Lost Week

Back at the Giro after being sick during the week.

It started on Monday with a scratchy throat and by Tuesday morning it was clear I had a cold, aka upper respiratory virus, possibly COVID. I'd been expecting another fairly high-mileage week. Lots of people were trying to cram for NOMA2NOMA, just like you'd cram for an exam, and this would be the last week you could do some longer rides before needing to shift to recovery mode ahead of the event, which is this coming Sunday. It was also the week of Six Gap. None of the Tulane riders seemed interested in going this year, and only Pat seemed committed to going. At any rate, by Tuesday any hope of doing Six Gap was clearly out the window. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at home sucking on zinc lozenges and trying to get at least some work done on the computer. By late Wednesday the throat was much improved, although I now had some minor chest congestion to deal with. Otherwise, though, I was feeling good enough to go out for a ride Thursday morning. Rather than try to meet the regular 6 am group, which would probably not have been advisable, I instead waited another half hour and went out alone for a short 20 mile ride to test the water. The water seemed OK, so on Friday I joined up with the early Friendly Friday ride, which thankfully wasn't too fast. I was still being careful and staying in the draft to minimize how much snot I was aspirating into my lungs. After that ride I went straight to the levee to see if I could catch the Tulane group, but apparently I turned around too early and missed them.

Jaden and his daughter #aerotuck

Saturday was the regular Giro Ride which unsurprisingly wasn't too terribly fast since some of the usual horsepower was planning on doing a bunch of extra miles, or in some cases were riding elsewhere. My brother and niece came in on Friday, so I wasn't very interested in doing any extra miles, which was probably a good thing, considering. Sunday was the Bike Easy "Bicycle Second Line" ride. I had lent the group some of the big NOBC coolers and had sent them some cash so the NOBC would be one of the sponsors. Candy, Jay, and Elise were planning on doing the 10-mile ride through town that started at 11:00. My plan was to ride the Giro and then go straight to the registration area on the Lafitte Greenway to help out, and then to do the ride. It was a plan. None of the aforementioned people had ridden any significant amount in at least a year, but the ride is basically done inside of a police rolling enclosure at well under 10 mph. Speed wouldn't be the problem, but the heat might be.

The ride started promptly at 11:00 with our little group more or less at the end. I ran into Jaden who was riding with his daughter in a seat between the handlebar and saddle, and Will who had his kid in a trailer. Candy was riding the 1970's Peugeot mixte, Jay was on my old Trek mountain bike, and Elise was on Candy's beach cruiser. Things were going fine, but Candy's grocery pannier kept coming unclipped from the rear rack. She ended up with it over her shoulder like a messenger bag. Fortunately it has a shoulder strap. Elise seemed to be doing fine until all of a sudden she and Jay kind of disappeared. I didn't know if they had just been going really slowly or had some sort of problem, but at any rate I couldn't see them when I looked back. By then we were only half a mile from the end of the ride. Just after turning off of Canal Street I got a text from Jay saying that they had stopped because Elise was not feeling well. I turned around and rushed back to find them and ultimately decided to ride back home and pick up the car. Meanwhile Candy got the message and turned back to meet them too. So it was kind of a shame that we missed the after-ride party at Second Line Brewing, but it was nice to get back to air-conditioning anyway. 

So with the two missed days and the one short day I ended up with a 204-mile week which I guess wasn't too bad under the circumstances. Of course about half of those miles didn't really qualify as training, but I guess they were still better than sitting on the couch eating potato chips. It's Tuesday now and I still have some lingering chest congestion that I guess will take a while to fully go away. Meanwhile, I am expecting delivery of an old used cyclocross bike some time this evening. It's just a simple Blue Norcross with rim brakes and all, but at least it can handle wide tires and give me the option of doing an occasional gravel ride or cyclocross race. We'll see.

Things have been kind of interesting at work lately as Tulane is making some big plans in the downtown area and things are finally winding down on the COVID front. I am still doing daily COVID reports but the day to day changes have been unremarkable and the numbers generally quite low. The LDH person keeps forgetting to publish the downloadable data that I need and in fact I am still waiting to see today's numbers. At this point I'm pretty sure nobody would even notice if I skipped an update. If the trend continues as it has I'm thinking we will discontinue that some time next month since it's not really very useful any more now that so few people are being tested and most of those who are being tested are probably doing so because they are sick.

September Miles

Mellow Monday on the lakefront

It was another somewhat high-mileage week for me. With good weather and little to no rain there were no excuses, and then on Saturday some of us went over to Pass Christian for a nice 75 mile ride.

