Hot town, summer in the city

A Thursday morning with waterspouts over the lake

It's mid-summer now, and it shows. The pre-dawn rides start at 82°F with the relative humidity in the 90s. Then it gets hot. Surprisingly, though, turnout for the regular rides has been high, especially the Friendly Friday and Saturday Giro rides. Go figure.

There's a lot to catch up on this week, so I'll turn the clock back all the way to the week after the Tour de La., starting with the July 3rd WeMoRi. I was feeling pretty decent for that one. It was one of those where most everybody was still there for the finish. As usual, we came screaming down the Bayou St. John bridge at 30+ mph as people started to set up for the Marconi sprint about a kilometer away. This time of year there are some big groups of high school cross-country runners that meet up along Lakeshore Drive in the mornings. It's not really a problem for us, but this time I guess one of them inadvertently left us a surprise. 

July 3 Skid

I was still toward the back of the paceline when I heard what I thought was someone hitting a coke can. What it actually was, however, was one of those Yeti insulated cups. Charles nailed it and immediately hit the ground a couple of bikes ahead of me. He went more or less to the left as his bike spun off to the right. I hit the brakes hard and barely made it through between the sliding bike and a parked car on the right, clipping some part of his bike with my rear wheel in the process. Fortunately, Charles and his bike were more or less OK. Later that evening I was cleaning my bike and realized I'd taken off a big chunk of my rear tire when I locked up the rear wheel. Good thing I checked. Also, good thing I happened to have a new tire on hand.

That Thursday was July 4th, so of course there was a Holiday Giro that morning. I rolled out the door around 6 am into the relatively mild but predictably humid 80° air with an official "feels like" temperature of 87°, hoping for a reasonably controlled ride. With the "interim" Giro route upon which we seem to have finally arrived at a consensus, my usual 59-60 mile Giro rides are not more like 68-70 miles, with that extra half hour tacked onto the hottest part, of course. The ride out to Venetian Isles was still pretty fast, with an average speed a bit over 25 mph, but by the time we were halfway back every one was pretty wilted and hot.

Big Friendly Friday Group

The next day, the Friendly Friday ride had a pretty big group, relatively speaking, so of course it wasn't quite as easy as it sometimes is. Still, having a bigger group always make the ride better and usually also makes it seem a little easier since all those bodies make for a much sweeter draft zone near the back.

Big Saturday Giro

The on Saturday we had possibly the largest group we've had since the bridge closure. That guaranteed a fast pace, at least on the way out before it became oppressively warm, but the big long paceline also made it feel a little easier. It really reminded me how much better the ride is when you have 20-30 people on hand. The last part of the ride, of course, was super hot, which kept both the pace and hydration levels well below normal. I was thoroughly dehydrated by the time I got home, and subsequently took the hint to order up a fresh bag of Skratch, since I was just about out of the one I had. 

Steve and Charles had planned a ride out of Pass Christian for Sunday, so I made my way over there. We had a nice group of six, and the pace was pretty controlled, so other than, again, the heat, it was a nice 52 miler with a little bit of terrain. It wasn't until I got back home and looked at Strava that I realized Apryl had ridden from a friend's house to the ride, and then ridden back afterward, logging over 100 miles. She's apparently planning on doing the 200-mile LoJoTa ride in early September. Considering how drained I was by the end of my own 52 miles, I was impressed. That ride brought my weekly mileage up to 316, which was probably more than generally considered advisable considering the fact that practically every single morning my Garmin greets me with a Heat Advisory.

Last week wasn't much different, really. We have under this heat dome lately, so winds have been fairly mild and temperatures have been fairly high. Considering the prior week, I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised to find nobody at NOMA for the 6 am Tuesday ride. Just as well, really, since I could clearly use a bit of recovery anyway. I did run into Keith Noonan who turned around and rode with me for a while. As I usually do when I'm solo for this ride, I turned around a little early so I'd get back  home at the usual time. Wednesday's WeMoRi was pretty fast, at least it felt that way to me. In reality, it was probably a pretty normal one. 

Thursday Morning Sunrise

On Thursday we had more of a group at NOMA, which made for a better ride. On the way back from t he casino we could see a line of rain clouds out over the lake that had spawned a number of waterspouts. Then again on Friday we had a surprisingly big group, which again meant an unsurprisingly fast pace. Mid-way through the ride we lost Charles, who I figured had a flat or something. He had come over to the house a couple of days prior to replace handlebar tape, and when I rolled the bike into the basement I could tell that the headset was very badly pitted. It was hard to imagine how he was even riding the bike like that. He had a replacement headset at home, and subsequently brought it over to the LBS in the Quarter, since replacing it would involve disconnecting and bleeding the hydraulic brake lines that run through the handlebars and head tube. He had gotten it back in time for the Friday ride, but soon realized something wasn't right. He wrote that it felt like you'd "just done a bong hit every time you take a tight turn or stand on the pedals."  Back at NOMA I looked at it and you could see the fork moving below the head tube, even though the preload adjustment seemed tight. My diagnosis was simply that something wasn't installed right and it would have to be taken apart to find the actual problem, which turned out to be an upside-down headset bearing. Anyway, it was a really good Friday ride.

