Punctures and Precip

It had been so long since I'd flatted that I was wondering if my CO2 cartridges had expiration dates. I'd just left the house a couple of minutes earlier on very dark Monday morning, looking forward to an easy twenty miles on the levee. The bike lane along Carrollton was littered with Oak tree debris from Olga, the surprise tropical depression that had hit with winds easily twice what the weather service had predicted. My headlight was helping, but with the occasional car driving past me I had little choice but to ride through the mess and hope there wasn't something big enough to bring me down. I wasn't even to Willow Street when I felt the rear tire suddenly go flat. Up ahead I could see the bright light of the GNO Cyclery sign, so I limped a couple of blocks more and pulled into the parking lot. There was no sign of anything left in the tire that might have caused the puncture, so I put in a new (ok, all my spare tubes are patched, so not technically "new") inner tube, inflated the tire and continued. All was well for the rest of the ride, although it did get me to wondering just many miles that tire had on it.

This morning I was greeted with damp roads from an earlier shower and a weather radar image that looked like it would be OK for the next hour or two before the predicted three-days of rain would start. I was running about five minutes early, which was fortunate because as soon as I got up to the meeting spot on the levee, a train came by that would have otherwise stopped me in my tracks. At 6 am there were four of us, I think, and we knew that a couple of the regulars weren't planning on riding that day, so we went ahead, hoping we hadn't left anyone stranded on the other side of the train tracks.

There was a bit of wind, but nothing too severe, and once we got warmed up the pace was nice and steady. I have no idea what the speed was since it was too dark to read the computer, but probably around 23, with is fairly typical. By the time we were upriver of Jefferson Parish, though, it was just Rich and me. I always feel sorry for him when this happens since I know I don't offer much draft, even to normal people, and Rich is a fair bit taller than normal. Anyway, we kept up a pretty steady pace out to The Dip where we planned to turn back. Naturally, as soon as we got there, at the farthest point from home, we started to feel a few raindrops. That kind of kept us pushing the pace a bit on the way back, but fortunately we never got anything heavy enough to qualify as "rain" until the last few miles. We were just getting to the Jefferson Playground when my rear tire suddenly went flat. I immediately wondered if I'd missed something embedded in the tread the day before, but when I checked it I quickly discovered a piece of metal, like a staple, sticking out of it. I did a quick inner tube change and we continued on. I was thinking I'd get back home just before it started to really rain. Then the tire went flat again just as I was turning off of the bike path and going down to River Road which was at a standstill because of another train. So I rode up to the tracks and immediately found another metal staple sticking out of the tire. The train cleared, so Rich headed home after making sure I had another tube and CO2. By the time I got the tire fixed there was a steady stream of cars filled with frustrated drivers going both ways, so rather than try and cross the tracks right there, I instead rode in the opposite direction to Monticello and from there to Willow, since I'd have been there forever trying to get across both lanes. So if flats come in 3s, I guess I should be good for a while now!

By the time I got home it was raining, so I did end up getting somewhat wet. I had to get the dog to the Vet for a $600 checkup, and drop The Wife off for her own doctor's appointment, and then go back home to drop off the dog and then back to Baptist to pick up Candy to drive in to work, all in the rain of course. On the plus side, everything went quickly and I was at work just a bit after 10 am.

Winter Creeps Closer

A view of the Spillway road, currently closed to traffic, from my Saturday ride.

Well, we survived the unexpectedly strong winds and rains last Friday night that caused some power outages and took down some trees and power poles during the night. I had already written off the Saturday Giro Ride, so I slept an extra hour or so, which was harder than it might seem given my regular routine. When I did finally get up and make coffee and look out the window I was a little surprised to see that the bad weather, which was another little cold front, had gone through more quickly than predicted and the roads were already starting to dry out. Granted, there was still the matter of a 15 mph wind, but the temperature wasn't supposed to start dropping until afternoon, so by 9:00 I decided to head out for a 50 mile solo ride to the Spillway and back along the levee bike path. Although the sun was starting to peek out through the breaks in the clouds when I started, most of the ride was under a fairly overcast grey sky. The wind was mostly westerly, so the whole way out was more headwind than anything else, but fortunately the trees along the batture were blocking much of the crosswind component. Along the way I saw three places where River Road was closed because of power lines that had come down. In one case a pole with a transformer had just snapped off. The others were poles that had been pushed over enough that the power lines were too low to make it safe for vehicles to pass under them. Anyway, it was a nice kind of relaxed ride despite the wind. I checked out the Spillway road since we may be taking it for the Varsity to Varsity ride in a couple of weeks. They have it barricaded with those big cement barricades, and I know it's washed out in a place or two, but otherwise it looks rideable. Hopefully nobody will have a problem with us riding/walking it so we don't have to ride on the antique bridge that was designed for Model T Ford car widths.