Thursday on the levee

The Mellow Monday ride that started the week turned out to be quite a fast one. Fortunately it is also quite short. I'd logged nearly 300 miles the week before, so Monday should really have been a rest day, which it definitely wasn't. Oh well. That's one of the things about group rides. You never really know what you're going to get, although there is always the (rarely taken) option of dropping quietly off the back ... or so I'm told. It is getting darker and darker in the mornings now. I just bought a new headlight since my old one's battery doesn't last as long as I'd like any more. 

The rest of the week was the usual routine with the long levee rides on Tuesday and Thursday, WeMo on Wednesday, and Friendly Friday on, well, you figure it out. 

That brings us to Saturday. Charles and Steve Martin had planned a 75 mile ride out of Pass Christian which is just an hour's drive away, so I figured I'd join them. The cooler temperatures of earlier in the week were nearly gone, though, so I knew it wasn't going to feel like a Fall ride or anything. We ended up with a nice group of seven - Steve J, Steve M, Charles, Pat, Dan, Norman Z, and me. The pace was pretty good throughout, although from the start I knew I was going to be dragging a bit. It's like that sometimes. There's no real reason you can find for it but from the first pedal stroke you kind of know it's not going to be your day. Anyway, I was fine with the pace but was being a little cautious about pulling too long or too hard. 

The Sunday Giro heading out

It was all kind of complicated by my screw-up with the route. Steve had sent out a link to the route which I had dutifully downloaded. I normally do that on my laptop at home and just plug the Garmin into the computer and transfer the file directly. This time I was at work so rather than wait until later I added it to my routes on Garmin Connect. When you "star" a route on Garmin Connect your Garmin device downloads it the next time it connects. Well it turned out that I also had an older 70-mile route from Pass Christian on Garmin Connect and of course I starred the wrong one so I started out with the wrong, but close, course loaded. Just to complicate matters further, right after starting the ride I realized I hadn't started my HRM and for some reason it didn't want to pair with the Garmin by the time I noticed, so a few miles into the ride I restarted the ride so it would pair. After a couple of intersections where my Garmin told me to go one way and the group went the other I realized I must have been riding the wrong route. So for the next thirty miles or so my Garmin was constantly telling me to make U-turns or turn onto side roads trying to get me back on (the wrong) course. 

I probably could have ended the wrong route and started the right one while riding but also probably would have crashed into the rider in front of me or ridden off the road in the process, so I waited until we stopped at the store and just ended the ride, saved it, selected the correct route, and basically started all over again. At least I wouldn't turn the wrong way at the intersections. Anyway, it was a good ride even if I had to do some arithmetic to figure out how far I'd ridden that day. Most of us went over to The Deck for lunch after the ride, which was quite nice. 

On Sunday I went out for the Sunday Giro Ride which was fairly tame, as Giro Rides go. Then I spent a few hours trimming hedges and clearing the badly overgrown corner by the house. I think I went through a couple of gallons of various liquids during that process, and of course did a number on my back. 75 miles on the bike was a piece of cake compared to the same length of time doing yard work.

Here we go

So although we have been exceptionally lucky so far this hurricane season, it is looking like our luck is finally running out. There's current a disturbance out there heading straight for the Caribbean and the early projections have it intensifying and ultimately turning north into the Gulf. It's still way too early to say anything for sure, but they are already giving it a 50% chance of development so it will likely be a tropical storm within a day or two. We are just a couple of weeks past the peak of hurricane season, so it certainly merits close monitoring. They will probably have better model consensus in a couple of days and it will likely be in the Caribbean by then. I just spent a couple thousand dollars having the oak trees trimmed back from the house, and we now have a bigger generator and a fair amount of gasoline on hand, so that's good. However the roof of the garage is held down mainly by gravity at this point, so that's not so good. 

Northwest

Back on the 26th we headed off to the airport for an early afternoon flight to the Pacific Northwest, aka Washington. 

I had packed up the old Orbea in my brand-new Airport Ninja bag the day before. This particular travel bag requires removal of the fork and saddle, and of course front brake and rear derailleur, but it makes for a small enough package that you can carry it on your back like a backpack and it doesn't get treated as over-sized. I had added the usual pipe insulation to the main tubes and seatstays, but that was mainly to minimize scratches because the bag itself has more than enough built-in padding. We'd already dropped off the dog at the vet for a long and expensive boarding stay, and were planning on parking in the airport long-term lot (also expensive) for the 10-day vacation that would be the first real vacation we'd taken in about three years. So naturally when we arrived we found the long-term garage to be full. Fortunately there is a new US Park place right down the street, so we parked there, which was marginally cheaper, and were immediately picked up by their shuttle for the short hop over to the airport.

