Finishing Off 2018

Audubon Zoo Lights

I woke to the sound of wet tires on wet roads on New Year's Eve. I turned the alarm off without even looking out the window, although I admit that I checked the weather radar ten minutes later. There's always hope, you know. In this case, however, the thought of yet another wet ride on wet roads followed by cleaning the bike for, I think, the fourth day in a row, was just too much. I pulled the covers up over my head and didn't put my feet on the floor until at least 7 am. After a cup of coffee and a somewhat over-ripe banana I checked the radar again. It looked like there might be a window of an hour or two without significant rain. I rolled out from the house a bit after 8:30 on the old rain bike for an easy ride on the levee. Although I got a bit of light rain for the last five miles or so, I logged the final 26 miles of the year, nudging my annual mileage up to 12,391 - just a bit higher than my 2014 total of 12.379. It always amazes me how close my annual totals are. Over the past five years, my average works out to 12,131. Riding along the levee I noticed that the big old dead tree near the country club where the eagles often perch had apparently been blown down during the recent storms. Not to worry, though, as I saw both of the eagles perched on a nearby tree as I went by.

It was very busy in the kitchen

So the holidays went nicely. Danielle and Shannon were here for a week and a half. I got in some nice rides, even though a lot of them were wet and messy, and we're planning on a nice New Year's Day ride on the levee tomorrow out to the Spillway. After that I guess it will be back to the grind, but the past couple of weeks have provided a nice diversion.

We went to the Zoo to see their new Christmas lights display, which was fairly impressive. Then, right on queue, the dishwasher stopped working. Actually, it was working great but would hang with one minute left on the timer, apparently waiting for the water temperature to get up to the proper level, which wasn't happening. All indications are that it is a bad control board. With the impending holidays and no time to wait for a new $250 control board to arrive, we hustled over to Lowes and bought a new one, which of course wasn't cheap. I got to work installing it and, of course, discovered I needed a different fitting for the water supply connection. Naturally it was half an hour before closing time at Lowes, so I had to rush over there to get what I needed, but it all worked out and we were happily washing dishes later that night.

High Point - City Park

Christmas Day was over at my sister's house following a visit with Dad at Poydras Home. Candy had made something like five pies. There's still a lot left a week later. Also cookies. Also chocolate.

Christmas Eve Giro Ride Group

The weekend before Christmas I did three Giro Rides, including the Holiday Giro on Christmas Eve, so that was nice. By Monday's ride, though, it was getting pretty windy and the forecast for the rest of the week wasn't looking all that good. We did manage to get in the WeMoRi before the rains started, though. Thursday was super-windy, and there were only a couple other riders out, so we did a shorter levee ride, turning around at the Big Dip. It still felt like a workout, though. Friday morning was a wash-out, but the rain stopped in the afternoon so I went out for a long solo ride to Ormond and back. Everything was wet and dirty by the time I got back, but otherwise it was good. I wasn't expecting much of a turnout for the Saturday Giro, considering the threat of rain, wet roads, and holidays. By the time we started I'd already decided to turn back at the end of Lakeshore Drive. It was chilly and wet and I knew if I got rained on I'd be really uncomfortable. I didn't regret my decision. Again I had to wash the bike and lube the chain and throw my dirty clothes into the washer.

Dec. 30 Giro - Lots of fog, but not too cold.

That afternoon the weather improved a bit so we went out to City Park so I could explore the Couturie Forest trail which I hadn't seen since we used to do mountain bike races there. There's a big "hill" there that was originally a dump for debris from construction of the nearby I-610. Back when we rode mountain bikes there it was basically a pile of broken concrete and rebar and dirt. This was before mountain bikes had suspension. Also before City Park knew there was a trail back there. Now there's a "lookout" on top of it and nicely laid out trails with occasional signage and lots of newly planted trees. It was nice, although in a more civilized way than it used to be. Anyway, Danielle and I walked the trails while Candy walked a lap around the golf course and Shannon did a long run around the park.

Poydras Home Visit

While we were there we rain into Dustin and a few other riders who were still on the bikes from the Giro Ride. As it turned out, only two riders did the whole Giro that day, and they ended up riding around the city, eating pastries, and fixing flats. Later that afternoon we send Danielle, Shannon, and the two little dogs back off to Olympia and returned to a very quiet house.

It's almost 9:00 pm right now and I can hear fireworks all over the place. The streets are still wet and the temperature is in the 60s. The city is doing three or four separate fireworks displays this year. It remains to be seen whether I'll still be awake to hear the last one at midnight, but after that it will be back to the regular routine I guess, at least for six days until the Phynny Phorty Phellows and Twelfth Night Revelers kick off the Mardi Gras season!

