Shoes Still Dry

The forecast for the latter part of this week was looking pretty bleak. Lots of rain, with the hourly rain chances jumping around in the way that they do when the effect of the model's random number generator outweighs that of the actual inputs. In other words, nobody really knew when and where and how long it would rain in the way that you do in the Fall when there's this solid cold front marching quickly southeast in your direction. The only way to play this kind of scenario is to get up in the morning, look out the window, check the radar, and make the call. Fortunately - surprisingly actually - the call every morning this week was to go ahead and ride. Somehow I made it all the way to Friday without getting my shoes wet, even though it's now been raining for hours.

The regular morning rides this week have been pretty routine, and as I've mentioned before, the Tuesday and Thursday long rides have had better turnouts than usual. Earlier in the year it seemed like almost everyone would turn off at the end of Lakeshore Drive, leaving just me and one or two others to battle the ever-present winter winds along the lake. Lately, though, there have been a few reinforcements meeting us at Bucktown, which has made the ride along the lake trail a little faster and more interesting.

Tuesday morning

With Tulane classes having ended mid-week and exams starting tomorrow, Wednesday's WeMoRi numbers were buoyed by a nice little contingent from uptown. Despite the numbers, though, a break went off the front, and then another couple in pursuit, leaving only the motivationally undecided dregs of the pack to its own lackluster efforts for the last Lakeshore Drive stretch. Fortunately the ride home provided a bit of excitement in the form of a couple of impatient drivers, one of which was provoked by Ben when he slotted into the draft of the car ahead of it. Comic relief was forthcoming, however, when the male driver's female passenger leaned out the window and basically told him it was all cool, despite the driver's continuing rant. Ahhhh, life in the big city.

Friday morning I looked out the window at the mostly dry street, then checked the radar which was surprisingly clear. It being "wear your ugly jersey day" or something like that for the final Tulane coffee ride of the academic year, I dug out my old "X-ray" jersey from (who else?) Primal Wear, and headed out to City Park. It was significantly cooler than the day before, and also significantly more windy, but not altogether bad. Turnout was a little lower than usual, but we still had a big enough group to keep me more or less sheltered much of the way. As usual, Lakeshore Drive was flooded in that spot near Elysian Fields where the drains have been nonfunctional for the past couple of years. The group slowed down to a crawl there as if it was three feet deep rather than three inches deep, and I ended up having to chase a little to close gaps since I'd been near the back. On the return trip we had a bit of a tailwind, and when we got to the flooded section I just rolled through it, which left me unintentionally in the wind all the way to the other side of the traffic circle where I was good and well streamed by the entire group that was back up to speed. That left me having to try to get onto the tail end of the strung-out line of riders going 28 mph, a task for which I was woefully unprepared. As I dropped off the pace Lisa came past and glanced back to let me catch her wheel, but I was already pretty gassed and dropped off a bit later. 

Afterward three of us rode down Carrollton to the river and met up with the Tulane coffee ride group that was a bit larger than usual since there weren't any classes. That eventually took us to the Junk Drawer coffee shop on Broadway where we hung out for longer than usual. The rain was still a few hours away, so once again I got home with a mostly clean bike and dry shoes. It's looking like it should be OK for tomorrow's ride, although the temperature will have dropped down to around 60° by then, accompanied by a 25 mph north wind, so we'll see how that goes. There's a century ride up in Ridgeland that morning that I might have done, but I think I'm going to go ahead a register for the Cheaha century scheduled for the 17th. There's also a planned 100+ mile northshore ride the weekend before that.