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Sunday Giro starting to ramp back up on Chef Highway

I wish there were some races around here right about now because it was just another week of routine sweat-soaked training rides. Yeah, it's hot and all, but if we survived the Tuesday/Thursday training races and all of the weekend races back in the 80s when the only electrolyte replacement was Gatorade and shorts were lined with actual leather, we could certainly handle it now. Anyway, it seemed like a decent enough week of riding for me. It's funny how one's "fitness" ebbs and flows in the absence of actual racing. It's mostly all in the head, though. 

Last weekend I watched the Saturday night pro Criterium in Salt Lake City, which looked plenty fast and featured some controversy in the end that resulted in a little punching match and a couple of disqualified riders. Whether the move in question was intentional or accidental is impossible for me to say but I can certainly see how it might have looked intentional to some, especially the rider involved, considering where and when it happened.

Big Friendly Friday Group

Last Friday's Friendly Friday ride drew a pretty good crowd which of course made it fairly fast. 

The Saturday Giro had a pretty decent turnout, though, and so the ride out to Venetian Isles averaged around 27 mph. I was atypically in a reasonable position when the sprint started, which took me up to 36 mph before I bailed with about 100 meters still to go. Felt good, though. We had a delay in starting back because of a flat, and as often seems to happen the return trip was a bit slower. Quite surprisingly, the roads out to the east were quite wet from a rain shower that we kind of mostly missed, so there was a lot of wheel spray for a while and even a little bit of actual rain, I think.

Sunday's Giro was at least dry, and as is usually the case, a bit slower than Saturday's. I felt good both days, and for a change didn't end up riding in with just a handful of people after stopping to help someone with a flat. After the Sunday ride we went over to Poydras Home for a brief 95th birthday party for my father. My brother is in the midst of moving from Orlando to Madison MS, so he was there with a couple of my nieces, and of course my own sisters were there as well. Dad's attention span is pretty short nowadays, and it was all over in an hour or so.

Monday, Monday

Monday's Mellow Monday ride was more mellow than usual. For unknown reasons, only four of five were on hand, which at least had the effect of keeping the speed down a notch or so. Sometimes that ride has four of five miles that get pretty fast, which isn't really quite the kind of recovery ride I probably need, but let's face it, recovery rides can be pretty boring, and I don't need that either. 

Meanwhile, Charley the dog has been chewing up anything he can find when we're not looking. This week it was a baseball cap, my pocket comb, and the TV remote, the latter being kind of an issue since it's for the DirectTV box. Candy went over to the AT&T store where of course they didn't have any and they ordered a replacement that is theoretically coming via US postal service one day. Fortunately the phone app lets me cast to the TV, so that worked fine. Last week I finally broke down and ordered a bike travel bag. I've never been too keen on dealing with the big rigid cases. Last time we went to Washington I packed my old bike in a simple soft bike bag that we originally got when we toured Colorado back in 1983. It was about at the end of its useful life, of course. So I sprung for a rather expensive Airport Ninja bag that is nice and small and can be carried as a backpack. 

The latest victim

Of course in order to do that you have to remove the seatpost, handlebars, front brake, fork, pedals, rear derailleur, etc., but that's not really too much of an issue for me.  Given the size of my bike it's entirely possible that I will be able to leave the seatpost and just lower the saddle and still get it in there. We shall see. We're planning a visit to Olympia at the end of August that unfortunately means I'll miss the criterium in Hattiesburg, but the tickets were already purchased before we knew the race date. 

Now we just have to worry about whether there will be enough pilots and airline personnel to keep the flight from being cancelled. I'm also a little worried about the COVID situation which is currently blowing up across Europe and has been on a steady rise here for over a month. I'm hoping that the Tour de France survives all the way to Paris without losing too many more riders to positive tests. I'm also hoping that I survive all the way to Olympia without any more positive tests. I've been on the fence about getting a second COVID booster since the currently circulating strain is now pretty far removed from the original and immune responses from that don't seem to be doing a whole lot to prevent mild and asymptomatic infections, although the vaccine has certainly brought the number of ICU cases and fatalities down dramatically. 

My data are kind of fuzzy right now because the amount of testing is way down but the percent positives are way up. Louisiana today was showing 24.5% positive and New Orleans was showing 18.3, both of which are pretty high percentages. Although hospitalizations have been rising persistently but slowly, deaths have been quite low. In the last two weeks New Orleans has reported only one fatality and the state has reported only 43. I think it's likely that a whole lot more people are being infected but aren't having symptoms serious enough to get tested at a location that is reporting to the LDH, especially since the at-home test kits are so readily available now. What I'd really like to see is a new version of the vaccine that targets the more recent variants, and although they're working on that, the variants are changing more quickly than they can get the new vaccine versions ready. They're saying we may see something in the fall.