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.