Winter Wind

Just a skeleton crew for the Sunday Giro today

Last week was mostly routine, riding-wise - 298 miles, mostly easy, occasionally super hard. Situation normal. The weather has been rather nice. As always happens this time of year, those of us out on our bikes in the dark at 6 a.m. are the first to notice the coming of fall. It seems like it gets noticeably darker from morning to morning. Another little cool front came through around Friday, and I was a little chilly riding out to the Giro Saturday morning despite a light base layer and thin sunscreen arm-warmers. The temperature, however, wasn't really the thing that got me thinking of winter. It was the wind. Saturday morning's ride was accompanied by a 10-12 mph ENE wind that felt kind of different. It was that dry, steady wind we get in the winter.

I have a love-hate relationship with wind. Mostly hate. The Giro route is mostly an east-west route, so I knew from experience to expect a few things. You might think that doing a group ride with a headwind would be harder than without. You'd be wrong.  Well, unless you were one of the four or five riders up at the front of the group doing all of the work. In reality, a stiff headwind makes it much easier to stay with a good-sized group. The wind keeps the pace slower, and the benefit of being in the draft, and indeed the length of that draft, is considerably greater. Riding in a group under those conditions is relatively easy. dropping back a couple of bike lengths doesn't seem to matter much, so it's easy to stay in contact. I should know. I spent approximately zero time in the wind on the way out to Venetian Isles on Saturday. I admit I was being a little bit lazy, but there was method to my laziness. The fact that every headwind implies an equal and opposite tailwind told me that it was going to get fast on the way back. It did.

I guess the average speed for much of the return trip on Chef Highway was in the 30-31 mph range. You'd think that being on a group ride with a nice tailwind like that would be easy. You'd be wrong again. I often tell new riders, "Never let a gap open in a tailwind."  Why?  Well, the draft zone is short, which means that if you find yourself two or three bike-lengths behind the rider in front, you're in trouble. So while riding in the group in a headwind gives you a lot of flexibility, riding in a group in a tailwind at 30+ mph requires careful attention. Everybody's trying to stay close to the wheel in front, so it can get kind of stressful. To make matters worse, you have to be constantly watching what's going on a few wheels ahead because it just takes one rider to open one of those un-closeable gaps at that speed. I was almost a victim of that on Saturday when someone put the hammer down after the Goodyear sprint and I had to red-line it for a bit to avoid being on the wrong side of the ensuing split. Of course it mostly came back together on Bullard, but as soon as we turned east on Hayne the speed kind of went through the roof again. I kind of threw in the towel pretty early on that stretch and rode the last couple of miles with a few other riders.

Sunday I went out to Starbucks wondering if we'd even have enough riders for a Giro Ride. The annual Tour de Jefferson was Sunday and over the past few years is has practically become the unofficial New Orleans Westbank World Championships. I've done it a number of times and it's always fast, we usually take a wrong turn somewhere, and I never even come close to drinking enough post-ride beer to justify the entry fee, which was $50-60 this year. So this year I decided to skip it. I'll ride the Tour da Parish ride in November, which is pretty similar in that it's a lot of the Giro riders setting the pace. Anyway, as it turned out we had a nice little group for the Giro, and with the lack of horsepower the pace was mostly pretty moderate. Also, the wind had died down a bit. I was feeling kind of tired, so it's probably a good thing that I didn't do the Tour de Jefferson ride.