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| View from the ferry |
Today is February 11. It's currently 75 F outside. I'm not complaining, you understand. I'll take 75 degrees over 45 every day of the week. Even better, I'm not seeing anything below 52 for the next ten days. Of course, the early part of the month, and most of January, was the usual roller-coaster of freezing cold and tolerably mild, most of which felt cold and miserable to me. This is always the hardest time to be training, outdoors, in the dark.
Last weekend Charles coaxed me into a last-minute decision to join a little group for a long ride up the river on the westbank to Gramercy, returning on the east bank bike levee bike path. It would be a bit over 100 miles with a small group, but all at a moderate pace. As it turned out, though, Charles had to back out early that morning. I headed out in the dark for the Canal Street Ferry where I would meet up with Joe Paul, Alison, Mary Beth, and Jason (and wonder where the heck Charles was) for the 6:15 am crossing. The weather was looking pretty favorable, except for the expected east wind that would be increasing all day. It had been quite a long time since I'd ridden much of the westbank levee bike path. Unlike its counterpart on the east bank, this one takes a rather torturous route from Algiers to Avondale, sending you back onto the street here and there where industrial operations or the canal bridge superceded bike path priorities.
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| A nice quiet River Road paceline |
By the time we got started the sun was almost up, so at least visibility wasn't a problem. Once past Avondale we got back onto the levee, and I was surprised how far the bike path now goes upriver. We were nearly 40 miles into the ride before we dropped down onto River Road for the last time, stopping briefly for a store stop there. I'd been worried that the next 20 miles on River Road would be sketchy, but other than a few miles of dump trucks due to some work at one of the plants, we mostly had the road to ourselves.
Toward the end of that stretch we picked up a nice little tailwind, my enjoyment of which was somewhat moderated by the knowledge that we'd soon be riding in the opposite direction for 50 miles.
I knew that crossing the Mississippi via the Gramercy bridge wasn't going to be as much fun as I'd have liked. Although there is a reasonable shoulder to the road, traffic is generally moving at Interstate speeds, and I'd been forewarned about the infamous interlocking finger-like expansion joints. Indeed, a couple of them were almost entirely disconnected, and most of them would be dangerous to ride over at any significant speed. I ended up coming almost to a stop for each of them and putting a foot down as I crossed. A few of our group just walked most of the way, so when I got to the bottom, I looked back and didn't see anyone! I was afraid someone had flatted or something, but eventually they appeared.
As expected, the return trip on the east bank, which was mostly on the bike path except for that 2-mile stretch where they've been working on the levee around St. Road, featured a lot of headwind. Fortunately Joe Paul spent a lot of time on the front of the group with me on his wheel. Nobody was pushing the pace, so it wasn't really all that bad, and of course we had another long rest stop along the way. So I ended up with 107 miles of Zone 2 with a total of 400 feet of elevation. Yeah, 400 feet in 107 miles. In the end I was glad I'd gone, but it was of course a long time in the saddle that took me a couple of days from which to feel fully recovered.
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| Friendly Friday |
This morning's WeMoRi was, as one might expect given the unseasonably warm temperature, very well-attended. As usual, I met up with the group on Marconi, slotting in easily near the back. Although the pace was pretty fast, it's still amazing how much easier it feels when you have a big group like we had today. Earlier rides this year all seemed to suffer because of the weather, and to me it feels infinitely more difficult to do a WeMoRi wearing full winter kit with a small group at 23 mph than when wearing summer kit with a big group going 28. We had four Tulane riders for this one, and I think they all survived. We stopped for coffee at French Truck afterward, which took just enough time to ensure that we got rained on just before getting home. Fortunately, it wasn't cold this morning.
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Since my somewhat unplanned retirement the first week of January, I've been navigating my way through Medicare and TIAA and LTRS and supplemental health insurance, most of which is still not quite fully settled, but at least moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, that has distracted my attention from cycling related things, such as the NOBC, LAMBRA, and the Tour de La. Some of that is going to be a little late this year, I guess. USAC finally killed off the legacy system around the end of last year after ten years of trying, and changed up the membership and racing license systems completely, again. Registration and results for any races we put on this year are going to have to be handled quite differently, I suspect. As far as I can tell, I can't download the rider data, for example. At any rate, we need to get some fresh blood into both NOBC and LAMBRA and see if we can reinvent bike racing around here. Hopefully I can get set up as a volunteer coach for Tulane Cycling and Triathlon. I feel like we will be pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, so will need to be thinking "outside the box" as they say. We'll see.