We had arrived at the airport so far ahead of our flight time that the tiny Alaska Airlines counter was still shut down, so we had to wait a while for them to open it up. At MSY, Alaska is way down at the very end of the ticket counters and their electronic kiosks (which were no working at the time) are likewise in an odd little spot as if they were an afterthought. In contrast, at SeaTac there's about a quarter mile of Alaska Airlines counters. Anyway, I had paid the $20 for the checked bag (my bike) and then the agent offered to check one more bag for free, so that was nice. The flight was long but routine except that Candy got the full TSA pat-down thanks to her hip replacement hardware. Danielle met us at the airport for the drive from Seattle to Olympia which as usual featured a fair amount of bumper-to-bumper traffic. 

With the morning temperatures in the 50s, I didn't rush putting the bike back together the next day and finally headed out for a ride around 10:00 when the temperature was around 60°. I had loaded a number of routes onto my Garmin, and decided to start out with a 40-mile one that I had more-or-less done a few years before, heading south largely on the Chehalis Western Trail (a rails-to-trails bike path) and then through Tenino and back up through Olympia. I was in vacation mode, of course, and looking more at the map than my speed, which was the case for most of my rides up there.

The next day, the 28th, I ended up doing a somewhat longer ride, first north, then south, adding an extra loop on Military road after I got a text saying the others had gone to the grocery. I pulled up to the house just as they were unloading groceries, so it was perfect timing. I did a shorter ride on Monday the 29th because we were planning to do some paddle-boarding later in the day. The paddle-boarding adventure was harder than you'd think, but not because of the actual paddle-boarding part. The tide was out and parking was a fair distance from the water, so there was a rather long portage before we could actually get the boards in the water. We were on our way back when I pulled my paddle out of the water only to find that the paddle part had slipped out of the handle part. It immediately sank, of course, and so I ended up getting towed back in. I guess that at some point I may have grabbed the paddle right where the little spring-loaded button is that allows you to separate the sections and maybe twisted it or otherwise moved the button out place. Fortunately we were almost back by then. Tuesday's ride was basically a repeat of the southern loop, but in the afternoon we all went for a ride on the Trail to pick blackberries. I was amazed that there were tons of blackberries at the end of August! Here in La the blackberries are usually long gone by the end of July.

On Wednesday I did a fun ride mostly not on the Trail and over to the west, closer to Capitol State Forest. The route I mostly used was named something like "Wednesday Team Ride." The route had a lot more terrain than the southern loop, so that was nice. I got slightly turned around early in the ride when my Garmin told me I was off course when I wasn't but I eventually got that figured out. Then, toward the end of the ride I made a detour to meet the others for lunch in town, which was great, after which I rode back to the house. Most of the roads around Olympia have bike lanes (and roundabouts - love 'em or hate 'em), which is always nice when you are in unfamiliar territory. The next day was a long drive down to the Portland Zoo, which was OK but not particularly impressive. 

On Friday and Saturday I did rides in the morning and long walks/hikes in the afternoon. Saturday's 6.6 mile hike was mostly on the Mima Falls trail in the Capitol State Forest, and since I hadn't brought shoes for that I ended up buying a pair of hiking shoes at the local REI. I was glad I had, too, because there sure are a lot of rocks on Washington trails! It was a nice easy hike through the forest with occasional horseback riders and mountain bikers.

So on Sunday we headed back to SeaTac for the trip home which was slightly complicated by the fact that the daughter's Volvo tailgate that she had just gotten repaired to the tune of about a thousand dollars stopped working again. Luckily the Airport Ninja was small enough to easily go in though the side door! When we walked into the airport it looked like the day before Christmas or something because the place was packed. It took us about an hour to get through the security line that snaked all through the place. The flight home was crowded but otherwise fine, at least until we got close to Louisiana where the pilot had to navigate around some pretty spectacular storm clouds. During the flights out and back I read Mark Cavendish's book "Tour de Force" which was an interesting look into his remarkable and unpredictable 2021 season, along with a stage-by-stage account of the Tour de France. Cavendish can perhaps rub some people the wrong way, but I have always kind of identified with him as someone who just doesn't seem to have the right physiology for those long heroic climbs, while somehow always being able to put in a good sprint effort at the end - if I can just make it to the 200-meter flag without having to put my nose into the wind too much!

All in all it was a great trip and I was happy to have ignored a lot of email and fit in a bit over 290 miles on the bike, which more than justified the hassle of bringing it along. Even so, it I were to add up all of the various expenses that went into those ten days I'd probably have an anxiety attack.

This week it was back to the regular routine, thankfully not until Tuesday since Monday was Labor Day. Of course, Monday was also a Holiday Giro Ride, so despite getting to bed a little late I was able to make it to Starbucks where I found Brandon B, aka "Half-Carat" who is in the midst of some chemotherapy and for whom a number of the local riders had recently shaved their heads in support.