Grey Winter Skies

Some days it's better to turn around and sit down with a cup of coffee to contemplate the meaning of life.

Friday morning started out chilly and windy. I knew that my usual Friday morning Tulane Coffee Ride routine was in serious jeopardy because it was exam week. Also chilly, windy and dark. I went out anyway and almost immediately regretted it. I was a little under-dressed, not so much for the temperature, but definitely for the strong and gusty wind. I continued on anyway, of course, just in case someone might show up. Nobody who gets out of a warm bed and goes out on the bike on such a day deserves to ride alone. Well, except for me I guess. It was no surprise that there was nobody there at the Reily Center for the coffee ride, so I just continued on through campus and into Audubon Park, and from there onto the levee bike path where I felt the full force of the northwest wind. I was pretty miserable and considered turning around immediately, but somehow talked myself into riding slowly out to the Huey P. Long bridge before turning around and making a bee line for the Zotz for coffee. There, I could see the clouds building up as predicted ahead of the next minor cold front. My Strava stats for the day?  An average speed of 12.9 mph, and a max of 19.2.

Saturday morning was considerably colder, and there was still a strong wind out of the west. I went out to Starbucks to meet up with the Giro Ride group, wondering what the turnout would be like. There were other things going on, of course, and the deeply overcast sky and strong wind were not particularly conducive to a big group anyway. Arriving around 6:30 I met up with Trevor, a visiting rider from somewhere in England who was here for a conference and had rented a bike from Bicycle Michael's in order to get in a couple of rides afterward. I was wearing a thermal base layer under a long-sleeve jersey. He was in basically summer kit plus arm-warmers. He said it felt like spring compared to what it was like back home. My quick assessment told me that if the ride got fast he was likely to be in just a bit over his head, but if it was just moderate and steady he'd probably do fine. Eventually other riders started rolling in, and my the time we left there was a smallish group that wasn't too unusual for this time of year. I noted, however, that there was nonetheless sufficient horsepower in attendance to make for a fast ride, especially considering that we'd have a pretty strong tailwind on Hayne Blvd. and Chef Highway. Tailwinds are fun unless you find yourself at the back where the draft doesn't really do you as much good as you think. On the way out on Lakeshore Drive I rolled up alongside Trevor and told him to expect someone to put the hammer down once we came down the overpass onto Hayne, which was exactly what happened. It was the last I saw of Trevor, among others, as I was struggling just to stay somewhere near the front as the pace settled in at around 30 mph. It stayed pretty much that way all the way out to Venetian Isles. Fortunately, Pat stayed with Trevor and I think they got back in with the group for a while on the way back. As fast as the ride had been on the way out, you'd have expected it to be a hard slog into the wind on the way back. It wasn't really, as nobody seemed willing to do too much work into the headwind. By the time I got home I was getting cold because of the lower effort level combined with the sweat generated on the way out. It wasn't until I had some hot soup that I really warmed up.

Post-ride on Sunday at the Lee Road Ballpark

So on Sunday I decided to go across the lake to do a little 50+ mile ride that Mignon had told me was happening. The weather was still chilly - around 50 degrees - but now there was a light mist falling that made it feel ten degrees colder. We had a small group of seven or eight, which was expected. I was hoping it would be a fairly easy ride. Perhaps it was the weather, but I just didn't feel like doing much intensity at all. Fortunately, everyone else was pretty much on the same page. I did a little work for a few miles on Hwy 439 before Sie Jenkins Road but that was about it. When we re-grouped at Sie Jenkins and Hwy 60, Darren took out a Pop-Tart. We rolled kind of slowly waiting for him to catch up and when I looked back just before we turned onto S. Choctaw I could see him coming, maybe a minute or so back. No problem, I thought, since we weren't going very hard at all. Well, that was the last we saw of him until much later. We figured that, for some reason, he must have decided to go straight down to Hwy. 16 and Enon, so we continued on. Well, when we got to Enon, there was Darren walking his bike. He'd flatted and not been able to fix it, so he'd gotten a ride with a passing pick-up truck down to Enon. His timing was perfect. We got his flat fixed and rolled in the remaining six or seven miles to the Ballpark. Afterward, I was surprised that I could feel some soreness in my quads.

Consistent, at least. Easy to see the broken collarbone years.

Anyway, it was a pretty chill weekend of riding for me, which felt about right for this time of year. Strava says I'm at 11,885 miles for the year with a couple of weeks left, so that's about normal. In fact, it's amazing how consistent my annual mileage has been. Although I make no effort to hit any particular target each year, I guess my routine is so set in stone that it just kind of comes out the same every year.

