Summer in the City

Tuesday on the levee, dodging the rain

It was the last week of June, and although there was no shortage of comments about the heat and humidity, the locals know that that month is just the appetizer ahead of July and August. Still, I rolled out into the dim pre-sunrise glow most mornings with temperatures still in the low 80s and humidity at saturation levels. The glasses fog up the minute you stop, and if you drop your head halfway into the ride, the inside of the lens is quickly sprayed with sweat. Situation normal, of course. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone with a bike is out riding, often in little ad hoc groups, sometimes quite early in attempts to avoid the heat that really produce a little comfort that is more psychological than thermal.

Front part of the Friendly Friday group

Monday night I fought with the new "no tools needed" inline water filter that I was installing for the new regrigerator's ice maker (which I also had to install myself). I'd been short one compression nut for one of the other connections (the original one had left with the old refrigerator), and so had ridden over to the old hardward store in the French Quarter to pick one up at lunch. It took me multiple tries and much cursing to finally get the "no tools needed" connections to work without leaking dramatically, but eventually everything was water-tight and functional.

Before dawn on Tuesday some big loud thunderstorms rolled through the area. One particular lightning strike must have been just a few blocks from the house because there was no delay between the flash and the thunder. I never did find out what it hit, but it definitely woke me up. By 5:30 am the rain was coming to an end, but I knew nobody would be at the 6 am ride. Studying the weather radar, I figured there was a little opportunity available, so a little after 6 I headed over to the levee on the 'cross bike to minimize the chances of flats on the still-wet streets and bike path. That worked out OK. The bike path was reasonably dry, I didn't flat, and logged a fairly casual 26 miles. 

Wednesday's WeMoRi was uncharactistically moderate for some reason, but I wasn't complaining. We had a visiting rider, Luca Mazzetti, who is Italian and will be moving here from Rio de Janeiro around mid-July. He had no problems with the pace. 

Thursday - Charles, Will, and Jeff

Thursday was a pretty normal long ride, with three or four of us doing the full out-and-back to Williams Blvd. The Bonnebel boat launch was already packed with motor homes and trailers and big racing powerboats for the upcoming weekend's races.

As it has been for the past few weeks, the Friendly Friday ride was well-attended. I'd guess there were 20-25 riders. Of course, than means that it will eventually get fast, which it did, but only for short stretches in the usual places. 

Although the shoulder joint is still causing me some significant discomfort, I guess it would be accurate to say that it is slowly improving. I use the term "slowly" the same way you would use it to describe the movement of a glacier. While I am still a little hesitant to jump off the saddle to sprint, it is now at least something I am occasionally willing to do. I usually take some Naproxin before the longer weekend rides to alleviate a bit of the usual aches and pains in my neck and/or back, and lately also shoulder. It does help a little, although sometimes those last then miles are still pretty painful for one reason or another. Sucks getting old.

Boyd's kit

So on Saturday I rode out to Starbucks a bit early for my usual coffee prior to the Giro Ride. A couple of people had already parked in the neutral ground parking lot and were on their way to the SaMoRi that has lately been starting at 6:15 am. A number of the usual Giro riders have switched to that ride in an effort to avoid some of the heat, which is likely making it faster than usual, and concurrently reducing the size of the Giro group. A visiting rider, Buddy Baudoin, who lived here at one time had contacted me earlier and decided to join in, despite the fact that he hadn't brought his regular riding shoes, and was on his Tri bike. Fortunately, it was a fairly steady pace, a bit below the usual speed, so he was fine. I had sent him a recent Strava link for the ride, so he knew what he was getting into. It's always hard to know what to tell visiting riders unless I can see that they are active bike racers. He stayed safely at the back for most of the ride, and I think dropped off on the last stretch along Hayne Blvd. 

