Pushing Zone One

Mellow Monday

Last week was what I'd have to call "high-volume," at least for me. It all started on Monday, which was July 4th, which meant a Holiday Giro Ride following up on the regular Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides, one of which had been quite fast. As holiday rides typically go, Monday's ride was notable more for the heat and humidity than the speed, but anyway I covered the details in an earlier post. 

I went out on Wednesday morning, still with a bit of the long weekend miles in my legs I guess, and met up with the WeMoRi as usual. It was a pretty normal ride - not too terribly fast, but by not means slow either. Thursday was the usual morning levee ride, including the detour around Powerline Drive which will likely be the status quo for another couple of weeks, and then the regular Friendly Friday ride which was occasionally fast, but not so much as to prevent me from making a little effort on the Wisner overpass.  And then there was Saturday.

Friendly Friday

I got out to Starbucks at my usual time, around 6:30, and as I was settling into one of the chairs out on the patio a guy walked up to ask me about the ride. Turned out he was in town from Houston and would be riding with us, so I gave him the usual summary - where it would get fast, where the holes were on Hayne, etc. As usual we had a nice warmup along Lakeshore Drive, and then once we came down onto Hayne the speed went up to 29 mph and stayed there. It was fine sitting in the draft, as there didn't seem to be much wind, but I couldn't really check up on the guy from Houston who was somewhere behind me. I heard he was still there when we turned onto Chef, but I never saw him again. We passed the early SaMoRi ride earlier than usual on Chef, and I surmise that they have started rolling out from West End at 6:30 lately to avoid a bit more of the summer sun. 

Saturday Giro

Anyway, it was a normal Giro, which lately means it's fast until somebody flats, which happened that day on Bullard shortly before the turn back onto Hayne. I stopped along with a few others, but the rest of the group didn't. We still had a good brisk ride back down Hayne after fixing the flat, and somehow I found myself out in front of the little group along Lakeshore Drive. I looked back and wondered why they were going so slow. By the time I got to the traffic circle at Bayou St. John they were nowhere to be found, so I did a loop around the fountain. I was afraid there had been another flat, but they soon appeared so I was able to get back together. Someone mentioned stopping for water at Starbucks. There had been some talk earlier about extending the ride. Once again I found myself way out ahead of them on Marconi, but figured we'd all regroup at Starbucks. I waited for a while, chatting with Howard and Todd. Apparently they decided not to stop, so never showed up. Oh well. I was feeling pretty well toasted anyway so I headed back home.

Saturday Giro

Early Sunday morning around 4 or 5 am I could hear it raining outside. By 6:00 it looked like the rain had stopped, at least for the moment, but the streets were soaked. Figuring that nobody would show up for the Giro I decided to wait a bit longer and go do a solo ride on the river levee bike path instead. I knew it would at least be a little more dry up there. I finally rolled out around 6:45 am and by the time I was two or three miles up the river the bike path was dry as a bone. The sky was overcast and it looked like it was going to stay that way. My legs were feeling heavy so I kept the effort level down as I pedaled into the light headwind, contemplating just how far I was willing to go. I'd already been considering riding all the way to the end of the bike path, about 44 miles, so had half a bottle of gel and two water bottles, one of which was a big one with Scratch in it. 

Upriver end of the levee bike path, 44 miles and change from the start.

So I ended up doing that full ride, probably almost exclusively at a Zone 1 effort level. On the way back I spotted what we call a brake tag station and what everyone else calls an inspection station. In this case it was a tiny little building that had once been a roadside gas station. Outside, however, was a coke machine! I had a couple of dollars with me, so I stopped and gulped down two cans of fruit punch in quick succession. None of the buttons on the machine had indicated fruit punch, of course, but I wasn't complaining. Anyway, by the time I got back to around Oak Street my calculations indicated that I'd be just a couple of miles short of 90, so I went ahead and rode a lap around Audubon Park for good measure, which brought me conveniently back home with 90.3 miles on the computer. Good enough under the circumstances, even if my average speed was barely over 16 mph.

Cold Drinks!

So I ended up with a 367 mile week, which is a lot for me, especially this time of year, but still infinitely preferable to sitting on the couch second-guessing team strategies in the Tour de France.

This morning I was back up on the levee for the 6 am ride. We rolled out with 6 or 7 riders, and as had been the case last Thursday, the bike path was still open at Powerline Drive. I could see all of the workers gathered on the river side of the levee, and up above I could see that they had already pulled one of the big transmission cables across the road to the top of the new tower. I knew the path would be closed on the way back. After losing all but three of us at Williams Blvd., and then picking up one rider around there, Jeff said he would need to turn back at the Big Dip, so that's where Charles and I turned back as well as Dave continued on to Ormond where he lives. By 11:30 this morning it was raining buckets. There's some disturbance down in the Gulf just south of us that is apparently going to be causing a lot of rain for the next few days. In fact, the daily weather forecast right now just says "Scattered Thunderstorms" all the way to the 28th with the chance of rain between 42 and 58% throughout, which basically means that wherever you are at any time it might or might not rain on you because there's just no way to reliably predict where and when it will rain.