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Tuesday heading back downriver from Ormond |
Last week was a pretty busy one. Danielle arrived around midnight on Wednesday. Jason F came by Wednesday evening to collect stuff for Saturday's Lakeshore Summer Scramble race. Candy's hip replacement surgery was Thursday morning. The drain plumbing (I use the term loosely) under the old concrete wash basin in the basement started to disintegrate on Thursday, which meant we couldn't wash clothes until it was fixed without flooding the basement. And of course there's work, complete with hot and sweaty rides to and from.
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Getting ready to call the next race to the line (Boedi's photo) |
I arrived at the lakefront early, right about the same time as Jason, and started getting things set up. Ricky showed up a little while later. It was all complicated by a strong northwest wind coming off the lake that I'd estimate at 10-14 mph minimum. We tied the tents off to sign posts and staked and weighted everything down well since anything can happen when you spend the whole day on the lakefront. Fortunately, the first race of the day was the Juniors, for which there were only five or six, so once that got going it was clear that Ricky wasn't going to need much backup, which gave me a chance to go change into my kit. If you've never tried to change clothes and pull on tight lycra while sweaty and sitting in a burning hot car in the summer in New Orleans you have no idea how difficult that task can be.
As usual when I try to jump into a race while also officiating, my head wasn't really in it and my warmup was dramatically insufficient. I lined up in the back row for the masters race so I wouldn't get in the way. There was no question that I'd be dropped, I just didn't yet know when or where. The answers to those two questions came quickly, though. The course started heading east on Lakeshore Drive for just a couple hundred meters before a U-turn in the middle of the road. Naturally Acadiana and maybe a couple others went from the gun, so by the time I finally came around the U-turn, way on the outside where the wind was, I looked up to see them attacking down the left side to gutter as many people as possible. I never even got into the draft and by the time I made the left turn onto Franklin and went up and over the levee I knew this would be a training ride for me. Heading back toward Lakeshore Drive on Franklin was brutal with the combination of the strong headwind and the rise over the levee. I kept some pressure on, though, and eventually caught and passed a few riders who had been ejected from the group. The wind eventually shattered much of the field and the lead rider lapped me a lap or two before the finish, with the remnant of the chase group sprinting past me just before the finish line. I was actually kind of surprised it took them so long.
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Russell showed up with his new TR-3 |
It was a really long day because there were a lot of separate raced on the schedule, some of which were pretty sparsely attended. In the case of the Women 1/2/3 race, sparsely would mean zero. Three separate races for Women attracted a total of only 7 women, which was pretty disappointing. Even the men's 1/2/3 race had only nine. The other races had reasonable fields, but I thought they all should have been better attended for something right there in the city with zero chance of rain. As the day went on the wind calmed down a little bit, so that was good, but it also got hotter. I went through quite a bit of gatorade and water that, thankfully, Jason had provided, and even had a nice lunch from a food pop-up that he got to come out. It was probably 6:30 by the time I got back home and unloaded the car. Jason still has some stuff with him, like traffic cones, etc.
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No good news here |
Monday morning I got to work and instead of our in-person staff meeting we did it via Zoom even though most of us were in our offices because we're back to an indoor-masking advisory due to the Delta variant that has already driven up the positivity rates to where they were back around Christmas holidays. At the start of the meeting Marcia said she had a head cold and had lost her sense of smell. She said she was fine. We sent her home anyway. Yeah, she ultimately tested positive for COVID-19, and yeah, she had been vaccinated. Lots of vaccinated people are testing positive - way more than I'd have expected - right now. Most seem to have mild symptoms, which of course means they're still out and about and likely helping spread the virus around even more. Danielle had tested positive a couple of weeks before coming here and Shannon has been sick for weeks.