A Lull

We've been in kind of a lull since the Red Bluff fondo a few weeks ago, so not much to blog about other than a lot of routine early morning rides in the dark, plus the weekend Giro Rides. It has been in the mid to low fifties in the morning all week, which to me feels rather cold and is practically impossible to dress for. As we approach April the training rides are starting to get a little faster for a little longer, but unfortunately we don't have any really nearby races on the calendar until the end of April when we'll be hosting the Westbank Speed Festival at the NOLA Motorsports Park. This should be a fun day with a full slate of races on the track, plus the opportunity to try out Karting. It's actually a really expensive venue for us to use. Even with $35 entry fees, the club will probably net about $5 per rider at best.

Fortunately the riders who live on the Westbank stepped up and raised enough sponsorship to cover a nice little prizelist. Then, the week after that race we will be hosting the Time Trial Championships. In addition, I'm just about to submit the Tour de Louisiane event permit for June 8-9. I'm probably going to go with BikeReg for online registration for that one. USAC has finally worked out a deal with them, and even though everything won't be ready for official roll-out until June 1, I think most of what I need should be in place now. It'll be a little more work to get that all set up since, at the moment, I can't duplicate a prior year online registration setup from USAC so that it will migrate to BikeReg, although that is one of the things they are currently working on. Another interesting development, and one that should be in place in time for the Time Trial, is a long-awaited deal between USAT and USAC on some kind of joint racing license or membership thing. Hopefully that will make it easier for USAT riders to come do our Time Trial. We'll see.

Saturday Giro Ride stopped for a flat (didn't stop for the next one, though!)

Last weekend we had a couple of nice Giro Rides. With the weather warming up and the road season rapidly approaching, the number of riders is increasing, as is the speed. Even so, the Tuesday/Thursday morning levee rides are still a bit inconsistent, attendance-wise. On Tuesday it was chilly and quite windy. I think there were like four of us, and a couple had plausible excuses for turning around early. Then, this morning (Thursday) we had a big turnout, which for this ride is about a dozen, that made for a much faster ride. By the way, the Mississippi River level has started to drop a bit and the Corps of Engineers has started closing off the Bonnet Carre Spillway, so maybe I won't have to move stuff from the basement to the main floor after all!

Thursday morning returning on the levee

As usual, I've been loafing around most of this year around Zone 2, which is to say I'm doing just enough riding to keep from getting much fatter but not really enough to keep from getting dropped in a real race.  Situation normal. February and March are never good for me, and I don't usually feel like I've hit my stride until around mid-June or July. On the plus side, there a good slate of LAMBRA races in May and June, followed by the usual lull in July into August, but that does at least open up the opportunity to travel. Maybe.

Danielle flew in from Washington a few days ago. We have my niece's wedding this weekend, so lots of family will be arriving today and tomorrow. I think we have a bunch of family kind of camping out at our house overnight before they can get into a short term rental down the street, and there's a crawfish boil at my sister's house tonight. I'm going to have to take tomorrow off from work, I'm afraid, lest I appear to be more antisocial than I really am. Then next week Danielle defends her dissertation at LSUHSC before flying back to Olympia where she already has a job lined up with the Department of Health. The only bad thing is that the Tulane Cycling team has Conference Championships over in Denton TX this coming weekend and neither Dustin nor I can go because of weddings, so that's a little disappointing since they are offering a couple of non-collegiate races. Masters Nationals this year is in Colorado Springs, which would be a nice place to go, and a terrible place for me to race. I mean, going from sea level to 6,000 feet and expecting to survive repeated high-intensity efforts, uphill, is just ludicrous. I still have vivid memories of the 1980 nationals in Bisbee, Arizona where it was only around 3,000 feet but on a course that was straight uphill in one direction and straight downhill in the other. I felt great climbing on the first lap, came flying down the mountain at 55 mph with the group, and completely imploded halfway up the next lap having still not recovered from the first lap's climb. Lesson learned for sure. Anyway, the Crossroads Cycling Classic and LAMBRA Road Championships just decided to move to that same weekend. This morning Steve was talking about going up to the Alabama Cycling Classic, aka Sunny King, April 13-14, which would be fun but kind of a heavy lift for me right now. We'll see.

