler. We'll see.

Later that day I heard about a crash in Florida where a "distracted" woman had plowed into a whole group of riders, killing one of them and sending six or seven to the hospital. This is getting to be a regular occurrence. People need to put the phones down and watch where they are going. I can't imagine any valid excuse for mowing down a whole group of riders in broad daylight on a flat road at 8:30 am on a Sunday morning. None. I'm not buying the "sun in my eyes" shit. Had to have been going fifty miles per hour, judging by the damage to the car.

Also, Sunday was my birthday. Sad to say I am now Medicare eligible, which I somehow find to be extremely disturbing.

In other updates: The hole in the street in front of the house now has concrete in it, but still lacks the top layer of asphalt. Meanwhile, the road is barely passable and as a result the garbage men apparently decided to just skip picking up my garbage Saturday morning. I got the estimate on repairing the Tulane Cycling TV ($263) which I guess isn't too bad. As I suspected, it needs a new power supply board. Hope I can get that reimbursed. Last week at the annual LAMBRA meeting I got volunteered to be LAMBRA treasurer. Townsend will be President, Dustin will be VP, and Rolando will be Secretary. Ricky will continue as the Commissioner of Officials, Robert will continue as the results uploader, and Boedi will continue as upgrade coordinator, so that all sounds pretty encouraging to me. I guess I'll register for Medicare tonight, even though I am also signed up for my regular insurance through work. I need to talk with someone in personnel about all of that, I guess. I'm not sure what I'll be doing next weekend. There's cyclocross up in Ridgeland Saturday and Sunday on a course that is probably best suited to actual cyclocross bikes, and then I'm supposed to be officiating the following weekend for the LAMBRA cyclocross championship in New Orleans. That will close out the LAMBRA calendar for 2018.

Full Winter Kit

All Chiefs, no Indians. Hopefully the street will soon be back like it was last January.

As expected, the temperature this morning was around 40°F. Fortunately I'd already dug through my bike clothes drawer and extracted the long tights and a long-sleeve jersey so I wouldn't be trying to find them in the dark among a drawer full of mostly black clothes. This would be the first day this Fall that I'd need a more or less full winter kit, which is something that means one thing if you're in Minnesota and quite another if you're in New Orleans. While the morning temperature might be described as comfortable by folks farther north, the sudden plunge we've experienced here over the past week made it feel particularly frigid. It was mostly in my head, of course, but even so, I went ahead and over-dressed. It's really no use going out and getting chilled on the first cold ride of the year. All that does is make you all that much less likely to step out the door the next morning.

Anyway, it still wasn't cold enough to need the shoe-covers or winter jacket or double-gloves, or even the wind vest. I did slip the toe-covers over my shoes, mostly because the streets were still a little wet from yesterday's unending rain. I got out the house a few minutes early, so rode into the north wind pretty slowly, arriving at Lakeshore Drive a bit after 6 am. The WeMoRi group usually gets back to Marconi around 6:10 or so, so I rode over the Bayou St. John bridge and a bit farther east before turning around and heading back toward Marconi. Despite my slow speed, when I turned onto Marconi I couldn't see any sign of the group. The eastern end of Lakeshore Drive had been closed the day before because the strong north wind from the cold front had pushed a lot of lake water onto the street. I wondered if it was still closed. When I got down to Robt. E. Lee with still no sign of the group, or for that matter any other bike rider at all, I thought that perhaps they had turned around early on Lakeshore Drive because of a road closure and I'd missed them, so I headed down Marconi in the opposite direction of the ride, figuring I'd see them approaching at some point. I got all the way down to City Park Avenue without seeing anyone, so I turned around, somewhat surprised that apparently nobody had showed up for the ride that morning. I went back to Lakeshore Drive, made the loop around the fountain, and finally saw three other riders. As it turned out, that was all there had been of the WeMoRi and I'd just missed them because they were going more slowly than usual. The weather really wasn't all that bad. I was quite comfortable the whole time.

Low expected: 38°

In fact, I was probably more comfortable than all those guys dripping sweat all over themselves riding trainers and pretending to ride their bikes on pretend courses with other pretend riders on Zwift.

