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.