The Sunday Giro had a good group that seemed to be
happy with a more moderate pace than usual.

Sunday was fairly chilly, and as I rode out to the Giro Ride I was wishing I'd worn a light vest. Of course once the group got going on Hayne the temperature was no longer an issue. It turned out to be a fairly moderate Giro Ride for some reason. The work along Chef highway seems to be progressing, and for a couple of miles on the way out we had nice fresh asphalt in the right lane rather than the washboard that is left when the scrape off the old surface. Perhaps by next week the whole right lane on the way out will be smooth. Wishful thinking. Next Saturday is the annual Tour da Parish ride that attracts most of the Giro Ride group, so I guess I'll be doing that. I also guess I'll be missing a day or two of riding mid-week as yet another cold front pushes through Tuesday through Thursday. With Saturday's low temperature currently predicted to be 47 with a 13 mph wind, it's going to be tough to decide what to wear. It'll probably be 60 by the end, so shorts or knickers, arm-warmers or long sleeves, vest or no vest. Most likely I'll opt to freeze for the first half hour in order to be more comfortable later. Complicating things a bit is the fact that we are having our Halloween party the day after Halloween, aka Dia de los Muertos, which may make getting up early on Saturday a little harder than usual. Then on Sunday I'm scheduled to officiate the Swamplocross cyclocross race on the Westbank when it will at least be slightly warmer. I'll probably freeze anyway since I'll mostly be just standing there trying to keep track of lapped riders all morning.

Looking kind of sketchy until Friday, then significantly cooler

Anyway, it's looking like winter is creeping closer and closer with the cold fronts getting more frequent. This will be the first weekend with low temperatures predicted to be in the upper 40s, which may or may not actually happen in the city itself where we get a little extra warmth from the lake water. Even so, it's getting to be time to look for the base layers and arm warmers and vests and gloves that haven't seen the light of day since last March. On the plus side, we switch back to standard time on Sunday, so at least it won't be so dark on the morning rides.

More Rain

Friday afternoon in New Orleans - view from the westbank looking toward downtown

Fall weather can be irritatingly inconsistent around here, especially now that we are starting to see the cold fronts making it all the way to New Orleans, one after the other. With the Gulf of Mexico still relatively warm, the city seems to be nicely positioned where the cold fronts run smack into the warm Gulf air. The predictably  unpredictable result, of course, is rain and more rain, until there's no more rain and the winds turn to the north and the sky turns blue and the temperature plummets, which in New Orleans means it drops into the 50s, accompanied by a day or two of 15 mph winds. At the moment we have a Tropical Depression named TD #17 (they apparently don't merit more colorful names if they don't spin up to the correct wind speeds) drifting toward us from the southeast, while at the same time a cold front is inching its way down from the northwest. It's been raining since about 2 am this morning, and probably won't stop raining until some time on Saturday when the northwest winds start to overwhelm the southwest winds. This would all be well and good if I'd been training and racing hard for a couple of weeks and could benefit from a day or two off the bike. This morning I turned off the alarm at 5:25 am and didn't even get out of bed until almost 7:00. The wife has some kind of stomach thing hanging on from yesterday so she wasn't going to go to work. On the plus side, that meant I could take the car, even though parking at the Tidewater garage meant I'd still have a four block walk in the rain to my building on Poydras. As luck would have it, however, when I tried to turn off of Canal Street onto LaSalle, where the entrance to the garage is, I found the street completely flooded, which seems to happen with alarming regularity lately. I decided to park in the garage at my office, which will cost something like $10, and then turned on the wrong block and ended up parking in the garage across the street from my building. Oh well. Closer than four blocks anyway. So I'm pretty sure I won't be riding tomorrow morning and somewhat doubtful I'll be riding tomorrow afternoon. Sunday should be nice if you don't mind the mid-50s temperature. Remarkably, the wind is supposed to be only 3 mph by then.

