Giro Rides and Road Paint and Flat Season

Tuesday morning on the levee

The weather was kind of unstable for much of last week but it wasn't quite enough to keep me off the bike. Tuesday's ride was actually pretty good, except for the stop to fix a flat tire (not mine) but it was already looking like Wednesday morning would be wet. 

Thinking the new French Truck coffee shop on the Lafitte Greenway
may become a popular post-Giro stop this year.

As it turned out, Wednesday morning wasn't wet. It was windy. Really windy. I got on the bike around 5:45 am and headed for the lakefront where the WeMoRi had already started. As I battled a gusty north wind I thought to myself, "The WeMo is going to be shattered in the crosswind on Lakeshore Drive." It was. Like in three pieces. I met the first group on Marconi and jumped onto the tail end of it. There were maybe eight survivors. The sprint to the top of the overpass was contested by just a couple of them, but they surprised the rest and kept the hammer down over the top, opening a huge gap. The rest of the group quickly came apart. Up ahead I could see Joe all by himself in no-man's-land so I put my head down and bridged up to him. For the rest of the ride we traded pulls on something like an 80:20 basis, my share being the latter. The group behind us didn't catch us, and we didn't make up any ground on the group ahead of us, but there's no denying it was a solid workout for me, anyway.

By the weekend the weather was looking better and I decided to keep it simple and do the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides. I needed to to out to LaPlace and re-measure and mark the 5 km and 10 km turnarounds on the time trial course because that section of the highway had been recently re-paved. So after the Giro I went home and had something to eat, put the bike in the car, and drove out to the TT course at the Cajun Pride Swamp Tours place. Since the start and finish are offset in order to avoid having riders going 30 mph coming through the intersection and warmup area, I had to measure the distance between the start and finish lines, divide by two, and mark the spot mid-way between. That's the point from which the turnarounds are measured. Then I set the Garmin to metric, put on a backpack with two cans of road marking paint, and rode the shoulder, stopping at 5 km and 10 km to mark the locations of the turnarounds. I then continued for the next 10 km, where the road had NOT been re-paved and where the shoulder was barely rideable, to freshen up the turnaround at 20 km. Along the way I picked up a piece of wire in my front tire that I carefully removed without having the tire go flat (it would later turn out to have a tiny little pinhole slow leak, but wouldn't be flat until the next morning). Then, way out by the 20K turnaround, yet another piece of wire punctured my rear tire. I needed my pocket knife to get that one out. Anyway, I was quite pleased that my Garmin agreed with the location of the turnaround within .02 kilometers, which is about as good as it gets for a little GPS computer like that. By then, what had started out as a chilly morning was a very warm afternoon, and I was glad to get back home to raid the refrigerator.

Today the Governor eased some of the state COVID restrictions, which I guess is a good sign. As long as we don't backslide too much it definitely clears the way for bike races outside of the city. New Orleans is still deciding whether to ease up more than they already have. Considering that some entire countries are currently in COVID lockdown, I'm not popping open the champagne just yet. 

Last weekend Gavin, Julia and a few others went over to Crockett Texas for the Davey Crockett Classic stage race where there were some pretty huge fields and they were dramatically outnumbered by a few of the bigger teams, but it was definitely great experience and I was kind of wishing all weekend that I'd gone. Some of my age-group riders who I've raced with for decades were there, like Tom Bain and George Heagerty, racing in the 60+ age group.