When I got home I was shocked to find the Sewerage & Water Board finally getting to work on that patch of mud they left in the road in front of my house when they fixed the water line leak last January. For this section of road that I would estimate at 15 feet square they had four trucks, two bulldozers, and six people.

So Cold

The week isn't looking too great for riding. Must be November.

There is nothing that will chill you to the bone like spending the day officiating a cyclocross race, except perhaps sitting on a bench high up in a football stadium on a cold, windy evening. As it turned out, I got to do both last Saturday. I also didn't get to ride my bike.

Saturday morning I pulled on my winter long-sleeve base layer, then a fleece pullover on top of that, and laced up my waterproof cyclocross officiating boots. I guess the temperature was, maybe, forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, but there was north wind blowing at about twenty miles per hour, and I knew that sitting at a table in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere down in Chalmette was going to get cold. I was not mistaken. There were times when it was hard to hit the right keys on the computer because my hand was so cold. Meanwhile, bike racers clad in summer skinsuits rode around us at the Swamp Otter Classic race down by the 40 Arpent Canal, which may lead you to ask, "WTF is an Arpent?" For that matter, you might also ask, "How on earth did you get trapped into being down in St. Bernard Parish, where a couple of my distant ancestors battled the British, two weekends in a row? Well, first things first...

Wikipedia says that "An arpent (French pronunciation: ​[aʁpɑ̃]) is a unit of length and a unit of area. It is a pre-metric French unit based on the Roman actus. It is used in Quebec, some areas of the United States that were part of French Louisiana, and in Mauritius and the Seychelles." So, apparently this little canal in the middle of nowhere must be old, French, and at some point around 7,680 feet long. Anyway, nowadays there a quite nice "wetlands observatory" there which, since it has bathrooms and as previously indicated is in the middle of nowhere, makes it a prime location for a cyclocross race.

Fortunately, the race went quite nicely and the ground wasn't very muddy or wet where we were, and the sun was out most of the time, so by cyclocross standards it was an exceptional day. Michelle and I officiated the racing that lasted until around 2:30, consumed a bag of leftover Halloween candy, and then I rushed back home, grabbed the ticket that Candy had left on the dining room table for me, and walked over to the Tulane football stadium where the Homecoming game was in it's first quarter. The game itself was fairly entertaining, as football goes, but after being chilled to the bone out at the 40 Arpent Canal, and then sitting motionless in the upper reaches of the stadium, I was just getting colder and colder as the game clock ticked down. By the end of the game, which came down to the last 10 seconds that weren't actually played thanks to that 10-second runoff rule, I was so cold I was shivering. It was definitely a long day by the time I got back home around 7 pm and sat down to post the cyclocross race results, and complete the post-event report. I hit the sack early because I was scheduled to officiate Sunday's cyclocross race up in Petal, MS, which is basically Hattiesburg, and thankfully only a couple of hours' drive away. I was glad that the race didn't start until 10 am because it was supposed to be around 39 degrees that morning. As it turned out, I never got uncomfortably cold on Sunday, probably thanks to the fact that the wind had died down considerably from the previous day. Even so, it was another long day of not riding. I left home around 6:30 am and got home around 6:30 pm.

This morning (Monday) the forecast looked bad, the streets were wet, but the radar looked OK, so I went out on the rain bike for a quick 20 miles on the levee before driving the car to work since I know it's going to be raining this evening. The rest of the week isn't looking too good and I think I'll probably be riding one of the WattBikes tomorrow. In fact, as I'm writing this, I got the following:

"Severe storms possible in NOLA this afternoon. A tornado watch is in effect until 7pm. Stay weather aware and review storm preparedness: ready.nola.gov/tornado"

And then, while at work on Monday, in the middle of a tornado watch and severe rainstorm, I got a call from Candy about this. By the time I walked over there I was completely soaked from the waist down since umbrellas don't work so well with horizontal rain. You know those fancy new granite curbs they installed downtown on Canal Street? They're razor-sharp, and yes, that's one of the tires I bought about a year ago when Danielle blew out two of them in a big pothole during a raging thunderstorm.

