Summer Weekend in February

A small but smooth group for the ad hoc Saturday Winter Ride Series ride.

What a difference a week makes! The weekend weather was looking to be good, and since we had cancelled the two prior weekends because of the freezing weather I decided we should try for a "make-up" Winter Ride Series ride on Saturday. With the forecast calling for unseasonably warm weather and barely any chance of rain, I figured we should do the longer 77-mile route up to State Line, with a return route via Sie Jenkins Road, South Choctaw, etc. 

Saturday morning turned out to be foggy but warm - like in the 70s before dawn. Still, it being February, I had a hard time accepting the fact that it was really so warm. I pulled on the sunscreen arm sleeves and put a pair of knee-warmers that I knew good and well I didn't need into my bag before I headed out for the northshore. The drive across the lake was pretty foggy, but once on the northshore it was clear and considerably warmer than it had been over the water.

I was running early, unlike Thursday when I'd been 15 minutes late for the levee ride, so of course I was the first one to arrive at the Lee Road ballpark where I was pleased to find the rest rooms open. There were a couple of forgotten shirts and a basketball on the court there, so I walked over to pick them up. Right in the middle of the basketball court I also picked up two rather soggy dollars. Karma! Eventually people started to arrive, but by the time we headed out there were only six of us unless you count Boyd who had started early and planned to latch onto the group somewhere around Enon. Despite the overcast sky and lingering fog, it warmed up really fast and even the sunscreen armskins were feeling hot before we'd logged ten miles. I was feeling pretty good all day and with only six riders the pace was mostly brisk but steady. There were a few faster segments in the usual places, of course, so I got in a pretty good workout, mostly thanks to Sean who kind of dropped the hammer a few times during the ride. I ended up with 78 miles or so and was pretty tired by the end, but felt like it was a good solid ride. Candy had gotten her second COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday, and was kind of under the weather on Friday, but by the time I got back Saturday afternoon she was more or less back to normal.

Waiting for the flat to be fixed

Sunday was another warm day, and I rode out to the Giro Ride with a nice tailwind. The Giro group had apparently been huge on Saturday, but Sunday's group was more typical. Unfortunately, we didn't make it past the Casino bridge before someone flatted, so everyone waited up on top of the overpass until they got it fixed. My plan for the day was to stay out of the wind and take it easy, which turned out to be a fairly simple matter. The pace never got super-fast, so sitting in the group was relatively easy. Still, by the time I got home my neck was killing me. I guess it got stressed out on Saturday. Anyway, I ended the week with something over 300 miles in the book, so I shouldn't be complaining.

Giro cool-down on the lakefront

It looks like things will be returning to normal March weather by Tuesday, after it rains of course. Situation normal.

Cold, Wind, and COVID

Front part of the Sunday Giro heading out on Lakeshore Drive

This week started out with some pretty challenging weather, at least for this part of the country. While the city, protected just a bit by Lake Pontchartrain and the Specific Heat of water, didn't get the worst of it like much of Texas and north Louisiana did, it was still pretty damned cold and windy. Monday morning was significantly below freezing with high winds, so riding was really out of the question. I'd set up the old Orbea on the wind trainer down in the basement, assuming I'd spend an hour of so on it after work, but then I got pulled into a late Zoom meeting and that went out the window in favor of dinner and, by then, two badly needed glasses of wine. I did make it out Tuesday morning, alone, despite the temperature in the 30s and the wind close to 10 mph, and it was every bit as miserable as I'd anticipated. Wednesday, however was another missed day with cold temperatures and wet streets, so I set my sights on Thursday. That turned into another solo battle with the crosswind, but at least the temperature was up to around 40° by then. 

Tulane had recently released club sports from their no-group-activities restriction, so I went out in the afternoon to meet the 4:00 club ride that turned out to be just Gavin, Joey and me. Joey is a new rider with the club. We didn't make it more than a block before Joey hit something in the road and pinch-flatted, but eventually got up onto the levee bike path where we were greeted by a truly brutal 14.5 mph crosswind that made it a struggle to keep the front wheel going in the right direction. There were a couple of gusts that had me reaching for the brakes because I thought I was about to get blown off the pavement. Fortunately, we weren't trying to go very hard, and I was glad to at least log a few extra miles for the day to put a dent in the already minimal weekly mileage tally. That night another little cold front slithered through, so it was back down to 34°F with a 13 mph north wind when I went out to meet the Tulane riders for the first Friday Coffee Ride of the semester. As expected, that turned out to be just Julia, Gavin and me, so we cut out most of the Lakeshore Drive part of the route, and then skipped the coffee stop altogether. At least we tried...

Around noon I rode downtown to get my second COVID booster shot, which was quick and uneventful, although I was fully anticipating I'd feel the effects by Saturday.

Batture Trail. Roots showing from when the batture was flooded for so long last year.