What everyone looked
like after Saturday's Giro

The Saturday Giro was, again, a big one with at least 30 riders on hand for another exercise in group dehydration. There was some horsepower at the front, so it got quite fast and stayed that way all the way out to Venetian Isles. Fortunately the winds were light, which, combined with the large group, made it manageable despite some long stretches that stayed in the 27-31 mph range. Not surprisingly, the ride back was a bit slower as the temperature got up into the low 90s and everyone started running out of water. One new feature on the Giro route lately has been a regular encounter with two or three small dogs that have been running out into the group near the end of Hayne Blvd. The group really scattered on Saturday when they ambushed us, but somehow nobody crashed and the dogs didn't get hit. Later in the ride, somewhere on the I-510 segment, Matt and Jaden got into some kind of argument about somebody's riding, I think. Anyway, the pace remained fairly fast, and I got home on Saturday completely drained, just like my water bottles. I wasn't the only one. Later that day I went over to Tulane HQ and picked up the 56 cm Specialized so I could take it home and check it out. Gavin was flying into town on Sunday morning for a conference, and would be borrowing it for the week. I stopped by GNO Cyclery on the way home and picked up a couple of rolls of handlebar tape because what was on there was kind of shredded on both sides from what had to have been a crash. Otherwise, though, the bike was functional. I cleaned it up, cleaned and lubed the filthy chain, cleaned the cassette and chainrings and jockey wheels, adjusted the derailleur, lowered the handlebar, and of course changed the tape. The bike is one of three Specialized bikes that were donated to the club a few years back. It's a basic aluminum Specialized Allez with the low-end Tiagra components, so it's a little on the heavy side, but otherwise pretty nice.

Mellow Monday

Sunday's Giro was a little smaller and although the pace was a bit slower, it felt harder to me. I think that all those long hot rides had finally caught up with me. By the time we turned back onto Hayne Blvd. I was already rationing the water and Skratch that I had left, and all I could think about was the cold Coke in the refrigerator at home. I had originally been considering doing a long ride on the northshore, but was glad I'd decided to instead just do the Giro. Gavin's flight was scheduled to arrive at 10:15 am, and I got home at 10:00 even after taking a shortcut, but fortunately the flight was delayed about fifteen minutes, so the timing actually worked out great. I picked him up and we go the bike adjusted, then went to lunch, and hung around the house long enough to watch the day's Tour de France stage before dropping him and the bike off at the Marriott. This morning's Mellow Monday ride  had a pretty good turnout, and although it got a little fast here and there, it wasn't a particularly hard one, which was good because I was definitely feeling like I was in need of a little recovery.

Meanwhile, back at home, I am dreading the next electric bill, still hoping that one day the city will show up and clean out the clogged catch basin next to the house, and thinking about the inevitability of needing to have a lot of expensive exterior work done to replace rotting wood, install new gutters, and paint. For now, the hurricane situation has been quiet, but it's expected to ramp up again fairly soon, things usually get pretty spicy in August and September, into the early part of October. Keeping fingers crossed. Charley has been moving up in the local Dog rankings, and is currently in 2nd position as measured by number of steps. He shows up also on Candy's Strava page whenever she takes him for a walk and actually remembers to bring her phone and have the app running. Their typical daily walks are in the 5-7 mile range, so that's a lot of dog steps.

Tour de La Weekend

Small field, but no lack of talent

Leading up to this year's Tour de La we had more complications and changes than we've had for at least a decade. Problems with the original road race venue led to a postponement from the beginning of June to the end of June. In the interim we secured a new venue (actually one that we'd used before for a couple of Collegiate races) and decided to run the time trial immediately after the road races from the same location, which greatly simplified things on Saturday. I think the road course at Lee Road was significantly better in many respects than the old one at Stoney Point. The road surface is dramatically better, and traffic around the start/finish is practically non-existent. All we really needed were riders. We didn't get many of those, however. I guess the heat was one factor, and perhaps there is just a general pervasive fear of entering an actual competition nowadays. Regardless, we pushed ahead, knowing that participation would be far below the years when we had over 200 riders. Of course, that knowledge has driven a gradual reduction in the prizelist that was once around $6k and is now down to around $2k, which is also around the total net revenue from entry fees. There's another $3-4k in costs to put on the event, much of which was made up by sponsorship from Bike Law and Palmer, and some other donations from individuals. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it is just as much work and expense to put on a race for 200 riders as it is for 50.