Mardi Gras to Red Bluff

Endymion, Saturday night

There's always so much going on this time of year that I tend to feel a little overwhelmed. Last Tuesday was Mardi Gras. For me, it wasn't really a very active Mardi Gras season. Between the weird weather for most of the week before, and I guess some general laziness, the only parades I made it out to see were Endymion on Saturday night and Thoth, the Sunday before Fat Tuesday.

For Endymion we went down to the Tidewater Building downtown as usual with a ton of food and drink for the annual get-together at Candy's office in the Psychiatry department. Although the weather was warm and there was no threat of rain, for some reason the turnout at the office was kind of weak this year. The parade, however, did not disappoint, so that was nice.

The weather forecasts leading up to that day had been calling for lots of rain, so it was kind of a last-minute decision to hop on the bike and ride down to Magazine Street next to Whole Foods. Candy needed to pick something up from Walgreen's, so she took a long hike to the Riverbend, and met me just as the parade was starting. It was kind of a strange parade, as it turned out. Because of the weather threat, they started an hour earlier than scheduled, and then pulled out all of the marching bands and dance groups and other fun walking entertainment, so it was just one float after the other. Back when I was a kid, of course, that would have been a dream come true, because all of the bands and things were nothing more than unwelcome interruptions to the far more important bead-catching activities. Anyway, the float riders were throwing tons of stuff, which is still fun to catch even at my advanced age, but I missed the other stuff a lot. So after a really quiet Monday after a cold front had come through, I was up early on Shrove Tuesday for a short little spin on the levee and a ride over to Audubon Park to watch the start of the annual Royal Run that very few people even know about. Somehow I think it's kind of cool that this tradition continues and you get a chance to see the king and queen of Rex before they get costumed and made-up, and if you want, you can get a Rex T-shirt and have some king cake and champagne.

Queen and King of Rex at the Royal Run, 7 am

After that I went back home and got cleaned up as the truck floats started to line up outside the back window along S. Claiborne Avenue. Our plan for the day was to ride bikes down to St. Charles Avenue near Napoleon, watch the Rex parade, and then walk down to the French Quarter. Although it was a bit cold in the morning, it warmed up a bit during the day and there was no chance of rain, so that was encouraging. We walked down to the "Rex House" that had recently suffered a devastating fire. Rex stops there every year to toast various folks while waiting for Zulu to clear Jackson Avenue. This year the family that has owned the house for about a century erected a big stand out in front of the gutted mansion just so that the tradition could continue unbroken.

For some reason, however, Rex was stalled there for what seemed like an hour, so we started our long walk downtown later than usual. By the time we got downtown we were hungry and decided to get something to eat at Manning's before venturing into the Quarter. Well, that was a big mistake. It took us at least an hour to get a couple of hamburgers, so by the time we made it into the French Quarter it was quite a bit later than usual. As a result, I missed all of my favorite walking groups like the Ducks and St. Ann krewe. Also, I just didn't see that many interesting photo opportunities during my brief stroll up and down Royal and Bourbon streets. It was already starting to get dark when we headed back uptown, and I guess it was 7:30 or 8:00 by the time we got home, having walked at least twelve or fourteen miles. Anyway, not one of my more exciting Mardi Gras experiences.

Rex a few hours later on St. Charles Avenue

With all of the Mardi Gras festivities behind me, the next thing on my calendar was the Red Bluff Gran Fondo. I'd been consulting with Bo for a few months on this new event, and knowing him I knew it would be well organized. The weather forecasts had been looking bad for the event for a few days, but seemed to be improving. Even so, I went there fully expecting to get rained on.

