Almost Ten

Heading back into the sun on the Thursday levee ride.

It was a pretty routine week on the bike. Not so much off of it. After a nice easy recovery ride on Monday, I managed to oversleep enough on Tuesday to miss the 6 am levee ride by three or four minutes. Just as well, I guess, as I must have been a little tired. The ride turned around at The Dip, so I met them on the return, logging a few fewer miles than planned. The rest of the weekday rides, however, were as usual. On Monday I did spot a bald eagle, the first one I've seen in a while. They always seem to start showing up with the cooler weather.

At some point during the WeMoRi, Nisha joined the group after taking a short-cut with a couple others. I looked over at her and thought, "I need to tell her to use a bigger gear."  Well, later in the day she posted that she hadn't realized she'd been doing the group rides in her small chainring! Problem solved. Later that day I went over to Ochsner and got the influenza vaccine.

Post-Giro cool-down on Lakeshore Drive - Rich and Jaden

So rather than do a group ride over in Mississippi I decided to just to the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides. Candy's replacement laptop had come in during the week and I wanted to at least get her email set up. It was all a little confusing. The laptop came with a "mail" program that is essentially Outlook. It also came with Office pre-loaded. I set up the free mail program, but I'm not really sure what to do about Outlook. There's the 365 subscription version, and a stand-alone version, and maybe she can download the Tulane Exchange version since she has "legacy" status. Who knows? 

Spent a lot of time on Carl's safe
and steady wheel on Sunday.

The mornings lately have all been carbon copies with temperatures in the 58-60 degree range, some wind, clear blue sky. Not too shabby, really. The Giro Rides this weekend were surprisingly fun, at least for me. I have no idea why. Granted, I was keeping my nose mostly out of the wind as usual, but for some reason I really wasn't struggling when things got fast, or gaps needed to be closed. Funny how that works when you get older. You just never know when you'll have a good day and when you'll have a bad day - or weekend.

Classes at Tulane end on Tuesday, so we did somehow make it all the way through the fall semester without having to send all the students back home. They'll take exams online after Thanksgiving and then won't be back until January when we will do the whole Welcome Center thing again. The COVID-19 surge we had has subsided considerably with only 0.5% positive test over the past couple of days, which included 3,844 tests.  Thus far the City has reported a total of 401,209 tests, of which Tulane's comprise over 142,815, so Tulane has conducted over 35% of all of the tests in Orleans Parish. Impressive. 

So back in March and April when I was hobbling around on crutches and unable to sit on a bike for more than fifteen minutes I was thinking it would probably be the first year in a long time that I wouldn't log at least 10,000 miles. I figured I lost around 2,000 miles during recovery from the crash. Yet, as of today I'm showing 9,886 miles, so I will easily make 10,000 by the end of next week, and the question is whether I'll make it to 11,000. My first full year using Strava was 2013. Since then, my lowest annual mileage was 11,725 back in 2015 when I missed a number of early season weekends travelling to collegiate races. I'll be pretty happy if I'm anywhere close to 11k this year, considering.