Nashville to New Orleans

Yesterday on the levee ride it was dark all the way out to Ormond. We still have another week or so until the time change, and I'm not all that comfortable on the bike path in the dark where we often run up on un-reflectorized pedestrians quite suddenly. Yesterday, on the way back, we came up on a couple of cyclo-tourists from Nashville TN who were on the last leg of their trip to New Orleans. Lucky for them that today wasn't their last day, because it would have been miserable!

This weekend there are cyclocross races up in Jackson/Ridgeland. I'm quite grateful that I'm not scheduled to officiate those. I suppose that turnout tomorrow will be on the low side despite the 88 entries since I suspect Saturday will be a bit of a sloppy mess that might be fun if you're riding but could be kind of miserable if you're officiating for five hours with eight race groups and twenty-one different age and skill categories. Also, 49 of those entries are Juniors since Rolando runs a popular kids' cyclocross series there.

Right now it's Friday afternoon and I'm waiting on a call from someone in Capital Projects who has been successfully dodging me for over a week despite three emails and a text message, so that I can start work on a $1M state capital outlay request that is due in a week.

Weekend at the Oval

The group at the velodrome last Sunday. Should be some nice photos from Leadingham Photography soon.

Last weekend we had the annual LAMBRA track championship at the Baton Rouge Velodrome. As usual, this was a very low-key affair, made even lower by the lackluster 10-rider turnout, which was inexplicably lower than most of the weeknight series races. Even more inexplicable was the fact that of those ten (well technically 11 since two raced only one day each), only two were from Baton Rouge. The weather was great, the races were fun, and things went smoothly thanks to Dustin and Will and the guy from BREC whose name I have of course already forgotten. I was there missing a weekend of riding in order to be the official, which is just as time-consuming if there are forty riders or ten. Saturday morning I was up at 5:45 and left home a bit before 6:30 am after loading a table, the finish camera, and various other officiating items into the car. I also threw the track bike on top of it all so I could ride around in little ovals in-between the morning and afternoon sessions. I guess I got back home that night around 9 or 9:30. Fortunately, Sunday had only a morning session, so I was back in New Orleans a lot sooner. It was a shame that the turnout was so low, but there's hope. We met with a couple of people from BREC who help manage the park there and they were fairly encouraging about the possibility of setting up an MOU with the Baton Rouge Velodrome Association (once we get it re-instated with the Louisiana Secretary of State since nobody sent in the required annual reports for the past couple of  years). Technically, if you charge an entry fee for anything at the park, and it's not something that is being run by BREC itself, there's a big rental fee you're supposed to pay, not that anyone has ever collected a fee for any of the track events we've put on for the past 35 years or so. We are hopeful we can work out an MOU where the events are BREC events that the Velodrome Association puts on under USAC event permits. Where the money goes isn't really an issue as long as the USAC insurance and permit fees, and maybe even the officials, get paid. Should be interesting.

Pre-dawn Fall rides are sometimes lonely

So Monday morning I headed out the door earlier than usual for a Monday, which is to say before 6 am, in the dark, because a cold front was headed our way and it was supposed to be raining all day. That worked out OK and I got in a nice enough solo ride, basically before the sun came up. It did indeed rain most of the day. The front came through overnight leaving us with a windy and somewhat cooler morning today, if you call 65F cool. I was running a bit late in the morning and rushed over to the levee for the 6 am ride only to find it deserted. I guess the 15 mph wind scared everyone away?  I had a pretty nice ride anyway, and the wind wasn't much of a problem since I was going mostly 19 mph and the wind was mostly crosswind. One thing about these early morning rides a few weeks before we set our clocks back is that we get to see some nice sunrises. Tomorrow morning is supposed to be 58 or 59 degrees at WeMoRi time, so it may perhaps be the first time this fall I'll indulge in a base layer and actual arm-warmers. There are cyclocross races up in Jackson/Ridgeland this weekend. Hopefully Ricky has enough help lined up for those and I can stay in town and actually ride my bike a bit. At work I'm in 'hurry up and wait' mode, fully expecting a fire drill, mostly on my part, for the last week of the month in order to get a capital outlay request ready before Nov. 1.

