Sunshine on My Shoulders

Friday morning with the Friendly Friday Dawn Patrol

It's not quite the end of February, so still far too early for declarations about springtime, but this is New Orleans and as always we are relentlessly teased by Mother Nature. The mornings last week were, by my standards, still chilly, with temperatures in the low to mid-50s, but hey, I'll take that any day instead of low 40s or, heaven forbid, low 30s.

Last Friday we had a big group, no doubt a direct result of a morning conducive to summer kit. It's always funny how that first warm morning brings all sorts of people out of the woodwork. Riding home I briefly contemplated putting in a few extra miles, just to enjoy the sunshine. Back at the house, the oak leaves were falling like rain. If you live under live oak trees you soon realize that the season called "Fall" is a misnomer. Although the trees do drop a fair amount of leaves in the Fall, it is early spring when they shed most of their leaves, just as the new ones are starting to develop. At the moment there are at least ten big bags full of leaves out on the street waiting for Wednesday's garbage pickup. I hate to see them disposed of that way, but the front yard is well covered already and all of the leaves that fell, and are still falling, in the back yard are still there. These were just the leaves in the street that were clogging up the storm drains.

Free tools!

The weekend weather was looking to be better than anything we have had thus far this year. Saturday's Giro Ride had a good-sized group and was quite fast. I think Will was probably on the front for half of it all by himself. Even sitting toward the tail end of the paceline I can usually tell when Will has settled in for a long pull at the front because the pace becomes so steady that you'd think you were motorpacing. Although it was a pretty good workout, I arrived home feeling surprisingly good, probably thanks to my careful attention to wheelsucking. We were planning a longish ride over in Mississippi for Sunday, so I didn't want to do too much damage the day before. 

As a special reward, I found a nice soft-face hammer on the roadside when I was riding back from the lake, so I stuffed it into my pocket to add to my roadside tool collection. Over the years I have picked up some really nice tools that have no doubt found their way out of pickup truck beds.

Sunday morning over in MS

On Sunday I was scheduled for an 80 mile ride that Steve and Charles had organized over in Mississippi, starting at a playground just off of I-10. It was one of those days that challenges your wardrobe selection abilities. When I arrived at the parking lot around 7:30 am the car thermometer read 49°, but there was almost no wind and the sky was clear. The forecast was calling for upper 60s later in the morning. Although I usually opt for at least knee warmers when it's below 60°, I knew it was going to warm up quickly and decided to go with bare knees. Yeah, it was a little chilly, but that didn't last more than about twenty minutes after we rolled out just past 8:00. We had a good group of, I think, nine, plus one other rider on an E-recumbent who tagged along the whole way about five bike-lengths off the back. Most of the route was fairly flat, with some little hills up toward the northern part of the big loop that we rode. Riders were taking super long pulls at the front on the way out. I think we may have had a light but increasing tailwind, and with the pace mostly in the lower 20s riders seemed content to stay on the front a little longer than usual. I think we were at least twenty miles in before my turn came up for my second pull of the day.

After avoiding a bunch of peacocks that were crossing the road in front of us, we eventually came to a store stop at maybe 42 miles into the ride. I got a Coke, but was still carrying around two nearly full water bottles and emptied half of one of them so I could fill it back up with my leftover Coke. I ate a little granola bar that I'd brought along, but wasn't particularly hungry quite yet since the pace had been fairly moderate. I think some were probably just a little apprehensive about the distance. Indeed, when we got to around 65 miles I could tell that a few of the riders were starting to feel the distance. Also, this was where the terrain was the least flat. I was definitely starting to feel the prior day's Giro in my legs on some of the uphills. It wasn't terrible, but I certainly knew I'd ridden 60 miles the day before. 

This morning, Monday, the temperature was in the upper 50s and the wind was light. I went out with covered knees, a base layer shirt, and arm-warmers. I was a little chilly at first but otherwise pretty comfortable. The Mellow Monday group kept it fairly mellow this morning, which was nice because there was still just a bit of residual soreness in my quads from Sunday's ride.