Cold and Wet Weekend Off the Bike

Grayson excited about finishing up his time at Tulane

Things were already looking bad for Saturday when Wes came by on Wednesday to pick up medals for the LAMBRA Cyclocross Championship. Although the championship races themselves were scheduled for Sunday, there was also a full slate of races planned for Saturday. The venue had already been moved at the last minute from Audubon Park to Behrman Park across the river. The latter was sure to be considerably sloppier, but tearing it up with knobby cyclocross tires would cause considerably less of a problem. We talked about the predicted 100% chance of rain and 20-30 mph winds and decided that if it still looked hopeless in the morning, the Saturday races would be cancelled. It did. They were.

I'd gone out Friday morning with the Tulane coffee ride group for the last coffee ride before final exams and Grayson's last coffee ride before graduating. The weather was still pretty nice. The cold front wasn't supposed to come through until Friday night. I wasn't holding out much hope for the Saturday Giro Ride, but it was looking like maybe a 20% chance it might be slipped in before the rain started. When I awoke on Saturday morning the streets were still dry. I looked at the radar for a long time and ultimately came to the unavoidable realization that it would definitely be raining by 7:30 or 8:00, and with the strong winds already blowing I figured that even riding over to Harrison Avenue for coffee would be futile. As it turned out, a few riders did show up. They even got in a few miles before, of course, it started raining. For myself, I figured it had been a good call. The rest of the day was wet and chilly as the cold front moved through.

Finish line all ready to go

By Sunday morning the rain was gone but I was scheduled to officiate the cyclocross races with Michelle. The temperature had dropped down to the low 40s and it was overcast and I knew it would be staying that way for most of the day. I also knew I was going to freeze my ass off sitting under a tent at the park where the ground was going to be just barely above the definition of swampland. I wore my warm cycling baselayer and slightly water-resistant boots. On the plus side, the races didn't start until 10:00 and the course was just 20 minutes away, so I had the luxury of making coffee, cooking a couple of eggs, and loading up the car in daylight.

Sloppy cyclocross on Sunday

I arrived at the course about two hours early to find just Wes and a lot of muck. He'd situated the start/finish on the opposite side of the course from the road since that was basically the only relatively dry ground. That was good, but it meant dragging all of the tents and assorted equipment through the muck. Three trips later, I set up the fence posts for the USAC snowfence, put up the tent and tabled, and camera, and got the computers ready. The night before I'd set up CrossMgr with the details for the five races, so everything was pretty much configured and ready to go. All I'd need to do is copy the registration data into Excel files so that the software could associate the bib numbers with the riders names. We got the first race lined up and ready and that's when I heard Wes telling them that the first lap was going to be a little shorter than the others. That was, I think, to avoid having the group encounter the barriers within the first 500 feet. As it turned out, the first lap was a minute and a half shorter than the rest, which totally messed up the software. CrossMgr uses the lap times to determine what the lap cards should read. It also uses them to predict when the leader(s) will be approaching the finish line on each lap. Well, the short first lap times completely screwed all of that up. We ended up starting the next races on the computer 1:30 earlier than the actual starts in order to compensate, which worked out reasonably well.

Anyway, by the time the second race was starting I was already shivering enough to make hitting the right keys on the computer kind of a hit-of-miss proposition. Fortunately the fields were fairly small, thanks no doubt to the weather, so it all worked out OK and we got the results done very quickly after each race. I didn't get home until around 4:30 or so, and got the results up on the website after grabbing something to eat. Bottom line: no bike riding for me last weekend.

The last couple of mornings have been around 40 degrees and windy. I rode on Monday mostly alone until I ran into Pat on the way back. This morning was a little less windy but felt at least as cold as Monday had. There were just three of us up on the levee, so we shortened the ride, turning around at the little dip. I think the temperatures will be generally warming up from here on out, although a little cold front coming through on Thursday has the forecast for that day showing 100% chance of rain with thunderstorms.

Wild Swings

It was a wet but surprisingly fast Giro Ride on Saturday

Here in New Orleans it's now the time of year for wild swings in the weather, and not surprisingly, ride turnouts. While the relatively recent popularity of computer game bike rides, aka Zwift, has definitely reduced the number of riders willing to show up to ride actual bikes in actual weather, I think that perhaps all that riding indoors also increases the level of, shall we say excitement, when the weather suddenly goes from dreary to spectacular. We certainly had samples of both last weekend.