Mike was there! His derailleur
cable slipped in the RR.

One nice surprise came a couple of days before the event when Howard emailed me to say that the speed bumps on the criterium course had been removed for the race. I was pretty impressed that he was able to make that happen. On Friday I downloaded the final pre-registration data, assigned numbers, set up the registration and results workbook, charged batteries, and went down to the basement to stage all of the stuff I'd need to cram into my car. Since we didn't need the big P/A system for the Road Race or Time Trial, I was able to leave that and the generator at home. For power we'd be relying on just a couple of Jackery power banks. Those would just have to run the radio, laptops, camera, and printer, for which they would have more than enough in reserve. As usual I drove over to the Hampton Inn in Mandeville Friday afternoon to shorten the Saturday morning drive, and was able to have dinner with Mignon and Mark that evening, which was a nice stress-reducer. I knew we would be short-handed this year since a couple of our usual people couldn't be there.

LAMBRA Cat. 1-2 Road Champions

Saturday morning I got up a little after 5 am, picked up coffee at Starbucks, and made the 45 minute drive up to the road course. I stopped at the intersection of 1072 and Lee Road, and spent about 30 minutes sweeping rocks and sand from the inside of that turn, and then put  up a few caution signs and a directional sign for the riders. Once at the Oak Grove church I put up some more signage and started unloading the car. Mignon, Boyd, and Ty arrived to help, and a bit later the two officials, Ricky and Cole. Once the riders started arriving we realized that the bib number set that I had for the masters race was missing a lot of numbers. I had assumed it was an untouched sequence, but apparently not. Fortunately we had lots of extra numbers, so although I had to change a bunch of numbers on my results spreadsheet, it wasn't a huge problem. This year we were running the women with the masters, and were weren't even offering a Junior race, so that meant there would be only three groups on the road, and we'd need only three follow cars, which was good because that's all we had anyway. Mary J from S'port was the only woman to show up, so I guess it was good that we had planned on combining the two groups. We go the police officers assigned to the various intersections and were ready to go right on time.

Masters Road Race

The races themselves went smoothly and without any crashes, but the heat definitely took its toll on some of the riders, even though most were doing only 51 miles, with the 1/2/3/4s doing one 17-mile lap more than that. The only issue was a loose dog, or maybe more than one dog, somewhere between the turn onto Lee Road that the spot where Choctaw road split off. One of the riders got bitten on his ankle. I didn't get the whole story, but Ricky filed a Report of Occurrence just in case, and I think one of the police officers went over there to have a talk with the owner. Usually, dogs will keep their distance from a big group, but none of this year's groups was big enough. The road races were also serving as the LAMBRA road championships, so we had a podium on hand to award the USAC medals. That's always a little complicated when you have people from other states in the race.

Masters Criterium Start

So we wrapped  up the road races and time trials by about 2:30 or so and headed back across the lake. Ricky and Cole were staying at my house, so we went out to dinner after I got the results posted, which didn't take very long.

Cat 1/2/3/4 Criterium

Sunday morning I was up early again to load up the car, this time adding the P/A system and generator, to head over to Torres Park in Chalmette, about half an hour's drive from home. I drove a lap around the course and discovered a water leak in the big parking lot. It was running right across the path we planned to use for the race, so we had to make a little change that, I think, was actually better than the original route through that section. Once again, it was hot, but fortunately there are lots of big oak trees, and we had tons of Coke products on  hand, thanks to Carter Lusk who works with the distributor in Mississippi. They were a sponsor of the Natchez Classic and he had offered to help us out for the Tour. He ended up driving down from McComb and dropping off a bunch of stuff at Mignon's place a few days before the race. Ty then loaded up his truck with a couple of ice chests. Even with it as hot as it was, we still didn't go through everything Carter had brought, so we gave away 12 packs of drinks to the winners. Anyway, nobody crashed and nobody was arrested, so the criterium went well despite the small field sizes. We need to remember to send a notice to the two or three houses that are on the back side of the course next year. We could also use about a hundred more traffic cones for the route through the parking lot.

By the time the criterium was over I was getting  pretty hot and tired. Ty, Mignon, and I took our time tearing everything down and loading it back into the car. Then, of course, I had to unload everything. It's all still sitting in the basement, and I haven't had the energy yet to re-organize it all. Also, the weekend took its toll on my back, as usual.

There are a bunch of photos on the NOBC Facebook Group page, and a nice on-bike video from the 1/2/3/4 criterium.