Back to Tuscaloosa

I hadn't been planning on doing a century ride in July, but when Pirm mentioned that he and Tessa were signed up for the Hot Hundred up in Tuscaloosa I naturally went to check it out. Despite it being the event's 24th year, it had never been on my radar, mainly because we had bike races going on in the summer, and so I never paid much attention to charity rides, centuries or not. It looked like a fairly low-key fundraising event that didn't keep track of finish times or anything, with the obvious priority being on rest stops and iced towels and cold drinks and such. Still, I had no plans to go until Ben, who had already registered but now had a conflict, offered to transfer his registration, and Donata, who had planned to accompany him, wanted someone to travel with. So I took him up on the offer. I mean, why not? It had been a long time since I'd ridden in Tuscaloosa. There used to be the Tour de Tuscaloosa stage race, and I'd ridden it in 2009, and then again in 2012, the latter time with some of the riders from the newly formed Tulane Cycling club. As it turned out, the staging area for the Hot Hundred was in the same area as the criterium had been.

Although making the 4.5 hour drive up to Tuscaloosa the "day of" might be feasible, the century ride was scheduled to begin at 7 am. I met Donata at the Slidell Starbucks around noon on Friday and we headed north with the bikes on the roof, arriving in plenty of time to check in and then go over to The Sanctuary to pick up packets. I didn't know if I'd run into problems with that because the event's BikeReg site still had Ben listed and I hadn't received a request to sign the release. I think I got an email from the promoter some time on Friday acknowledging the transfer, but didn't see it until much later since I was driving. Anyway, since the place where they were doing Friday evening packet pickup was a restaurant with a big bar and outdoor seating, I sat down with a pint of Stout since we were planning on meeting Pirm and Tessa at 6:30 for dinner.  They organizer had just swapped my name for Ben's on their registration list at the last minute. They gave us these kind of stiff plastic numbers that were customized with our names, so of course mine said "Ben" and also at some point during the ride someone called me Ben. Note to event promoters:  I never signed a waiver for this event, electronic or otherwise. Anyway, a bit later as I was sipping my drink, they both showed up to pick up their own packets, so we all headed off to the Nami Supreme Buffet for dinner. I can't believe how much Pirm can eat.

Saturday morning we got to the event around, I guess, 6:15 or so, after a quick breakfast at the hotel (very bad coffee and half a cup of raisin bran for me), Although the parking lot I was aiming for was already full (it was the same one I'd parked in back in 2012) we found a nice spot about a block away. After the usual sponsor acknowledgements and national anthem, we rolled out pretty much on time behind a police escort. I'd lined up around the middle of the 150 or so riders, and soon found myself navigating through a sea of rear view mirrors and multi-colored club cut Primal jerseys in order to get up closer to the front where it seemed safer. Pirm was already on the front, and I never saw him or the small front group again. In fact, I never saw when the escort ended or when the group split at all, not that I had any intention of riding the 102 miles like it was a race anyway. Pretty soon a fairly big second group formed and I got into the rotation. The first 15 miles out of town were pretty much dead flat, so we were rolling along a steady 23-24 mph, which was nice, with maybe seven or eight of us taking pulls and some unknown number sitting in behind. Evan from New Orleans was also in our group sharing pulls. 

A little bit after crossing the Black Warrior River we turned right and soon hit a short but significant climb of around 7% I guess. I didn't have my heart rate to guide me since I had apparently not pushed the button long enough and it didn't start up and pair with the computer. No worries, though. I probably didn't want to see my heart rate anyway. Much of the rest of the course was a series of short but sometimes steep little uphills, many of with touched 7-9%. I had the course loaded onto the Garmin, so I just left it in Map mode where it shows the climbs and grades. If I'd been in race mode and race fit, I think they would mostly been manageable in the big ring since they were all pretty short, but as it was I found myself making ample use of the 36 ring now and then. I never had to resort to the lowest gears on the bike, though, and was generally feeling OK with the pace and effort.

I'd started with a big Tulane water bottle with Skratch, plus a regular bottle with plain water, and was carrying a flask of Hammergel plus a couple of Gu packets for emergencies, but I was pretty sure that I wouldn't need them, considering how many well-stocked rest stops they had set up along the route. The temperature never got really extreme or anything, so I probably could have gotten by with just that if necessary, which it wasn't. The group I was in was slowly shedding riders out the back, sometimes at the earlier rest stops at which the rest of us didn't stop, so when we all finally pulled into a Fire Station rest stop at around 60 miles our number was down to maybe ten or so, I guess. I took the opportunity to top off my bottles, but looking at what they had on offer I probably could have stopped for a full lunch. We later came to another rest stop where everyone except me stopped. I still had lots of water and gel left, so I decided to just soft-pedal for a few miles until the group caught me. It was a nice little break, actually, and I really hate stopping mid-ride on a hot day anyway. When the group caught me a few miles down the road, I was surprised how big it was. I think that a part of our original group that had stopped at an early rest stop had caught back up because I recognized most of them. Unfortunately, Evan hadn't seen everybody leaving until it was too late and was never able to get back in the group. Anyway, by the time we were 75 or 80 miles in, it was getting hot and our number was dwindling rapidly. The effort was starting to get to me around that time so I pulled out my Age Card and started hanging out more at the back. By then we were down to maybe five or six riders. Shortly after we turned onto the last 15 mile flat section it was just me and one other rider who was obviously in better shape than I, and in retrospect may have been intent on finishing in under five hours. I traded pulls with him most of the way until we made a left turn at an intersection and he accelerated. I glanced down at the computer, which was showing something like 97 miles and thought to myself "close enough" and eased up. A couple of other riders came up from behind and I tagged along with them for a bit, but I guess they were also determined to hit a specific goal that I wasn't interested in, so I just cruised in the last few miles. Just after dropping back, I took a wrong turn in the city and had to take a few minutes to turn around and navigate back to the course, but by then I was right at 100 miles, so practically finished anyway.

