Mid-summer in the Mid-south

The July 4th Giro Ride

Last week was hot, and as my monthly electricity bill glides above the $250 mark, thanks to certain members of the household who insist on chilling the bedroom to 68 degrees when it's 85 outside and then sleeping under a comforter, everyone is starting to feel the burn. The 4th of July saw a fairly big group show up for a "holiday Giro" ride, and despite the 7 a.m. starting time it was already scorching by the time I got back home a bit before 10. I was happy to get in the workout, of course, but it took me a few hours in the air-conditioning to recover.

After an easy ride on Friday, I was looking at a double-Giro weekend since there didn't seem to be much else on offer and my afternoons were going to be booked anyway. I've been doing most of my rides with just two small water bottles because they're so much easier to deal with in my small 50cm Bianchi frame. In fact, even a small bottle scrapes along the underside of the top tube when I pull it out of the seat tube cage. I think it's about time to switch to the big bottles, at least for the down tube cage, though, because I'm easily going through all my water on a 2.5 hr. ride despite the 1970's ear water-rationing habit I acquired back when big water bottles didn't even exist. Saturday's Giro turned out to be pretty fast despite the temperature, which was well into the 90 by the time I got home. I think we averaged over 26 mph on the way out. As often happens this time of year, the pace on the return trip was considerably slower in response to the temperature which was considerably higher. To complicate things, the group had two flats on the way back, and I use the term "group" loosely in this case since a fair contingent didn't stick around for both of them.

Once I got my moderately dehydrated self back home I decided it was going to be my only chance for a while to cut down some more of the little trees and stuff that have grown up along I barely made a dent in the problem, I managed to go through about five cans of soft drinks in the process, an amount that clearly left me with a hydration deficit for the rest of the evening.

Saturday's Giro heading out on Lakeshore Drive before the heat had taken its toll

So after flirting with heat exhaustion all day Saturday I naturally headed out again Sunday morning for the third Giro Ride in four days, fueled by a cup of Starbucks iced coffee super-saturated with sugar. It would prove to be insufficient. Although the Sunday group was smaller than Saturday's, which I'd estimate to have been around 45, you couldn't tell from the pace on the way out. With three or four TT bikes and a light tailwind, just staying in the paceline behind the rotation would prove to be a more than adequate workout. I showed the same 26+ mph average for the outward bound 15 or 18 or whatever mile stretch. It was, however, even hotter than Saturday and with fewer riders I was definitely doing more work, although you'll just have to take my word for it since my hrm battery gave out along the way.

The return trip was a whole different story, though. I think that everyone must have been pretty burned out. As I usually do at the turnaround, I started back at an easy pace while the rest of the crew hung out for a minute under shade of the solitary little tree out there in the Venetian Isles marshland that has miraculously not been killed by urine poisoning. There were a couple of riders up ahead somewhere, but I wasn't in a hurry since I knew the bunch would be coming up on me from behind pretty soon anyway as usual. I soon found myself in a 3-rider group with a rider on a TT bike and Mike Williams, also on a TT bike (this was after Mike had passed me with the comment, "That all ya got?")  Now, being in a group with two riders on TT bikes, and fully expecting the group to come flying past at 30 mph at any moment, I wasn't taking any pulls. Every now and then I'd look back, surprised that I couldn't see the group yet. We rode like that at a fairly steady 24 mph all the way to I-510, and I still couldn't see the group. I figured someone must have flatted or something. The other two rider inexplicably went straight on Chef, but I turned onto 510 which is the normal route, and backed off to a leisurely pace as I waited for the missing group which finally showed up. As it turned out, nobody had flatted. They had just reached a group consensus to take it easy.

Not exactly pin-point accuracy at the moment

So once again I got back home pretty dehydrated. A few hours later We went over to Audubon Zoo for the welcoming party for the new Psychiatry Residents. It was held in the outside party area that the Zoo rents out, which thankfully has a roof and fans and food and drink and, in this case, snoballs. Even so, and despite my best efforts to not move from my chair, it was another few hours of being hot and sweaty, albeit with the occasional glass of wine and cup of snoball and hot-dog and salad.

I think I fell asleep around 8:30.

Mike's page is always entertaining because he gets
so excited about this stuff.

Meanwhile, the weather forecasters are getting excited about the first potential tropical depression, which is expected to maybe develop in the northern Gulf in a few days once the big high pressure area that has been causing all this heat starts to move out of the way. At the moment, all bets are off for Thursday through Saturday. Could be fine. Could be rain. Could be a tropical depression. Could be a Tropical Storm. It just depends on which computer model you like this year.