The next USAC Local Associations conference call has been postponed twice, so I assume USAC hasn't quite finished working out what their plan for the Local Associations is going to be for next year. I'm expecting there will be some drama there, although for LAMBRA it probably won't be as critical as it might be for some larger associations that have larger budgets. We're just now starting to collect 2020 race dates for the planning calendar, and some events have already submitted their USAC 2020 event permit requests, although none of those have been approved yet because USAC hasn't finalized the fee structure. USAC has a new president/CEO this year, so things could change. Over in Covington where we do the Tour de Louisiane's criterium, there's a new Mayor, so hopefully we won't run into any problems holding the race there in June. Right now we're (as in the NOBC) planning on doing the NOLA Motorsports Park race again, plus the Tour de La. We could do the Time Trial as well but I don't want to "claim" that event if someone else really, really wants to promote it. At the moment, we don't know where the LAMBRA championship events will be - road, time trial, criterium, cyclocross, track, time trial, team time trial. Hopefully we can get some of that worked out over the next month or so in order to put at least a preliminary calendar out there.

Change in the Air

Bald Eagles in Kenner along the river levee bike path.

We felt the first raindrops at precisely 6:45 am as Christian, Judd and I were doing a little cool-down after the 5:45 am WeMoRi. It had been a fairly easy WeMoRi for some reason, so I'd only had a few brief bits of intensity (OK, yeah, I never really tried to go to the front) except for the last couple of miles when Jeff sat on the front for a long time just hammering before Judd came around with me on his wheel. Then, about 200 meters before the finish, Judd unexpectedly sat up just when I thought he was about to go for it. Turned out he had misjudged where the finish was. It was still rather dark because of cloud cover and, well, the fact that the sun wasn't up yet. When I'd looked at the radar before leaving home, I thought I'd be able to do the ride and get back home before the nasty-looking line of rain ahead of the cold front got here. It was now clear that my estimate had been a bit optimistic. I turned around quickly and rushed down Marconi as the occasional raindrops turned into a light rain, checking my tail light periodically because it has been known to turn itself off when it gets really wet.

Not a fan of this setup

The city started tearing up part of Marconi near City Park Avenue a couple of days ago, and although that would have been my shortest route home, I decided it would be a lot safer to go through City Park and head down Jeff. Davis instead. I'm not a huge fan of what they plan on doing on that section of Marconi because it's going to be a problem for group rides unless you're OK with 25 people going 30 mph down a two-way bike lane where they're trapped between parked cars, plastic road furniture, and the curb (no idea how the RTA bus is supposed to cross over all of that to pick up passengers). We'll probably end up riding in the one remaining car lane and pissing off the drivers. At least there should finally be some nice smooth asphalt along there. Fortunately the heavy rainstorms that had shown up on radar earlier had evolved into just some light to moderate rain, so I arrived back home twenty minutes later quite wet but not fully soaked. This was our second cool front in a couple of weeks, so it's now looking like Fall is inevitable. The low tomorrow morning is supposed to be around 62F, which qualifies as pretty cool around here although perhaps not quite cool enough to mount a full-on search for last year's misplaced arm-warmers.

No, that's not how it works.

We broke down and bought a new washer and dryer set last week at Lowes. Pretty standard stuff despite costing over $1,000, but the dryer has this "steam" cycle that requires a water line, and since the washer and dryer down in the basement are separated by a big old cracked and leaky cement double sink, the hose wasn't long enough. Just as well, though, because the guys from Lowes who showed up to install the stuff didn't have a clue what they were doing (I had to read him the instructions at one point). After they left I discovered that they hadn't bothered to level either machine and had, in fact, left the feet for the dryer sitting on top of the dryer. That was lucky, I guess, because when I pulled it out to install the feet I immediately noticed that they hadn't put the cable clamp on the power supply. That would have eventually rubbed through the insulation and shorted out, electrocuted someone, and/or burned down the house. Worse, they'd apparently taken the clamp with them, so I had to go find one and install it, re-install the vent pipe that hadn't been installed correctly in the first place, and then spend quite a while on the floor leveling the washer and dryer, after which I ordered a 12 foot water supply hose since they had none at the store. It would have been a lot easier if I'd just had them take the washer and dryer out of the boxes and leave them in the basement for me to install.

