Weekend Miles

February in New Orleans

I'm sitting here at the office on February 11, looking out the window at partly cloudy skies, trying to get a handle on all I need to get done in the next few weeks. The temperature outside is a balmy 80° F, which is pretty warm even for New Orleans. The Azaleas at the house are all blooming, and I've been riding in summer kit for the past two days.

The Saturday Giro heading back onto I-510 because the service roads are still closed off by the city

Of course, it wasn't like that last week, which featured another couple of rides on wet streets and a day without a ride because of rain. So I was happy to see the weekend forecast calling for warmer weather and no rain. Saturday's Giro Ride had a smaller turnout than usual. There were a lot of options on the table last weekend - a few group rides, a gravel race in MS, and a stage race of sorts in TX.

A small Giro Ride by no means an easy Giro Ride. My plan to take it easy in anticipation of a long ride on the northshore on Sunday went out the window pretty quickly, and despite my best efforts I did a bit more work than I'd have liked under the circumstances. I was almost happy when Rob flatted right after the Goodyear sprint and everyone stopped. He was kind of lucky that a number of us stopped because his spare tube leaked and he ran out of CO2. It took a while to get him rolling again with various difficulties involving the tire, the tube(s), and the inflators. Anyway, it was a good ride and although I did a little more work than I'd planned, I wasn't shattered or anything. That would come later in the weekend.

Sunday's long northshore ride was windy and hard, so, almost perfect.

So on Sunday morning I was up early heading across the Causeway just after sunrise. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, and all was good. Well, except for that big fuzzy grey glob hanging over the northshore. By the time I was across the lake and driving through Mandeville toward Covington it was foggy, damp, and about ten degrees colder than it had been on the southshore. I knew there was blue sky up above the fog - it was just a matter of how long it would take for the fog to burn off. I dressed fairly lightly for this one since I knew it would be in the 60s or even 70s by the time we finished. Like Saturday, Sunday's ride had a small group of six for the planned 77 mile ride up to State Line. This ride goes pretty much straight north, makes a little loop up by the Mississippi state line, and comes back via the back half of our standard 64-mile route. It's basically designed to get in as much rolling terrain as possible. From the start I could tell that Boyd was having a bad day, so I wasn't surprised when he said he was going to turn back at Pine. That left five of us, which on the one had was nice because everyone was on the same page and we didn't have to stop and wait for people to catch up very often. On the down side, the wind was relentlessly increasing as the ride wore on, which made the ride back south feel like a very long headwind grind. Just to twist the knife, we had decided to add a little spur to the ride on the north end in order to actually cross the imaginary border line into Mississippi, which I guess was where the smoother asphalt turned into rough asphalt. There was a really nice gradual climb on that part of old State Line Road, which I later discovered actually had a Strava Segment. Anyway, it was a long ride back into the wind and I was pretty well cooked by the time we got back to the cars at the Lee Road Ballpark with 80-something miles on the computer.

The Tulane crew up in San Marcos. No freezing rain this year!

Meanwhile, four of the Tulane riders were up at Texas State doing a collegiate race weekend. I was impressed to see that in the grueling uphill time trial on Saturday Julia got the Strava QOM by over half a minute ahead of the other 60 or so women who have done that TT, and Gavin was 3rd out of over 1,600 riders who had done it. Then, as we were starting our ride on Sunday I got a call from Dustin telling me that they had moved the criterium a few days prior and had only announced the fact via Instagram. So the Tulane riders, and some others as well, showed up at the original location to find nobody there and had to call around to find out where the race was actually going to be. Then they arrived at the new course, which was a wet parking lot, to find them marking out the course with caution tape no the ground held down with rocks, and nothing to keep cars from driving onto the course. He almost had them get back in the car and drive back to New Orleans, but ultimately they stuck it out and raced and came back with all their skin and bones intact. Next weekend I'll probably be going to Auburn for that race weekend since I at least get to ride a little road race which serves as a nice kind of warm-up for the road season. Speaking of the road season, I have three unfinished event permits floating around the USAC computer right now that I need to finalize once I come to some decisions on prizelists and such. We just got the Westbank NOLA Motorsports Park to modify the original contract they sent us so that we won't lose a thousand dollars if it rains, so I guess that race is back on track.

Ricky was over in Texas officiating the Davy Crockett "stage race" with Lane last weekend. It was kind of strange in that they (a) allowed people to race the stage race stages even if they had not ridden in the prior stage, and (b) were giving people a 30-second time bonus for riding the time trial without aero equipment. Despite having Tim and his TopView chip-timing stuff, there were still a few problems with the results. Top View did the Auburn race weekend the last couple of years, at least, and although it mostly goes fine, you can never just assume that because there's chip timing that everything will be perfect.