Lakeshore Drive's Water Feature - Sunday

On our way out, after turning onto Chef Highway, we saw the SaMoRi group going the other way, and a bit later a little group on the side of the road fixing a flat. The latter group was the lucky one. Shortly after we passed the main group they had a big crash caused, once again, by one of those asphalt bumps just before the turn onto the interstate. Boyd took an ambulance ride, and from what I heard six or seven went down. Fortunately, Boyd didn't break anything, but there were a few bikes that got damaged. I think Bo had to get someone to come pick him up. Later that afternoon someone went out there and painted those bumps with orange paint.

Crusising back home along Marconi after the Sunday Giro

Sunday's Giro group was fairly small, but that did not make it any easier. Sometimes it's much easier to sit near the back end of a 40-rider group than it is to be hanging onto a 12-rider paceline. Anyway, although I didn't spend any significant time on the front, I was feeling reasonably good. Lately, for the longer rides I've been putting Gatorade into one of my bottles, as much to provide electrolytes as to provide sugar. Combined with the four packets of sugar that I put into my morning coffee, and then the can of ginger ale I've sometimes been getting when the uptown group stops at the gas station in the way home, I'm at least not in much of a caloric deficit. 

This morning's Mellow Monday ride was true to form, which is to say it was reasonably mellow with just a couple of fast segments leading up to the inevitable sprint at Marconi and then at the top of the Wisner overpass. I did not indulge in either, as I was still feeling my legs from the weekend.

Long Road

WeMoRi Sunrise

Our summer solstice was last Friday, as if we needed any further confirmation it was mid-summer. The weather here has been dominated mainly by high humidity and widely scattered rain, typical for this time of year. Fortunately, most of the rain is in the afternoons, so the morning rides have been affected only by the perpetual Lakeshore Drive pond and runoff from the rain-saturated lakefront levee. I've logged four consecutive weeks above 270 miles, and although the shoulder is still achy enough that I am a little reluctant to pull hard on the handlebar, it's been at least tolerable.

Theoretically back where I started

I recently took a look at Strava's "fitness and freshness" chart, and although I don't usually give it a lot of credibility, it does seem to have done a reasonably good job of tracking my long road back to whatever qualifies as "fitness," at least for me. I've always found that I don't start to feel like I'm in decent shape until and unless I have a few 250 mi.+ weeks under my belt, at least in the absence of regular racing opportunities. I have been feeling a little less concerned about getting shelled on group rides lately, so I guess that qualifies as some kind of improvement.

I recently subscribed to VeloViewer to replace an older Chrome plug-in that I'd been using for years to compare annual mileages and things like that. That plug-in stopped being supported when Strava tightened up its API a while back, which I assume required services that pull data from Strava to pay for it and conform to whatever security requirements Strava required. Anyway, VeloViewer is pretty cheap, and allows for the same annual mileage comparisons, plus it has a number of other kind of fun features. I'll see how it goes for a while. It can create lots of interesting charts related to segments and distances across variable timeframes (I have at least ten year of Strava data), so it's kind of fun even though I never pay much attention to Strava segments. 

Last Tuesday the group refused to ford the Lakeshore Drive flood and turned back at the Elysian Fields traffic circle, but at least there were a few of us who were able to do the full ride out to Williams Blvd. and back. Wednesday's WeMoRi was civilized enough to keep me from being dropped or killed, despite the group making a couple of questionable decisions regarding traffic signals.

No caption needed

On Thursday the water level at the Lakeshore Drive pond was low enough that the group at least didn't turn back, so that was good. Later, out on the lake trail, however, there was a lot of runoff from the levee, resulting in lots of wheel spray and, not unsurprisingly, a flat tire for Jeff that took a couple of tries to repair. As a result, the ride was a few miles shorter.

Friendly Friday Group

Friendly Friday has been getting some pretty significant turnouts lately, and last Friday was no exception. Dylan and Jess were both on hand, along with most of the regulars. I'd guess we had 20-25 riders at one point. Thanks to rain the day before, the Lakeshore Drive pond was deep enough that the group didn't want to ride through it, so we instead added another little loop between the two traffic circles to make up for the lost mileage. As usual when there are a lot of riders, there were a couple of faster segments, but nothing very long or extreme, so things remained pretty friendly.