Alt-Giro to the End of the World

Quick and bad photo of the front group posing in front of the End of the Road sign -
trying to avoid pointing the camera directly into the rising sun.

I'd never done the "Tour da Parish" ride before. Now in its 3rd (I think) year, this is a charity type ride organized by St. Bernard Parish, and Howard Luna who is a council member there when he isn't surging off the front of the Giro Ride. St. Bernard parish comprises essentially the last strips of mostly dry land southeast of New Orleans that's not immediately adjacent to the Mississippi. As you might expect, the paucity of dry ground results in a similar paucity of paved roads, which in turn results in a ride featuring dead-ends and U-turns, one of which, down by Delacroix, has a big sign that reads appropriately, "End of the World." For the most part, these are not roads I'd go out of my way to ride, since they are mostly narrow 2-lane roads about six inches higher than the two bodies of water between which they are squeezed. On the other hand, if you want to see lots of shrimp boats and fishermen and duck hunters, it's like paradise.

With The Daughter in town for the week, I had wiggled my way out of officiating the weekend cyclocross races over in Baton Rouge, but hadn't conceded my local weekend morning rides. I knew that there probably wouldn't be a quorum for the Saturday Giro, since most of those guys were definitely going to be doing the Tour da Parish ride, effectively making it into the week's alt-Giro Ride. Besides, the Tulane riders were in need of another vehicle to get their riders down to "da parish."

So Saturday morning I picked up coffee, and then met up with the TUCA crew in front of "old" Bruff, and headed down to St. Bernard, arriving in plenty of time to register, pick up a number that wasn't even recorded, and head over to the road for the official start. I was careful to start near the front. I've done a few of these things before and, looking at the Giro horsepower in attendance, I knew it was going to get fast sooner or later. We were probably less than ten miles into the ride when I noticed the big guy in front of me who looked a little wobbly. I thought to myself, "that guy isn't going to be long for the front group," and starting looking for a way to move ahead of him where it seemed more safe. Just then I saw him ride straight into a big sharp pothole. Once the planet stopped shaking, I thought, "that's got to be a pinch-flat." Sure enough, a minute later he looked down at his rear tire as the last molecules of air were escaping. Then, naturally, he did what every uninitiated rider does under those circumstances. He hit the brakes in the middle of the bunch and came to a stop as about thirty riders swerved around him in various degrees of disbelief and/or surprise.

Lots of shrimp boats and crab traps down here.

Stationed mostly toward the back of the front group as it was slowly whittled down to 25 or 30 Giro riders, I found myself constantly needing to close gaps. Whoever was in front was basically attacking after every turn, so back where I was there would be a frantic 30 mph chase each and every time. At the Shell Beach U-turn, where the road changed from asphalt to rocks, the front of the group was attacking in the other direction before I even got to turn around. That resulted in a long solo chase for me. Apparently a couple of guys had ridden off the front, so the rest of the group was in chase mode, and I was trying to chase them all by my lonesome. Luckily, a couple of miles later they had to make a couple of turns and cross an old bridge, which allowed me to close the last little bit. By then I guess we were reasonably close to home. When we turned onto the 4-lane highway with only a few miles left, someone at the front put the hammer down, again chasing a couple of guys who had ridden off the front, and the whole group got strung out single-file going about 28 mph. A little while later someone a few riders ahead blew up and opened a gap, and the rider behind him didn't go around, and I knew we were in trouble. I rode up alongside and said, "Come on!" and ramped it up to 30 or so to start closing the gap. I took a long pull and then pulled over, only to find nobody there, so I ended up in no-mans-land. The group ahead was still going full-gas, so after another minute or two I knew I wasn't going to be able to close the widening gap and eased up to regroup with whatever was left of the back half of the original group. Fortunately, we were only a few miles from the end by then.

So it was actually a surprisingly fun ride despite all of the out-and-back segments, and I even got in a bit of intensity. That afternoon I spent a couple of hours taking down and cutting up a little dead tree that had fallen behind the garage, which of course means my back and arms will be sore for days.