Winter Week Ahead

New Year's Eve Ride

The last week of 2024 started out warm, then became chilly, then got warm again. None of which is particularly unusual around here, but the cold front that came through in the middle of Sunday night brought with it a thirty degree temperature drop and a brutal northwest wind. It's looking like we now have a solid winter week, or two, ahead of us, and won't see a morning temperature in the 50s for a while. Welcome to 2025.

Tuesday morning the streets were damp and it was quite foggy when I rode out to NOMA. On the plus side, the temperature was in the 60s and the wind was light. On the minus side, I flatted out by the Armory, but everyone waited, and I got in the full ride out to the Casino and back anyway. I was still feeling unrecovered from the prior weekend's excessive mileage, but at least the pace remained moderate enough that I didn't feel like I was doing any additional damage. We were already getting predictions of a big cold front that would be hitting the area late on Sunday. While weather forecasts can be pretty sketch when the weather is coming out of the Gulf, Winter cold fronts coming from the northwest are usuall spot on. We had a visiting rider from the frozen North, aka Minnesota, to whom the damp 62 degree weather must have felt like a summer vacation.

Holiday Giro to start the new year.

Wednesday was New Year's Day, and so we had a Holiday Giro planned. It was chilly and a little windy, but I wasn't expecting a big turnout or a super fast pace. Checking my phone, I saw that the city had sent out a notice around 5:00 am about a "mass casualty" event around Canal and Bourbon streets, and I guessed it must have been some drunk driver incident like the one that happened some years back on Esplanade Avenue. I would later learn that it was way worse than that, and most definitely not an accident. Oblivious to the seriousness of the terror attack, we had a nice enough ride, despite the 10 mph north wind, and then spent the rest of the day watching the nonstop news coverage.

Friendly Friday

Thursday was colder, and although nobody seemed too interested in a hard workout, a few of us did complete the usual full ride. I was technically back at work, but because they had postponed the Sugar Bowl until that evening because of what had happened on Bourbon Street, it didn't seem advisable to go in to the office under the circumstances. At the time it was still a little unclear if there had been other people involved in the attack, so security around the Superdome was understandably even tighter than usual.

On Friday we had a nice turnout for the Friendly Friday ride. It was warmer, and the wind was light, and although it got a little spicy in places, it was the first morning that week where I felt more or less recovered from Sunday's ride around the lake. Afterward, I rode down to Faubourg Marigny with Charles, Dan, and Will for coffee.

Looking for coffee

A little cool front blew through that evening, so the temperature on Saturday was back to the upper 40s. There was a pretty significant east wind that kept the outbound speeds down a bit. For some reason the front of the paceline kept hugging the left edge of the right lane on Chef Highway, despite the fact that for most of it the more sheltered side was also on the left. The entire group was strung out single-file for most of the way despite some loud verbal suggestions on my part about not putting all of your riding buddies into the left lane. Granted, it's tough wind direction for that segment, and toward the end the road curves enough to shift the sheltered side from left to right. Of course, it's hard to complain too much when you are sucking wheels back in the cheap seats and aren't willing to move up into the rotation. 

After getting back home I swapped my road shoes for my mountain bike shoes to take a little test ride on the 'Cross bike. I had put a new saddle on it the night before. This was a Selle Italia Novus Boost saddle, which is a fairly inexpensive and well-padded one that I thought would be better for longer gravel type rides than the super-light road racing SLR that I had on there. It was. I rode some of the neighborhood gravel and some of the Audubon Park bridle path to give it a fair test. It is wider at the nose than I'm used to, and shorter as well, but it seemed fine, so I guess I should be OK for some extended gravel riding, at least from an equipment perspective.

At the Spillway in the wind, about to head back downriver.

Sunday morning it rained, and there was a super strong south wind blowing. I knew the Giro wouldn't happen, so I waited until most of the rain blew through and the streets started to dry out a little bit, eventually rolling out to the levee around 10:00 am. I'd guess that the south wind was around 20 mph, with gusts up into the 40s, but at least it was nice and warm. The bit cold front was supposed to come through that night, so I felt like I should maybe put in a little extra saddle time, even if it was only optimistically Zone 2. Although the river winds around quite a bit, the wind going upriver was largely crosswind, with just a few brief stretches of headwind or tailwind. I wasn't in a hurry by any means, but I was still lured into extending my ride all the way out to the Spillway. Once there, I looked down at the computer and decided to continue on for a few miles so I'd have a nice round 60 miles for the day. Coming back was definitely harder, but again most of it was crosswind. It was strong enough, however, that just keeping the front wheel headed in the right direction was a challenge, and I guess the stress involved in that was making my usual upper back and neck pain all that much worse.

This morning, as predicted, the temperature was around 43° at my house, and dropping, when I rode out into the 20 mph northwest wind. I didn't know if anyone would be insane enough to be out riding in that, but as I was circling the NOMA, Charles showed up at literally the last second. Obviously this was going to be just a charcter-building ride, so I shifted down to a nice low gear for the duration. Most of Lakeshore Drive was OK until we got out past Franklin to the east. There I could see the waves crashing over the seawall, and some areas where the westbound lanes were slightly flooded. We wisely decided to return to City Park via Leon C. Simon rather than deal with the cold spray of lake water. That turned out to be much better, but of course we were just soft-pedaling anyway. I was glad I'd ridden, but it took twenty minutes after I got home for my fingers to start working normally again. The rest of the week is looking to be pretty cold and windy, so welcome to winter.