Later in the day Mignon texted to see if I wanted her to show me the mountain bike trail on the river batture near the old Colonial Country Club. I'd been wanting to check it out, and since there was a good chance I'd be somewhat incapacitated by my immune response the next day, I dusted off the old Trek 820 that hadn't seen an actual trail in years and headed out there around 4:00. By then the sun was out and it was much, much warmer. 

Still works - kinda.

This particular mountain bike trail is kind of a pop-up trail that a local guy has been creating for a few years whenever the river has been low enough. It's probably only a mile and a half long, but it was a really nice change even though I was being particularly cautious due to the fact I hadn't ridden off-road in years other than a few cyclocross races. So again, I got in some nice bonus miles for Friday, which turned out to be a good thing. Saturday's morning forecast for the northshore was for low 30s and after consulting with some of the regulars and kicking around some alternate starting times, it was clear that the consensus was that most would rather stay on the southshore where the air would be significantly warmer. As it turned out, none of that mattered to me because by Friday night I had a not-unexpected low-grade fever and headache from the reaction to the vaccine. I decided it would be pointless to try to ride on Saturday, which it would have been. 

Glad the group stopped for Joey's flat.

Fortunately I woke up Sunday morning feeling much more normal, so I headed out to the Giro Ride as usual. I noticed that, finally, there was a little bit of light in the sky when I left home, and so I barely even needed my headlight. As might have been expected considering the clear sky and warmer temperature, there was a pretty big turnout for the Giro on Sunday, and among those were a number of Tulane riders. Joey was basically jumping into the deep end, making the Giro one of his first group road rides ever, so I was planning to keep track of him and drop off the back of the group if he got separated, which he did after we turned onto the Paris Road / I-510 segment where the speed jumped as usual up to the 27-31 mph range. I collected him after turning onto Chef, and we rode kind of easy out toward Venetian Isles until we saw the group on its way back. They hadn't started going fast yet, which was good, but before the caught us Joey flatted. Fortunately, the whole group stopped while we fixed it, so we were able to ride back the whole way with the group, which was nice. It turned out to be a perfect ride for me since I was still a little unsure about whether I was feeling better because of the naproxin I'd taken or if I was actually over the vaccine reaction stage. Turned out to be the latter, I think.

Random Recovery Program

Thursday morning on the levee, all alone.

The weather the past few days has been less than ideal. Today it's even less than less than ideal. My training program, and I use the term "program" in its loosest sense, determines its rest days not by the TrainingPeaks' Training Stress Score® or Strava's Fatigue & Freshness figures, but instead by a combination of subjective motivation and Mother Nature. Mostly Mother Nature. So when the weather is good for a long stretch, I ride every day. Sometimes that works out to a full month or more without a day off. It's not as bad as it sounds, though, because at least two of my usual weekly rides would barely qualify as Zone 2, however one might want to calculate that. Anyway, this haphazard approach always means more skipped days in the winter than in the summer, and the past few days definitely qualify as winter. 

After a nice few days of warm temperatures that actually saw me riding in shorts for the first time in a while, things started slipping downward Thursday morning. Temperatures were still fairly warm, but the wind was shifting and at 6 am the levee was wet and socked in with a thick fog. Pretty much everyone had bailed out on riding in that, so I wasn't a bit surprised to find the meeting spot deserted. The fog, as it turned out, was kind of patchy and the road wasn't terribly wet, so it turned out to be a nice enough ride on the old Orbea, if you overlook the entirely predictable flat tire I got on the way back. I was glad I'd ridden because Friday was looking to be rain, which it was, which clearly called for a recovery day. The forecast for the weekend was calling for cold and wind, to be followed by more cold and more wind and rain and maybe sleet and maybe snow.

Saturday Giro at the Turnaround Tree

Saturday morning the temperature was around 40°F with no chance of sunshine, but the temperature wasn't the problem. The problem was the 10 mph north wind. Thus, I was surprised that we ended up with a pretty decent group for the Giro Ride. It turned out to be a pretty hard ride with a lot of complications. Jeff started off the complications by hitting one of the drainage grates on the Casino bridge (everyone was hugging the right side because of the aforementioned north wind). A few people stopped with him as gaps opened in the back half of the group. I decided to continue, which meant a pretty hard chase with a few others to close it back up to the main group that thankfully wasn't going super-fast yet because of the wind. After the turn onto Paris Road and the interstate exit lanes we picked up a tailwind and the speed went up to almost 34 mph as things started to string out. It was practically the hardest section on the whole ride. Once we got onto Chef and were back into kind of a quartering headwind a nice paceline developed, and since I was feeling good after that "recovery day" I spent a lot of time in the rotation. Heading back from the turnaround we came across the group that had stopped with Jeff earlier. They were fixing yet another flat, I think their third or fourth, so we waited for them to finish so they could get back into the group for the return trip. Then, as we turned onto Bullard there was another flat, so I stopped with that one along with a few others. We fixed that and made it back without another flat unless you count the one Charles got on his way home. I had a good ride and got home feeling surprisingly good.

