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.