I woke up Saturday morning to dark wet streets. Based on the forecast I hadn't really expected to be able to ride at all, but looking at the 5:45 am radar I couldn't see any rain in the immediate vicinity, so after a bit of deliberation, and resigning myself to a post-ride bike-cleaning session, I slipped out the door around 6 am into the 100% relative humidity. The streets were still wet from the earlier rain, but not so much to get me wet, at least at the slow speed I was going. Arriving at Starbucks twenty-five minutes later I wasn't too surprised to find no other bikes around. I was already thinking that the full Giro was probably not going to be a possibility since I don't much like being out on Chef Highway with just one or two others anyway. Eventually, as I sat outside sipping my coffee, a few more riders started to arrive, and by the time we rolled out at 7:00 I guess there was at least a dozen.

The Garmin showing its age

There was still no consensus as to whether to cut the ride short, but once we crossed the interstate, the virtual Rubicon of the Giro Ride, there was no turning back. Of course by then I was already fairly wet just from wheel spray, so when it started to really rain a few minutes later on Chef Highway, it didn't really matter much any more. I was glad I'd charged my retina-burning tail light, but even with that I kept thinking about that ride in Florida the week before where an inattentive drive had plowed into a group and killed two. On the other hand, I was feeling pretty good and ended up doing a fair amount of work.

The rain had stopped by the time we turned around for the ride back into an increasing headwind, which itself was delayed by a broken spoke on Bullard. All-in-all though, I really couldn't complain. On a day that I'd initially thought would be a complete rain-out, I'd gotten in a respectable workout and we'd done the full Giro distance. On the minus side, it became clear that my trusty old Garmin was no longer water proof. After I got home I opened up the case and set it in front of a fan for the rest of the day. I may have to start wrapping it in a plastic bag on rain days. It's got something over 80,000 miles on it by now and the rubber sides that hold the buttons in are cracked. I had to put a piece of electrical tape on one side about a  month ago when one of the buttons fell out entirely.

Sunday's weather was practically perfect

The forecast for Sunday was looking much better than Saturday. Rain was unlikely, the temperature would be in the 60s and 70s, and the wind would be essentially calm. We had whipped up a somewhat last-minute NOBC ride on the northshore, and given the nice weather forecast it was looking like we would have a good turnout. I had tried a new mapping website called Plot a Route that I really liked, especially since it allowed you to download a tcx file that included cue sheet data which lets the Garmin tell you how far it is to the next turn. Anyway, I drove over with Pat to the Lee Road Ballpark where we found I guess twenty riders in various stages of preparation for the planned 65 mile route.

We had a great group on Sunday.

Looking around, I could see that there were a few riders who were likely to be pushing the pace despite my request to keep things at a "winter ride" pace for the first 25 miles. Mignon told me she had been sick all week and was still recovering, but wanted to try and make the full ride, so we should be sure to wait for her if she got dropped when the pace got fast. Indeed, the pace got plenty fast once we got off of 1072 and onto Choctaw Road, but everybody was fine with waiting for those who hadn't made the split. The next section, from Hwy. 10 to Sie Jenkins Road, had been designated, at least by me, as the "fast" section, so I was a little surprised when everyone rode smoothly up the first of the three significant climbs there. When we got to the second climb I was on the front and put in a little effort over the top that not surprisingly split one or two off the back. I was feeling pretty good and really enjoyed the effort along this stretch, so much so that it seemed Sie Jenkins Rd. came up way too soon. Despite the fast pace, we hadn't put all that much time on the rest of the group, so after a brief regrouping we continued toward Bogalusa, made the two right turns, and headed back toward S. Choctaw. By then I had the arm-warmers in my pocket and was well into my water supply. The weather was about as good as it gets, so everybody was having a good ride. We continued regrouping the intersections and after a quick stop at Enon headed toward firetower hill that doesn't have a fire tower any more where I was fully expecting to see some action. I think a few of the guys were targeting a Strava segment there. I stuck with the surge about two-thirds of the way up, then dropped off a bit to come over the top about fifteen seconds back. Luckily they soon eased up a bit and I was able to regain contact, after which the pace gradually increased pretty much all the way back to the ballpark. It was one of the nicest northshore rides I've done in a while, so I was really glad I'd gone. The rest of this week is looking to be colder and then wetter, so situation normal for early December. By tomorrow morning the temperature is supposed to be back down to 47, and then Tuesday night a bit lower to 43 before a gradual warm-up again leading to rain on Friday and Saturday ahead of the next cold front. I'm supposed to be officiating cyclocross here in New Orleans on Saturday and Sunday. It's still too early to know for sure but it's looking like Saturday morning is going to be raining and windy and Sunday just cold and windy. Oh boy.