There is a weekend of racing over in Mobile this coming weekend. I am hoping to go, but kind of tapped the brakes this morning when I looked at the forecast, which was calling for thunderstorms on Saturday and some more rain on Sunday. Of course it's still early, so hopefully that will improve. I don't bounce as well as I used to, so that is something that I have to consider nowadays. A rainy road race wouldn't be too bad if it's not very cold, and the criterium is on a pretty non-technical concrete course, so even it the rain it probably wouldn't be sketchy, but I would probably still hesitate to rail the one significant corner like I might otherwise. We'll see. Not looking forward to the time chance coming up on March 10 when all of my morning rides will be thrown back into the dark.

The Longest Month

Obligatory Rex Photo

February is the longest month. Not technically, of course, but definitely mentally. Throw in Mardi Gras complications and posts from other people who are actually racing already, and it just makes it seem even worse. It's always like that. Cold temperatures, strong winds, and lagging motivation. The only thing that kind of saves me would probably be diagnosed by some as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or perhaps just the knowledge that the older I get the costlier become those skipped days. Anyway, somehow I survived Mardi Gras week without too big a hit to the training log.

We were off from work on Monday, probably because everybody knows that nobody would show up the day before Mardi Gras anyway. That offered an opportunity for a long ride, but of course Mother Nature had other ideas. I woke up that morning, as I'd expected, to a weather radar that was entirely green and a light rain falling outside. It was also pretty cold. So I initially set my sights on early afternoon, by which time the rain was supposed to taper off. As it turned out, though, a lot of the rain that was showing up on radar was not actually rain, and by 10:00 or so it looked like the streets were drying up a little bit. What I did not find was the motivation to push myself very hard into a wind that was occasionally trying to wrest away control of my front wheel. I still managed to log 40 miles, albeit with speeds ranging from 12 to 31 mph depending on the sinuosity of the Mississippi River. 

Tuesday was Mardi Gras and it started out very cold. I decided it would be a great day to skip riding, except for my usual ride to and from the French Quarter. Candy and I rode over to Napoleon Avenue around 10:00 and watched all of the Rex parade, after which I made my way downtown via, mostly, Prytania. Riding along toward downtown just a couple of blocks from St. Charles, I could see the parade off to my left at the intersections. By the time I was past Jackson Avenue I'd already passed all of Rex and was looking at Zulu floats. Zulu always comes down Jackson to St. Charles and ends up ahead of Rex. Fortunately, Zulu turns left when it gets downtown instead or right like Rex, so as long as you're ahead of Rex you can usually cross Canal Street pretty easily. 

I locked the bike up on St. Louis street where I ran into Dustin & company. We headed over to Royal, or maybe Bourbon, but as I was taking photos I soon lost track of them entirely. I wandered around downtown for a couple of hours as usual before finally heading back home, by which time the temperature had risen enough to make the ride quite nice.

So Wednesday's WeMoRi was pretty much of a disaster for me. I rode out to the lakefront as usual, with the group catching me just after the turn onto Wisner. Jaden came past me and I jumped to catch his wheel since nobody else was there, and immediately thought to myself, "This is not exactly the ideal wheel to be on right now." My speed went from 19 mph to 26 as my heart rate went from 94 to 155 bpm, at which point I moved over and motioned for Brian, who was behind me to come through. It was a small group and at the back I found little draft as the pace remained fast. I was barely hanging onto the tail end of the group as we went over the overpass and things got strung out. I wasn't recovering at all, and so just after turning on to City Park Avenue I quietly drifted off the back. I was thinking I'd take some time to recover, turn onto Lakeshore drive, and make a u-turn ahead of the group on its way back from the traffic circle, but then I ran into Jeff who was sitting in the parking lot fixing a flat, so I stopped there before riding out to LSD where I missed most of whatever was left of the group before heading back home.

Thursday's levee ride was going along nicely, even though there were just three of us left by the time we were past The Dip. Then, within sight of the Luling bridge, I noticed my front tire going soft, so I told the others to continue while I stopped to fix it. I assumed I'd pinch-flatted on a sharp little hole I'd plowed into earlier, but later that night when I did a post-mortem on the tube I discovered a piece of metal wire sticking a millimeter or two past the inside of the tire. How it didn't puncture the new tube before I got home I'll never know.