Sunday's Giro was even colder and every bit as windy. To make matters worse, it was a little foggy, which meant it was basically like riding in a mist. To make the worse matters even worse, only about a dozen riders even showed up. As we rolled out I was already questioning my own sanity and weighing my options to turn back early. Fortunately the speeds weren't too fast because I was feeling pretty miserable from the start. I nonetheless resigned myself to sitting on the back and honing my drafting skills as a matter of survival. Well, as we all know, drafting doesn't count for shit in a tailwind, and when we turned onto the Paris Road / Interstate section the speed ramped up and the group strung out, and somewhere around 31 mph I decided I'd had enough and dropped off the back of the group. Behind me, David had done the same, so somewhere on Chef we got together and had a somewhat less miserable ride out to almost Venetian Isles, turning around when we saw what was left of the group. As I learned later, one of the eight or so riders left had flatted right after the turnaround and Jaden had stopped with him. So the ride back was going fine, despite the fact that I was basically cold, wet, tired and miserable and things eased up a bit when we turned onto Bullard, which made negotiating that pinch-flat minefield a little easier than usual. After stopping at the light we were riding pretty easy toward the lake between I-10 and Morrison Road when all of a sudden I sense this car coming up on our left way, way too closely. Well, it wasn't an accident. The driver then steered the car over to the right in classic "punishment pass" style, except that this time someone threw open the passenger door in order to hit us. It made contact with Rob Konrad who, amazingly, didn't crash, an outcome I can only ascribe to his decades of competitive riding experience. I was toward the back and heard the hit and saw his water bottle to flying after catching a glimpse of the door opening. How he didn't end up with a broken leg, or knee, or ankle I have no idea because the impact broke off the front part of his left pedal and somehow also broke his rear brake. The car never slowed down, of course, since it was entirely intentional, so we couldn't get a license plate number or anything. So I guess I was glad to have gotten in most of a Giro Ride that morning, but I was pretty miserable the whole time. One of those "character-building" rides, I guess.

Some nice pastels on radar Monday morning

This morning, Monday, the temperature was in the 30s and it was raining (there was also a bit of sleet) and considering the forecast I will definitely be taking another "recovery day" today. Much of the state had snow and ice and sleet, and various Interstate highways have been shut down since we do not have snow plows or salt trucks around here. Tonight we're expecting ten to twelve hours of below-freezing temperatures, down to a low of 26°, which is pretty unusual and enough to freeze exposed plumbing of which there is much. Things should improve by tomorrow afternoon when the sun should come out, the wind should die down, and the temperature should get up to the high 30s. I'm fully expecting to get in a ride at that point since we're off from work because it's Mardi Gras, at least technically. With no parades and most of the French Quarter shut down to keep us from seeding the next national COVID-19 surge, it's a Mardi Gras like I've never seen. On the plus side, it will be so cold that even if the parades were rolling it's questionable whether I'd be up to going out in the freezing cold for very long.

I've already had quite enough of this winter stuff.

WIshy-Washy Weather

There were probably about 50 for Saturday's Giro Ride.

Well, as usual the February weather is all over the place. By Friday morning I knew the Saturday northshore ride wasn't going to happen. It was rainy and cold by Saturday morning, which effectively killed off both the northshore and Giro rides. Of course a few brave souls were out there, however briefly, but I'm quite certain none of them was having fun. By noon things had improved a bit, which is to say that it had mostly stopped actually raining, so I stuffed my rain jacket into my pocket, pulled on some shoe covers, aired up the tires on the old Orbea with its "Gravel King" tires that are really just regular tires, and headed out to the levee. The asphalt was still pretty wet, and there was the occasional smattering of light rain, but I'd dressed with rain in mind so all was good. I was way out in Destrahan when came upon a couple of guys underneath the bridge trying to fix a flat tire. One was standing and offering sage tire-changing wisdom while the other was sitting and trying with limited success to get the tire off of the rim using the brute force method. I stopped to see if they needed help, and quickly decided they did, so I removed the tire and put in the spare tube and handed it back to the guy to re-mount the tire on the rim. That was when I noticed that my own front tire had gone flat, so I repaired that while the other guys was still trying to get his tire mounted. It looked like he was getting close, so I told them I'd be back shortly and headed upriver for the final mile or so to Ormond. When I got back to the bridge they were just getting back on their bikes.

I decided to stop by the Tulane Cycling HQ at the end of the bike path to see if they'd fixed the toilet yet. Sean was there, so we chatted for a bit, and then I headed down Broadway for home. It was still misty and my glasses were a bit foggy. I guess that's why I didn't see whatever it was that I rolled over as I passed a construction dumpster. Naturally, I had another flat. It was still a mile or so to the house, so I went ahead and fixed it. I was glad I'd gotten in 40 miles, but hadn't planned on fixing three flats along the way.

