Well, it's that time of year again. The days are getting shorter and shorter, and my Strava feed is increasingly cluttered with Zwift cartoons rather than photos of tranquil summer country roads. Last Saturday was the annual Tour da Parish, and also the last day of DST before switching back to standard time in the wee hours of Sunday morning. For reasons I cannot fathom, a number of the Tulane riders who should have done the TdP didn't, and the couple who did had their own transportation, so I had an uncomplicated 40-minute drive down to St. Bernard Parish, arriving in plenty of time for the 7:30 am start. The start time had been moved up because of some ongoing construction along the route involving trucks.
The week prior had been just the usual morning group rides, although I think the upcoming beat-down in the parish was weighing on some minds and slightly limiting the effort levels. Not to worry, though, because Mother Nature stepped in right on time with a rainy Friday that kept many, including me, off the bike altogether. It was still quite dark as I neared the uncomplicated Los Isleños Museum Complex, causing me to miss a turn, but I found my way there easily, parking near the entrance, where I was quickly targeted by a thousand or so hungry mosquitos that I couldn't even see. I'm still full of itchy mosquito bites from head to toe since summer weight lycra apparently offers not the least bit of deterrent to the pesky purveyors of misery. Anyway, I quickly hiked over to the registration tent and picked up my number and wrist band and a couple of free water bottles. The back numbers that they use for this event are like no others. They're rather large, and printed in full color on some kind of relatively stiff crinkle-proof plastic material. Lots of riders just folded them up and put them in their pockets rather than struggle with actually pinning them on. Since the numbers serve no purpose other than to identify who actually paid the registration fee, it doesn't really matter much anyway. There is no finish line or results listing, not that that made it any less of a race for the front group, of course. On the plus side, it was basically summer weather, with just a moderate bit of wind out of the east.
So we started off on time at just a moderate pace until we came to the infamous barricade about a mile and a half from the start. I'd ridden down there before the start and saw that there was a little single-track path around the right side of the barricade. The actual ride routed everyone around the barricades to the left through a gravel driveway of sorts. It's always kind of a cluster there, and it also always gets really really fast immediately after. This morning was no exception. I had been careful to stay near the front of the group, more out of fear than anything else, and after going around the barricade on the right I looked over to see Peyton coming back onto the road just ahead and to my left. He sat up and looked behind him briefly, and that was pretty much the last I saw of Peyton that day! Within half a mile I was going 31 mph, into a slight headwind, with a long string of gaps and riders ahead of me. I thought to myself, "this isn't sustainable." Of course, I was referring to myself, not the rapidly forming front group of, I guess, around twenty. By the time we were four miles in I knew we weren't going to catch the lead group, which already included most of the local talent, and things slowed down to around 27 mph as riders shelled from the front started losing the draft.
It was at around 4.5 miles that you come to a section of road where the right lane is partially barricaded off and everyone has to shift over to the left. I was a wheel or two behind Pat there, and ahead of him, but still over toward the right, was Scott. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a crash. Scott had hit a block of wood or something, and as far as I can tell, was thrown forward, losing his grip on the handlebar. We slowed for a moment, but with so many behind is, stopping there might have just caused more of a problem. Scott ended up in the hospital, but reportedly had no broken bones, just a lot of rather bad road rash, including some on his face. Could have been worse, I guess. Anyway, we were still kind of in chase mode there, but soon enough a group started to come together and things settled down to a relatively sustainable 24-25 mph. This second group turned out to be a nice size with a number of people, largely Giro Ride regulars, willing to take some pulls, so we soon had a nice paceline going. At the first turn, 7 miles into the ride, we caught a small group that had been dropped from the front group, so that was good. The 7-mile stretch down to Delacroix was fast but fairly smooth at a 26.5 mph pace, even though nobody had any illusions of catching the front group that was already a couple of minutes up the road.
So that was pretty much how things stayed for the rest of the 51 mile ride. There were a few lulls here and there where the pace dropped down to the low 20s, but basically it was a typical brisk group ride pace. I think our group had an average speed just under 24 mph, while the front group (what was left of it) averaged a bit under 28 mph. Big difference. Really big difference. I think Will and Peyton and for a while Connor were off the front of the front group from Hopedale all the way back. Anyway, it was a nice ride other than Scott's crash. Afterward, I had some fried catfish and a Coke and kind of rushed back home for a little family get-together at my sister's house.
Sunday morning I headed to Starbucks not quite in the dark thanks to the time change. There was a good group on hand and it still felt like summer, so we had a pretty typical Giro Ride, although clearly a few people were still feeling Saturday's ride in their legs (apparently there had been a good group for the Saturday Giro as well).
Mellow Monday was mostly mellow, but not without a few of the usual fast miles on LSD and Wisner. That was fine with me, since I was still not feeling quite recovered from the weekend. This morning we had a nice sized group for the 6 am Tuesday ride. After an easy roll out to the lakefront, Maurizio took the front and pretty much stayed there unchallenged for the entire rest of the ride. It still felt like summer with a significant east wind and temperature in the mid-70s. For some reason I felt kind of stressed for much of the ride today.
I arrived back home and had just enough time to make coffee before the power in the whole neighborhood went out. Sounded like a couple of transformers blew out. There's a tropical depression forming in the Caribbean right now that seems to be headed more or less in our direction. The models are expecting it be become a hurricane somewhere around Cuba, but it's expected to start falling apart as it gets into the northern Gulf. Guess we'll get a lot of rain, though. The "Cone of uncertainty" is about the size of Texas right now, so I don't think the models quite know what to do with it beyond a couple of days yet.
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