One of *those* Giro Rides

Back in the group on Chef

According to Strava, I must be more or less back to where I was last February. It was a pretty deep hole I had to dig myself out of, and I don't actually feel like I'm quite back where I was yet, but I guess it's close enough.

I kind of had to think twice about going out to the Giro today. COVID-19 cases are on the rise, although not quite so much here in New Orleans as elsewhere (yet). Anyway, I left a little early and had a nice relatively cool ride out to Starbucks, if you call 80°F and 95% humidity cool. Around 6:45 riders started arriving as usual and the group rolled out along Marconi under a hazy sky. The Peake guys were out with their new jerseys and sponsorship, and with all of the pent-up energy I figured it was going to get fast.

It did.

Sort of back where I was at the beginning of February ... theoretically.

I was only halfway down the casino bridge when I looked ahead and saw a couple of riders already on Hayne Blvd. going probably 35 mph, attacking. "This is bad," I thought. Basically, the group split before everyone was off the bridge. Most of the group was in the second part with me, and we were just getting re-organized when we started rolling right through patches of broken glass and nasty drippings from the garbage truck that had just gone by. Sure enough, both Woody and Charles flatted. I turned back to help, along with a couple others. We ended up taking the Bullard shortcut, but we were still a couple of minutes behind the group when we got back on course.

Brett flatted, Rob crashed when he turned around to help

We were a couple of miles before the turnaround when we saw Matt and Todd coming toward us. The odd thing was, Matt's bike was missing its saddle, which was stuffed into his pocket. Apparently the bolt had stripped somewhere around the turnaround. Anyway, we soon saw the group coming and made a U-turn to get back in. By then I guess things had settled down a bit and it was pretty easy to stay with the group. For some reason there was another little split around Lake Forest Blvd, so we ended up going a lot faster than we should have down Bullard until it all came back together.

The speed picked up again on Hayne, at least until Brett nailed that big hole in the concrete right after Read Blvd and flatted. Again, a few of us stopped while he fixed it. Oh well, not quite the workout I'd been expecting.

The not quite current situation in NOLA - no numbers for today.
I'm sure they'll all be lumped together as tomorrow's number

After I got home I went to check on today's COVID numbers on the Louisiana Department of Health website and, damnit, found that once again they just decided not to post anything today because they were expecting a power outage in their building. Really??  Middle of a pandemic and you can't figure out a way to update the numbers everyone is using for tracking the pandemic some other way?