The ride seemed a bit harder than I'd expected, probably due to a combination of all of the little climbs and the increasing temperature. I'd consumed the equivalent of only about four gel packets, so I guess I was running a little low on calories and probably should have been more attentive to that. At the finish they had lots of ice cold drinks and a lot of food like hamburgers (I had no desire to eat a hot hamburger at that point). We hung around for a while under a tent eating and drinking and such. Pirm had actually been the first rider to finish with a 4:24 riding time, far ahead of my own 5:03. As I was loading up the bikes and stuff, Tessa gave me an iced latte that really hit the spot. I normally avoid coffee with milk in it, but fortunately my gut bacteria didn't really seem to notice very much. The drive back was going along nicely until I saw a police car go flying past us at a high rate of speed. Up ahead there had been some kind of serious accident and they had just closed the interstate, forcing us off at an exit. Luckily it was pretty easy to navigate around to the next exit, so we were back on the Interstate within half an hour or so. If we'd been ten minutes earlier we would have been past the exit and trapped between it and the crash, so luck was on our side. I got home around 5 or 6, I think, so that was nice.

Sunday morning I went ahead and did the Giro, for which we had only a handful of riders. My legs were definitely still feeling the prior day's ride, so I wasn't doing any more work than absolutely necessary, and when we got to the bridges on the way back I eased off with VJ rather than contesting the bridge to bridge drag race. I was still feeling the ride in my legs this morning.

It's Been Rather Warm

I woke up this morning around 5:20 am and glanced at the outdoor thermometer. 83°F.  OK, so situation normal. We've had enough hot days recently that I am seriously dreading the next electric bill. Meanwhile, there's a little tropical depression heading out way that may at least put a few clouds in the currently cloudless summer sky. The forecast still looks pretty imprecise, though, so I guess we'll see. I should probably check out the generator to make sure it's running OK though, just in case.

Last Wednesday's WeMoRi for me was kind of the definition of shoulda, coulda, woulda. Things were going along just fine, and as usual the front of the group sprinted for the Wisner overpass honors as the rest of us followed at a respectful pace, fully expecting to regroup after the downhill. Coming over the top, with the gap growing, I found myself kind of trapped between Mike and the curb when he unexpectedly sat up. By the time I had extricated myself a few people had sprinted past on the left and there was a rapidly widening gap between me and most of the group. After coming down onto level ground there were just three of us trying to bridge back up to the group, and by then it wasn't looking too promising. We kept the pressure on, though, and by the time we were making the turn from City Park Avenue onto Marconi We were Oh So Close. I really thought we'd be back in the draft, but we needed just one more person who wasn't completely gassed to take a pull. Unfortunately that person did not exist. The gap started to grow again and the best I could do was to hope that they got caught at a light long enough to get us back within striking distance. They didn't. We didn't. Back on Lakeshore Drive we turned around early, before the Elysian Fields traffic circle, and eventually slotted back into what was left of the group around the bridge. It was a good workout anyway, and a few of us had a nice stop at French Cup on the way home.

Thursday's ride was the usual, with a short fast stretch on Lakeshore Drive and then a steady pace out to Williams Blvd. and back with just a few riders. 

Friendly Friday had a really big turnout this week, so of course it was a pretty fast one, which is to say it was mostly 25-30 mph. The flooded part of Lakeshore Drive was dried up enough, finally, that we were able to do the full route for the first time in about a week. Anyway, it felt like a pretty good workout.

Saturday's Giro had a small group of nine or ten as lots of riders opted for the earlier SaMoRi that I think is starting around 6:15 now in a largely psychological effort to avoid some of the summer heat. I mean, it's been at least 80° before dawn every single morning lately, and with the usual relative humidity, it probably feels more like 90. Anyway, it was still a pretty fast Giro with few places to hide, so a solid workout, but steady and mostly 25-28 mph. Felt pretty good, actually. My frozen quasi-insulated water bottle was completely unfrozen by the time we got to Hayne on the way back, which was quite a bit earlier than the past couple of weekends.

On Sunday there was an easy 60-miler with a few of the TU riders plus Pirm and his wife and Ben's mother. We rolled out from Abita Springs around 6:00 am, when meant my drive across the lake was basically in the dark. I arrived early enough that I had time to go over and jimmy the lock to the bathroom with my little pocket knife as I've done numerous times in the past. It's nice of them not to use the deadlock on that door.