Saturday's Giro Ride didn't have a very big group, but it was plenty big enough. There was a nice rotation at the front with six or seven riders pulling at a nice even pace, with the rest of us sitting in. It was still fast enough for a good workout, even toward the back. On the way back down Chef, between the stop light and the Goodyear sprint, there was a totally unexpected crash near the front of the group. Steven had hit one of the nearly invisible heat buckles in the asphalt while holding a water bottle in one hand. Somehow, nobody else went down, and fortunately he jumped up without too much skin missing or broken collarbones. At the time I was totally focused on tracking the erratic roll of his water bottle so I could plot a safe route around it. After he got back rolling he basically rolled right off the front of the still-reassembling group with Matt. They were joined by a couple of others, but the rest of the group didn't mount a chase, so that was the last we saw of them. By then, everyone was feeling the rising temperature for sure.

Somewhere in MS

On Sunday, there was 67 mile ride out of West Harrison Ballpark over in Mississippi. I figured it was about time I did a ride that wasn't dead flat, so I made the decision to do it. I picked up Dylan for the one-hour drive. I think we had seven riders for this one. The air felt nice and cool, relatively speaking, for the first hour or so, which was nice. Steve Martin's routes are always quite circuitous, but this one put some of the others to shame. I was glad I had loaded the route onto my Garmin. As usual, this ride was all just nice steady paceline with most people taking long pulls. The roads were nice and traffic was light, and we stopped two times along the way at gas stations, so it was pretty much all Zone 2, which was fine with me.

When I got home, however, I was greeted with, "the refrigerator isn't working." This was the refrigerator that we had gotten after Katrina, so it was just shy of twenty years old. It was obvious that it had died quite a while earlier, perhaps some time on Saturday, so things were beginning to defrost. We have this little old refrigerator down in the basement that we had liberated from one of my father's apartments immediately following Katrina when we were waiting for our new one (everything was backordered for months, of course). That thing must be 40 years old, but still runs, so we use if mostly just for beer and cold drinks. It was of course immediately pressed into emergency service and its little freezer is now crammed full. I could have spent a day or two diagnosing the problem and ordering a new start capacitor or whatever else might we worth trying, but under the circumstances, and considering the age of the unit, we headed over to Lowes and found a replacement with the right dimensions that could be delivered on Monday. It's just a basic refrigerator plus an icemaker kit, but will still set me back by about a grand. As a result, I'm stuck at home waiting for it to be delivered today.

Mileage Back, Fitness Not Quite

A week ago Monday was Memorial Day, which of course meant a Holiday Giro. There was a pretty good group on hand for this one, and as Holiday Giros go, it was good, which is to say it wasn't too slow, and it wasn't too fast, and there were enough wheels available for drafting, which I definitely appreciated. The shoulder is still pretty achy, especially in certain orientations under load, and of course the lost fitness is coming back at a snail's pace. I've been doing a few little theraband exercises for the past week that I suppose are better than nothing, but it is impossible to attribute any improvement to them.

Tuesday's long ride turned out to be unexpectedly short. As usual, a lot of the group turned off at the end of Lakeshore Drive, leaving just Will T and me. The pace had been pretty fast, so I was already planning to turn around early on the lake trail - maybe at Causeway, or at the next outfall canal, but my plans were interrupted when I came down over the curb turning onto Hammond Hwy and managed to pinch-flat. As I was pumping up the tire after changing the tube I felt a sting on my ankle and realized I'd been standing in a little red ant pile. I brushed away as many as I could, but five or six of them managed to sting me anyway. At that point I just took it as a sign and headed back home.