The weather on Sunday was much improved, and there was a really big turnout for the Giro despite the significant wind. I was feeling fairly fresh since I hadn't ridden all that hard on Saturday, so I ended up doing a slightly harder Giro than usual. The nice thing about the Giro Ride, especially when there's a big group, is that you can kind of choose your effort level. Later that day I spend a couple of hours shoveling some of the riversand that the road construction people had left all over the road alongside the house. I barely made a dent in it, but by dusk I knew I'd done a number on my back and it was time to stop. At least it looks a little better than it did.

The perimeter

On Monday morning, around 9:30 or 10:00, Tulane started sending out emergency notifications about a "police action" down the street at Audubon and S. Claiborne, about three blocks from my house. There were police cars everywhere, plus the SWAT trucks, and the shut down S. Claiborne right at my house when they established their perimeter. There was a suspect barricaded in a house. He had apparently committed a number of armed robberies over the weekend and had shot a Tulane student in the leg during one of them. The standoff lasted until mid-afternoon, but they finally got him out of the house and arrested him on multiple charges. Fortunately nobody was hurt. Anyway, it made the day more interesting.

This morning was so foggy that you could see it falling. I got dressed and on the bike, but turned back after a few blocks. It was obvious that I'd be soaking wet, and cold, if I did any kind of significant ride, and I was tired of fixing flats. Besides, the afternoon weather was looking to be pretty nice. Indeed, at the moment (3:30 pm) it's 74°F and sunny. The rest of the week is looking bad. The rain is supposed to start, off and on, tomorrow morning through Friday, and then it the temperature will drop dramatically for the weekend with temperatures in the 30s again. I'll just have to play it by ear, I guess.

February

Tuesday morning winter sky

I'm sitting here half an hour after getting back from a Tuesday morning ride, still waiting for my toes to return to body temperature, and contemplating the fact that February always seems to be the hardest month for riding. The novelty of cold weather and winter kit has worn off, and that warm speck of light at the end of the long winter tunnel seems a very far way off right now. 

Relatively speaking, the weather this morning wasn't all that bad - low 40s with a 10 mph NNE wind. Up in the frozen north people are posting photos of deep snow and the few who are riding are busy discussing which types of tire studs provide the best grip on the patches of black ice. Last night email was bouncing around with everyone saying they'd be riding this morning. Wishful thinking. At 6 am there were just two of us - Scott and me - up on the levee. There was a bit of a tailwind here and there on the way out, and we were pretty much just in cruise mode, taking long steady, silent pulls in the dark, hoping to see the sun eventually. As we usually do when there's a low turnout and it's windy and cold, we turned around at the Big Dip around LaRose, knowing the ride back would be more of a struggle. It was. We picked up Pat somewhere along the way, just in time for the sun go back behind the clouds. All-in-all is was an OK ride, far better than my solo battle with the wind had been on Monday.

In contrast, last Saturday's Winter Ride Series ride up on the northshore had been way more enjoyable. We had a nice manageable group of nine or ten, and although the temperature was in the upper 40s I guess when we started, it was never really very cold or windy. Knowing that the weather would be nice for the last Saturday in January, I'd posted a 77 mile route we'd done the year before. I wasn't feeling too great at first. My arm was sore from the vaccination I'd gotten on Friday and I was just generally kind of run-down. As sometimes happens, though, I started feeling better as the ride progressed. Luck was with me on the way back when two large dogs ambushed us on Dummyline Road and I had to grab two handfulls of brake to avoid them as the ran right into a gap in the middle of the group. They always seem to do that. It's how I crashed in the Giro years back and broke my first collarbone. At least this time everyone stayed upright and the dogs headed home amid angry calls from their owners. Anyway, I had a good ride and felt none the worse for wear by the time we got back to the cars at the Lee Road ballpark. 

On Sunday I'd planned to ride the Giro. In fact, I got dressed, strapped on the helmet, and headed out right on time. A few blocks later, however, I pulled the plug. The streets were wet, there was more rain in the forecast, and I could feel a light rain starting to fall. As it turned out, the Giro wasn't rained out and that light rain had been only temporary. I ended up going back out in the afternoon for an extremely windy solo ride on the levee just to psychologically salvage the day.

The forecast for the next week or so isn't looking all that terrible. Tomorrow morning it will be around 42° for the WeMoRi, but at least the winds will be light. After that, it will start to warm up a bit with increasing rain chances Friday. Hopefully Saturday morning won't be rainy, but it's still too early to tell. Anyway, it's looking like morning temperatures in the 40s and low 50s for the foreseeable future. 

Must be February.