The pace was generally conversational the whole time except for one little unplanned dog interval.  On the plus side, it was below 80° for probably an hour or so, which by comparison felt practically chilly. I forget where we were at the time, maybe somewhere along Tung road, or was it Lee Road. Whichever it was, I happened to be a few bike lengths ahead of the rest of the group when I was ambushed by a dog that was a stealthy as it was big. He came flying out of the bushes unannounced, and made a beeline for my right calf. Of course I screamed at it and simultaneously swerved left and jumped on the pedals, somehow accidentally shifting to the small ring in the process. I could practically feel his breath on my leg at one point, but fortunately his sprint faded before mine did, and I guess he more or less ignored the riders who were behind me. 

There were three store stops along the way at Isabel, Lee Road, and Enon. I always find it surprising how much stuff these guys consume on these rides. For 60 miles, even considering the summer temperatures, I was fine with one pre-frozen water bottle, one small bottle that I barely touched, and one gel along the way. I had another backup gel that I never used, and I never felt like I was running low on calories, but then again my 72 year old metabolism is remarkably efficient when it comes to energy expenditure. I can probably gain weight by just breathing nowadays. Afterward we sat around at the Abita Springs Farmers' Market for a while. I got an iced latte, and just hoped I'd get home before my gut bacteria noticed all the suddenly available lactose. It did hit the spot at the time, though. On the southshore, I think the "feels like" temperature hit 106 later in the day.

This morning's Mellow Monday ride wasn't quite all mellow. I was feeling a little bit tired, so didn't take any significant pulls. Charles has been on a semi-structured training program for the past couple of weeks and dropped off right after we got onto Lakeshore Drive as planned, meeting back up afterward at City Park. 

Diversions

Summer  Sweat

We enjoyed a perfectly fine Saturday Giro Ride from which rode back home sucking the last bits of semi-frozen Skratch mix from my water bottle, and I was expecting to do the same on Sunday. I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason there were only a few of us on hand for the Sunday Giro, so the decision was made to just do a lap of Lakeshore Drive and then an out and back to The Wall along the lake to the west, which also happened to be the direction from which a mild wind was blowing. West winds aren't what you'd normally expect in the summer around here, but anyway, there it was. It was enough, I guess, to scrape a couple MPH from the speed on the way out, especially since there were only three or four of us and nobody seemed in the mood to push the pace. So Sunday's mileage was a little bit lower than usual, I guess. At least I got to watch most of the Tour de France's first mass-start stage live on Peacock.

Last week I swapped 160 mm brake rotors on the Cervelo for 140s that I'd gotten on sale. Yes, front and back. I'd been seeing little skid marks on my rear tire for a long time and suspect that I was occasionally locking it up thanks to the combination of the larger rotor, my relatively low weight, and fifty years of muscle memory trained on rim brakes. Regardless, I considered it a fairly trivial change, but one that would give me a little more modulation, especially on wet roads, and of course 160 rotors on both wheels in New Orleans with a bike+rider weight of around150 lbs is definitely overkill anyway. What I did not expect was that people would notice the change and ask me what rotors they were (Galfer). Go figure. Anyway, they work as expected, and feel a bit less grabby, which I like. Other recent changes include replacing the bolts in my stem and headset cap with titanium ones, not for the insignificant weight difference, but because the existing ones were bound to start showing corrosion after a summer of dripping sweat all over them.

Mellow Monday had a good enough group, and was reasonably mellow but otherwise routine. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning some big noisy thunderstorms came through, which meant the dog was nervous and my sleep, such as it is nowadays, was often interrupted. The rain had stopped by about 5 am I guess, but I decided not to venture out on the still damp streets, and instead waited for things to dry out a bit more. I ended up heading out to the levee a little after 8 am with no particular plan in mind. There was just a little bit of wind, and it was around 80°F when I started, but I guess the humidity must have been a little lower than usual because it didn't feel too oppressive.

I ended up riding 30 miles upriver past the Spillway. Along the way I had to make two diversions each way. They recently closed off a short stretch of the bike path just upriver of Ochsner where the asphalt had been crumbling for a while. I ended up riding down and back up the levee on the grass, each time needing to stop once I was back on the asphalt to pull dried grass out of the derailleur pulleys. Farther down near the parish line, just before the spot where it's been closed off for over a year, they had created a little chicane with barricades where they had a temporary (I hope) water pipe running across the levee. And then there was the two mile stretch of River Road to get past the "levee raise" section where, as far as I can tell, absolutely no work has been done is three or four months.

No Progress at all - upriver end

Anyway, despite the diversions it was a very nice steady 60+ mile Zone 2 ride, and I arrived back home with empty water bottles but otherwise none the worse for wear. This morning I met up with the WeMoRi on its alternate route due to the frequently flooded stretch near the Elysian Fields traffic circle being, once again, completely flooded and barricaded off. Are they ever going to fix this? On the plus side, there was a pretty big group and although it was a fairly fast one, staying in the mix wasn't terribly difficult.