Giri

New Year's Eve cool-down along Lakeshore Drive

The weather around here has been a pain in the ass, but not for the reasons you might expect this time of year. This lingering chest cold isn't helping much, either. For the past four or five days we've had unseasonably warm temperatures, which by themselves would be awesome. What hasn't been so awesome has been the accompanying morning fog and wet roads. Those things, combined with the usual holiday disruptions, have resulted in smaller than usual numbers showing up for the early morning rides. New Year's Eve was Saturday, and for that one we had a pretty decent turnout. The temperature was in the low 60s and the wind was fairly light, and although the streets were wet it wasn't all that bad. Rinsing the dirt off the bike with the garden hose has practically become routine lately, but sometimes I just lube the chain and leave everything else dirty because I know it will all be a mess the following day anyway.

Heading out on New Year's Day in a light fog

New Year's Day was another Giro Ride. It was cooler - in the mid-50s to start - and a bit foggier, and turnout was unsurprisingly lower than normal. Will and Brett were pushing the pace up at the front, but there wasn't much wind so it wasn't too difficult to sit in the draft toward the back where my sometimes impressive coughing fits wouldn't disturb too many people. As we made the right turn off of Hayne onto Paris Road I thought I'd drop back to the end of the line since I knew it was going to get faster there. Glancing back, I saw Howard a couple of bike lengths off the back and rather than plug the hole myself I drifted back onto his wheel thinking he would close it up right away. He made a brief effort but the just kind of sat up suddenly. I think I actually had to touch the brakes for a moment. By the time I came around him I knew I wouldn't be able to close the rapidly increasing gap without putting my congested lungs into difficulty, so I just settled into an easy solo cruise for the rest of the way out to Venetian Isles. Fortunately there was hardly any traffic. I got back into the group shortly after it has started back and the rest of the ride was fairly uneventful. Every time I would have to make any sort of sustained effort above 145 BPM I'd start to cough a bit and have to back off. Fortunately those were rare instances. So I ended up 2022 at 13,266 miles, a bit fewer than last year but higher than most of the prior ten years.

On Monday many people were off work, it being the "official" New Year's vacation day, so of course there was a third Giro Ride that day. Well, sort of...  It was almost 70°F with a moderate south wind, which would have been nice if it hadn't been so damned foggy and, of course, wet. By 7:00 there were only four of us at Starbucks so we decided to just do a shorter ride, turning around at the end of Hayne. Having just four riders out on Chef Highway in the fog just didn't seem wise anyway. So that ended up being a fairly easy ride. Going up the Casino overpass on the way back I was sitting on Christian's wheel as he pushed the pace just a bit. Sure enough, just before the top I started to cough again and decided it was a good time to back off. I caught back up at the top of the Seabrook bridge when they all stopped to walk across the steel grate. I was glad we hadn't done the full Giro because I wasn't really feeling all that great anyway.

The forecast for this morning, Tuesday, had been looking really bad on Monday night. It was supposed to start raining around 5 or 6 am and continue, with storm warnings, for about 24 hours. I was not expecting to be able to ride, but since weather forecasts around here can be unreliable I looked out the window at 5:30 am to see that it wasn't raining. Checking the radar, I saw that they had pushed the bad weather arrival back until 11:00 or noon, so the morning ride was going to be fine. Well, sort of...  As often happens when there's a warm humid south wind blowing across the Mississippi, the levee bike path was fairly foggy at 6 am despite a significant wind of around 10 mph. There were just three of us - Charles, Chris M, and me - on hand, and when Charles said he was going to have to turn back at the Dip because of a work meeting there were no objections. On the way out there were a number of places where the fog was so thick we had to slow down for fear of running into a pedestrian or something. Fortunately there were very few of those. Chris kind of blew up at some point on the way back and dropped off. He'd mentioned that he hadn't really been on the bike much for the past few months.

When I got to the office this morning there were emails from everyone else saying the would be "working from home" today because of the weather forecast that features a "Severe Storm Risk" notice mentioning wind, tornados, and hail. Looking at the weather radar right now at 10:30 it doesn't look that bad. The timing of the heavy thunderstorms has been pushed back to 2:00 pm. I guess I'll play it by ear and make a run for home early so Candy doesn't have to come out and rescue me and my bike later in the day.