Old bike, old kit. Expecting to get wet but stayed dry.

Friday we had a big turnout for Friendly Friday, and the pace remained pretty moderate, so that was nice. Saturday, though, was a completely different story. It had rained all night and into the morning, so the Giro was completely out of the question. There was an off-and-on light rain falling most of the morning, but nothing too serious, so around noon I decided I may as well go for a ride. Assuming the streets would still be wet, and/or that it would start to rain again, I dressed for colder temperatures than we had. There was a strong northeast wind blowing at around 14 mph when I finally hit the road around 12:50, but the levee path turned out to be essentially dry. Still, it was a long battle in the wind, stopping occasionally to take pictures of the eagles that are so easy to spot this time of year when there's not much foliage on the trees along the river.

Saw four eagles on Saturday

The weather was a little better on Sunday, but it was still quite cold and windy, which resulted in a pretty small turnout for the Giro. We did the entire route anyway, although certainly not as fast as usual, and then a whole group agreed to continue down the lake trail to add what is inexplicably called the "shuffle," which took us eventually over to the river levee. By then the sun was out so it was a nice ride that added enough miles to make up for the missing mileage, if not intensity, earlier in the week.

Only three on Monday

This morning's Mellow Monday ride had only three of us. It was still rather windy and cold, so I guess a lot of the usual people decided to skip it altogether. I was feeling a little tired, so it felt like a good enough workout even though I didn't spend much time in the wind. Fortunately it looks like temperatures will be rising a bit for the rest of the week!

Early Mardi Gras Year

January and February, especially February, are always the toughest, and some years they are tougher than others. This year we seem to have had more than our share of early morning rain, or cold, or cold rain. Just last week we had quite a bit of street flooding in the city, no thanks to one of the ancient turbines having gone down in the middle of a rainstorm ... again. Then, to make matters just a little more complicated, Mardi Gras is early this year. You see, Mardi Gras (aka Fat Tuesday in English) is the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the day that starts the period of Lent, which is supposed to be a 40-day period of fasting prior to Easter. The problem is that Easter, which you would think would be a fixed date, was long ago determined, probably by some committee that couldn't come to an agreement and had a flight to catch, that Easter would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon (basically closest to the summer equinox) that occurs on or soonest after March 21st. Which of course makes no sense whatsoever but has nonetheless survived more or less unchanged for centuries. In order to include enough (6) Sundays in Lent, that means Mardi Gras is 46 days prior to Easter. Makes sense, right? Anyway, the bottom line is that every now and then, depending on the phase of the moon and earth's orbit around the sun, Mardi Gras comes really early. This is one of those years. Having Mardi Gras in the middle of February puts it at possibly the time of the year then the weather around here is least predictable. And when it comes to unpredictable weather, this particular year has knocked it out of the park. Anyway, the bottom line here is that we've had a lot of sketchy morning weather that has impacted those of us who don't like riding bikes that go nowhere quite a bit.

Friendly Friday

So this morning, Sunday, I lounged in bed an extra fifteen minutes, as usual for a Giro Ride morning. The temperature outside was nearly 70°F, and the wind was negligible, neither of which you'd expect for mid-February. Saturday was nearly as warm. By Mardi Gras morning on - you guessed it - Tuesday, it will be in the low 40s. For the first time in a while I went out in, basically, summer kit. Saturday's Giro had been quite fast, but surprisingly my legs felt none the worse for wear. I cruised down Orleans where the street had already been cleared of the tons (literally) of abandoned Mardi Gras beads and related trash from the prior evening's Endymion parade. If there's one thing this city does remarkably well, it's cleaning the streets following parades. Of course, I'm sure the parading organizations who put on these free spectacles pay for that too because if the city had to do that it would probably happen on the same timeline as pothole repair. 