Down in the French Quarter on Royal Street

The roads between Columbia and Monticello up in Mississippi have been a favorite place for area cyclists to indulge in somewhat more brutal than usual training. There are lots of nice little climbs, mostly reasonably steep, combined with rough roads and little to no traffic. I rolled out of bed that Saturday morning around 4:45 am, pick up Gavin and Mignon around 5:30 and got up to Monticello a bit before 8 am for the 9 am group start. Mignon and I were registered for the full 102 mile route. Gavin, along with a number of other bike racers I know, were all registered for the shorter metric century, which guaranteed it would turn into a race. As it turned out, Gavin "won" the metric "not a race" with Dustin 2nd. We were probably only ten or fifteen miles into it when the group split, with mostly the more serious metric century riders in the front group and the rest of us in the second group. Along the way there were a number of flat tires thanks to the speed and road surfaces, which included a few very short segments of gravel. Knowing that I would be riding over 100 miles, and knowing the guys pushing the pace wouldn't be, I was just trying to conserve as much as possible without getting dropped. Fortunately, the group I was with was all on the same page and once the "race" group went off the front we settled down into a nice moderate pace.

Gavin and I did the Giro on Sunday. My legs were
still pretty sore.

At around 53 miles we came to the intersection where the metric century route split off from the full century route. There was a bit of confusion there, mostly because most riders hadn't really studied the course. Fortunately I'd downloaded the route onto my Garmin and was getting nice alerts and maps prior to the intersections, so I always knew which way to go. Anyway, I think most of the group I was with stopped at that intersection, which was also a rest stop with cookies and drinks and stuff, while made the right-hand turn to do the second half of the century ride. I was surprised to see only two other riders ahead of me do the same. I caught up to one (Drew from Oxford) and we started riding together at what I thought was a nice sustainable pace, fully expecting at least a few more riders to catch up to us. Well, what actually happened was that a pair of riders came flying up to us - one of them had flatted so the other had stayed with him - at race speed. The two of us latched onto what was essentially a 2-man team time trial for a few miles before it became obvious that the pace was going to be unsustainable for us, at which point we dropped off and continued our own 2-man paceline. That was essentially how we remained for the next 45 miles as our strength gradually began to fade. We were probably about 25 miles from the end when we decided to stop at a rest stop to refill on water. As we were standing there with the local volunteers filling our bottles and trying to give us all sorts of food, we saw a rider go by. He couldn't have been more than a minute or two behind us. Drew kind of rushed to get back on the bike, so I rushed with him. For the next ten or fifteen miles, which included about twenty turns and lots of neat little twisty roads with punchy little climbs, we watched him about 45 seconds ahead of us and wondered why he didn't just ease up for a second and wait for us. It was Cale Guidry from BG down in Thibodaux, who I knew was a strong rider who was never afraid to be out in the wind, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, but I wasn't really in race mode for this and the extra wheel would have been nice. Anyway, we were maybe ten miles from the end when we suddenly caught him. I thought he would latch onto us since, by that time, we were not going very fast and were climbing even the smallest hills in the lowest gears we had. As it turned out, his legs were cramping up and he limped in a couple of minutes behind us.

Anyway, we ended up finishing 4th and 5th, which would have been impressive if there had been more riders doing the full century (52 finished), but really most of the horsepower had done the shorter route as a race. Those two rider who had passed us at around 50 miles and the rider who had been ahead of them apparently got together eventually and they finished over 20 minutes ahead of us. My legs were pretty shattered by the time we finished and even on Monday were still achy. We waited around for Mignon, who was the 3rd woman to finish, ate pulled pork and stuff, and tried to re-hydrate before heading home, arriving back in town just after dark without ever having seen a drop of rain. The only problem with that was that I'd neglected to put on any sunscreen, so ended up with a mild and very unexpected sunburn. So in our car we had the winner of the metric century, 4th or 5th in the full century, and 3rd in the Women's full century. [Full results]