A few minutes at Zotz before heading home

Last Friday I went out for a solo recovery ride along the levee (it was Fall Break at Tulane so no regular coffee ride that week) and saw two sets of bald eagles along the way. I don't know where they hide during the summer, but I always start to see them along the river this time of year. Naturally I stopped and tried to get a photo or two. Seeing them is a sure sign that the weather is starting to change. Don't get me wrong, though. We probably won't have anything that qualifies as "Cold" for another month or more, but at least the early mornings should be noticeably cooler. I just wish the switch back to standard time came earlier because right now it's pretty dark for most of my morning rides, and I am never comfortable in a paceline on the levee bike path in the dark even though I leave an extra bike length or two ahead of me. Even with the super-bright headlights that most of us have now, un-lit pedestrians and bikes still catch us by surprise sometimes.

This was clearly an engineering disaster that never should have happened. How do you take down those
cranes and demolish the building in the middle of downtown?

Last weekend I rode back-to-back Giro Rides and crawled around under the shrubbery in front of the house putting up Halloween decorations. Not too exciting, although lots of stuff has been going on around here. For one, we had the collapse of a new hotel they were building on Canal Street just a couple of blocks down from Tulane's Tidewater building. Three people were killed - they're still looking for one of them - and they haven't figured out yet what to do with the building and the two big cranes that are now both damaged and unsupported. A big area around the site has been evacuated, and numerous streets are closed, in case more of it collapses or one of the cranes comes crashing down.

New plumbing to replace the blown-out section
of 110-year-old water pipe under Spruce Street.

Meanwhile, a few blocks from home on Spruce Street, a big 48" water main exploded, flooding streets and resulting in a boil water advisory for a couple of days for a huge swatch of uptown New Orleans.

There was a whole blow-up at the cyclocross race over in Lafayette last weekend. I was kind of glad I hadn't gone. An invisible grass-covered hole just after the start took Kenneth down and apparently he got up and started cursing at the race director and such, which put the race director on the defensive, which just made things worse, and I guess they argued about who should have known about the hole and who should get his money back and that kind of thing. Not that unusual, really, but I guess it went on longer than normal and maybe started to escalate. With all of that going on, the woman from ULL who was there because it was being held on university property inexplicably freaked out and called campus police, which made everything ten times worse and I guess must have freaked Kenneth out, being one of only a couple of black guys there, with an unknown white police officer and all. His team stepped up to defend him against some sort of fear of racist actions that, as far as I can tell, didn't actually materialize, but I guess it's easy to jump to conclusions nowadays when there's a white police officer questioning a black man, and they all left which left only one or two riders for the Cat. 1/2/3 race, which was then cancelled. They then posted something on FB calling the promoter's behavior racist, which I think was a bit of a stretch, if not flat-out libel, under the circumstances (I called him on Monday to find out what the hell happened) since he apparently wasn't the one who called the police or asked Kenneth to leave, and I have to assume he isn't entirely insensitive to the issues involved since his girlfriend is mixed race. Anyway, after a LAMBRA conference call Townsend posted kind of long reminder on the LAMBRA page about course design and proper conduct at races that was kind of a sensitivity training reminder at the end, which I read but didn't comment on and which predictably led to a lot of back-and-forth commenting as always happens on social media. I decided to stay out of it on Facebook since I wasn't there and really, it would have been pointless. The area racing community for the most part, and certainly in New Orleans, has always been welcoming to anyone interested in racing, going back at least 30 or 35 years when Carl Cook and Kendrick Perry and Eddie Padilla were racing here. I lost track of Carl and his son a long time ago. I suspect they moved because of work. Anyway, the whole thing reminds me a bit of the Mike William incident back in the 90s with the crash in the sprint, foul language in front of spectators and children, accusations and subsequent disqualification from the series. Of course, in this case some colorful words after such an unexpected kind of crash are understandable, but the whole thing should have been resolved with a couple of apologies, a refund, and a handshake.