Given the Mardi Gras festivities that have been in full swing for about a week now, it wasn't surprising that the turnout was pretty slim for Sunday's Giro. On the other hand, considering that the forecast for Monday is looking pretty bad, I would have expected a few more people to have dragged themselves out onto the road this morning. Now, you'd think that a small turnout would mean an easy ride, but if you did, you'd be wrong. More often than not it means you'll be spending more time than usual on the front. As it turned out, the ride was pretty good. It was by no means slow, or easy, but the limited amount of horsepower available kept the speeds down to levels that allowed people like me to actually see the front now and then. It was a good ride, actually.

Afterward, I rode down to Magazine Street at State Street to catch some of the Thoth parade - the closest parade to my house, and the only one I've seen so far. It was threatening to rain the whole time but never really did, unless you count a few random raindrops that fell here and there. The uptown crowd there was friendly and easygoing and since it was only 12:30 or so not yet drunk enough to be obnoxious. We stayed for maybe 30 of the 40+ floats.

Thoth

So this year, since early Spring, I've been using Silca Super-Secret drip wax on my chains. At first I considered it to be quite an extravagance, considering the relatively high cost of a little bottle of the concoction, but it has turned out to be quite cost-effective since you waste so little of it. Yeah, I know that using the "immersion" chain waxing technique is the best, but this stuff, when done right, is a pretty reasonable compromise that required little effort and definitely extends chain life, keeps the chain impressively clean, and at least theoretically saves a couple of watts here and there - as if anyone could ever really feel the difference. The one thing you have to be sure to do is to thoroughly clean the new chain in mineral spirits to remove absolutely all of the factory lubricant. I do this by putting the new chain in a pickle jar with mineral spirits (aka paint thinner) and shaking it up and letting it soak and shaking it up again, etc. etc. Of course for me it's practically a waste since I have been in the habit for many years of replacing chains when they reach the 2,500 - 3,000 mile mark regardless of how worn they might be. Anyway, I think I like this drip-wax thing. 

One other think I recently did was to put latex tubes in my training tires. It's not something I'd normally do, but some place had them on sale so I figured I'd give them a shot. I put one of the latex tubes in my front training wheel, which had an old Michelin race tire on it, and it worked nicely, so the following day I did the same with my rear wheel which immediately exploded. One thing about latex tubes is that they will squeeze through the smallest of slices in a tire sidewall and blow out quite dramatically. Anyway, I ended up having to ditch that tire and install a new one that I fortunately had on hand. I can't say they made me any faster or anything, and of course they bleed air quickly enough that I have to pump up the tires every couple of days, but otherwise they seem fine. I suppose I could pretend that they make me faster. I mean, it's a possibility, right?

After the Saturday Giro

Last week, despite some discouraging weather forecasts, I somehow managed to log a little over 250 miles. While that is actually a little low compared to my typical weeks, I was nonetheless somehow pleasantly surprised. Tuesday's levee ride had been 40 miles of unrelenting crosswind followed by a mad dash to make an early meeting. Wednesday's WeMoRi had been good, but just a bit easier and smaller than usual. Then on Thursday we had only three of us up on the levee with a 10 mph east wind that turned the entire return trip into a slog and saw us turning around at the big dip rather than going all the way out to Ormond. 

By Friday it had started getting warmer and so we had a pretty big group on hand for Friendly Friday, which of course resulted in a rather fast ride that shelled a few people. It was great to be riding without three layers of clothes, though, and that really made it a lot more enjoyable. 

Sunday

As I said before, Saturday's Giro had a pretty good sized group with some significant horsepower, which made for quite a fast ride. I spent a lot of time focusing on the finer points of wheelsucking, of course, so although the speeds were consistently high, I was never in any real difficulty and felt pretty good.

So I'm off from work tomorrow ("Lundi Gras") and Tuesday, and as luck would have it the forecast is calling for a lot of rain all morning. Of course the forecasts have not exactly been batting 1,000 lately, so I'll just have to look out the window in the morning before making a decision. It looks like the cold front will be through around noon, though, so an afternoon ride is looking like a possibility. Going to have to play that by ear, I guess. Mardi Gras is going to be kind of cold, unfortunately, starting in the 40s and not getting out of the 50s, but at least the rain should be gone. Christian sent out an email about doing a Mardi Gras Giro, although I may just play that one by ear too.