Wednesday's WeMoRi went as it has been going for me lately. Fortunately is wasn't super-fast that day and I more or less survived, at least until the sprint started at which point I eased up and cruised in the rest of the way. The forecast for Thursday was not looking good, so I wasn't surprised to find wet streets when I awoke. I watched the weather radar for about half an hour and it looked like I might be able to squeeze in 15 miles on the levee around 6 am, so I headed out on the Cyclocross bike since it's much less prone to flats. Well, that didn't work out. The minute I got to the levee I felt the first raindrops, and looking to the west all I could see were dark black clouds, so I turned around and started riding toward Audubon Park, just barely ahead of the worst of the rain. Well, until I actually got to the park. At that point the sky opened up above and I limped back home in the pouring rain down various torn-up Carrollton streets. At least I tried, but I don't know if the 6.5 miles I logged were worth it.

By Friday the weather was much better and not surprisingly we had a pretty decent turnout for Friendly Friday. Saturday felt a little cooler and for some reason we had a really big turnout for the Giro. That, of course, meant that it was going to be a fast one. In addition to the usual instigators like Connor, Dustin, Jaden, Pirmin, Brett, TJ, etc., we also had Dan Bennet who was in town for a few days, and a pretty strong rider on a e-gravel bike that had a cassette cog that looked considerably larger than my 'cross bike's large chainring. There was a bit of a northeast wind which kept things together on the way out on Hayne Blvd., but somewhere along Paris Road, where we picked up more of a tailwind, the group split. At one point I found myself behind the rider on the e-bike as the speed crept up over 28 mph, and I started to worry that he would exceed the bike's assist limit, but somehow he gutted it out on that 40-pound bike with an impossibly low gear and flat pedals.

The return trip started with a nice bit of recovery pace until we got to the Hwy 11 intersection, after with it ramped back up to normal. With a bit of a tailwind, we averaged around 29 mph to the Interstate. Then, after turning onto Hayne Blvd. all bets were off and whoever was on the front put the hammer down. I think we averaged a bit over 30 mph to the overpass, after which the group kind of shattered with a fast group off the front between the bridges. Although there was no chance of catching, I did make a decent enough effort there, and then we were saved by the drawbridge being up, so everybody was back together for the cool-down along Lakeshore Drive. It was a pretty hard ride for me.

Sunday's Giro featured less wind and slightly fewer riders, so the pace was relatively tame, at least by the prior day's standard. That put me at 277 miles for the week, thanks to that long Monday ride, and despite the rain day and the shortened Thrusday ride. I was pretty happy with that since it was the first week I've had with relatively normal mileage and intensity in seven weeks. I feel like I'm still in a bit of a fitness hole, as some of those rides felt harder than they should have, but at least it's progress.

Dan was still in town for the Mellow Monday ride, which had a pretty big turnout and at a nice revocery ride pace, at least until the last bit. When we turned onto Wisner near the end, Dan launched off the front, forcing almost everyone to chase. Almost everyone but me. I felt like I really needed the recovery, so I didn't even make an effort.

On Tuesday there were three of us who continued out to the lake trail. Earlier, when we did a lap of Lakeshore Drive, the lake had been just pancake smooth, but as we headed west we started to pick up a significant tailwind. Without too much effort we cruised out to Williams Blvd. at around 24 mph, and then of course plodded our way back at more like 19. It was actually a significant workout.

This morning I woke up around 5 am and realized I'd forgotten to put out the garbage. With once a week pickup, and warm summer temperatures, you don't want to miss a garbage day around here, so I rushed down stairs and dragged the bin out to the street. Since I was already up, I went ahead and rode out to the lakefront earlier than usual, hitting Lakeshore Drive probably three minutes ahead of the WeMoRi group. I cruised east and made it around the Seabrook loop before being swept up by the pack that was relentlessly pushing 27-30 mph. Fortunately there were wheels available, so I hung on all the way down Lakeshore as my physiology caught up with my legs. At the turn onto Touissaint, though, there was a car that kind of split the group, forcing those of us at the back to chase back on. Unfortunately, when the rider in front of me blew up, I just couldn't close it the rest of the way, so it was just VJ and me on Wisner. We cut across the park on Zachary Taylor to Marconi and ultimately merged back into what was left of the group just before Lakeshore Drive. At that point, two riders were already off the front, a situation that did not change for the rest of the ride. Again, that was some badly needed intensity for me, even though I was in the draft throughout.