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Saturday's Independence Ride with the Tulane krewe

After a week of weekdays with two rained-out morning rides, I was looking forward to the weekend, even though morning temperatures would be a bit on the chilly side. Fortunately, there was a Tulane ride starting at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday up in Independence, and then on Sunday the 8:30 Northshore Winter Training Ride.

Saturday morning I was up considerably earlier than I needed to be, which gave me time to actually cook a couple of eggs for breakfast before riding over to Kaitlyn's place for a ride. By the time we got to Independence, about an hour's drive away, the sky was clear, there was a light wind, and it was still pretty cold. The forecast, however, was telling me it would be at least 20 degrees warmer by the time we finished. Naturally, I over-dressed anyway, even though I intentionally went lighter than I might have if I'd been doing a solo ride. This ride was mostly an easy to moderate speed, and I was spending a lot of time in the draft because I knew I'd be riding around 70 on the Sunday northshore ride. Still, you can draft all you want, but if there are hills involved you know that (a) you are going to have to do some work anyway, and (b) somebody's going to attack somewhere and make it hard, at least for a while. We were only a few miles into the ride when Kaitlyn's rear derailleur cable broke. It was the typical Shimano break up inside the shifter. Nobody had a multi-tool with a screwdriver, but luckily there was a crushed soda can on the side of the road and Dustin was able to use the pull-tab as a screwdriver, so we got the derailleur moved over to the 14 or something a little more manageable and rolled on. As expected the temperature quickly rose from the low 40s to the upper 60s during the course of the ride, and I got back to the car with full pockets and a very sweaty base layer. All-in-all it was still a good ride and I was a little surprised that my legs felt a bit sore later that day.

Northshore ride heading out toward Enon

Sunday's northshore ride also started at 8:30 a.m. and although it was probably a few degrees colder than it had been on Saturday when we started, it was also probably a few degrees warmer when we finished. This weekend we had a small turnout, perhaps due to it being Superbowl day. I refuse to believe that the one mile of easy gravel on the route scared anyone away. I think we had nine riders on hand for the start, and the pace was good and steady.

My favorite kind of "gravel" with very little actual gravel

I'd mapped out a new route that included some time on La. 16, Poplarhead Road, Wardline Road, Isabel Swamp Road, and a loop around the old road course on Old Military and Stafford. Although we dropped a couple of people on the fast stretches, nobody was ever more than a minute or so behind, so we never had to wait long to re-group. When we got down to the split to Hwy. 16, Todd and all but three of us decided they didn't want to ride the one mile of gravel on Isabel Swamp Road and instead went east all the way out to Sun where they could cross the Bogue Chitto bridge there. The distance would be about the same either way. So anyway, Randy, Ty and I headed down to Isabel to cross the river there. As it turned out, the unpaved section of Isabel Swamp Road was nice hard-packed fast dirt. It was arguably better than some of the paved roads.

By the time we were halfway around the old road race course I was definitely starting to feel the effects of two days of riding on roads that weren't flat. My legs were starting to hurt, but otherwise I was feeling fine. We ended up taking it pretty easy for the last fifteen miles or so.

After missing two days of riding, I was still fairly pleased with 242 miles for the week, which was maybe 30 or 40 fewer than I'd have liked. The spectacular riding weather on Saturday and Sunday definitely took the sting out of those rained-out days, though.

January 27

Meanwhile, I should note that the river is fairly high lately thanks to all the rain upriver. It's not much different that it was last year at this time, which isn't really good news. Hopefully it will have a chance to drop down before the snow up north starts to melt.