The Morning Commute

Things are nice at the start of my morning commute. It doesn't last long, though.     

Practically every weekday morning, and most weekend mornings for that matter, I step out the door between 5:30 and 6:00 am, climb on the bike, hit the start button on the computer, and ride off to meet a group or start a solo training ride. On weekdays those rides range from easy 20-mile recovery rides to brisk 40-mile group rides, and generally I'm back home a bit before 8 am. It's not always easy. It's also not my last bike ride for the day. After a shower and breakfast and a sometimes long session checking email, I roll the old commuter out the door for the ride to work. By then, I'm wearing slacks and a button-down collar shirt and leather shoes, and there's a rather heavy messenger bag with rain gear and papers and sometimes lunch over my shoulder. This time of year it's also considerably warmer than it was at 6 am. So this morning I thought I'd put the camera in my pocket and take a few photos along the way.

Since my office moved back downtown, my commute has gone from a tranquil two-mile ride on uptown residential side streets to a considerably less tranquil 4-5 mile ride on bike paths and bike lanes on much more busy streets. The first mile or so is nice and shady as I'm still in the residential areas near home, but then I suddenly emerge from the cool oak canopy of Vendome Place into the stark unfiltered blazing sun of Jeff. Davis Parkway.

After negotiating a couple of never-synchronized stop lights at Earhart and crossing the Palmetto Canal, I cross two lanes of traffic to get onto the Jeff. Davis bike path.

The Jeff Davis bike path is kind of a poster child for how not to build a bike path, but it offers one of the only reasonably safe ways for a slow-moving bike to get from one side of I-10 to the other via a separate path in the middle of the overpass. I could, and sometimes do, take the Broad St. overpass, which shortens my commute a bit, but despite the 35 mph speed limit, most cars are going about 50 at the top where traffic from Earhart merges into the right lane, and then traffic in that lane exits toward Poydras, both sketchy situations for bikes to negotiate, not to mention the cluster f that awaits at the bottom where traffic is always tied up and buses are pulling over to the curb.

It's always a bit of a chore to climb the Jeff Davis overpass on my commuter since it's a single-speed and rather dramatically over-geared,  having been built up from whatever discarded parts were available at the time. Coming down the overpass would be quite nice were it not for the water and mud quagmire that is pretty much always there. Most days I fly through the standing water with my feet raised as high as possible in order to keep the spray that escapes the fenders from messing up my pants and shoes.

Jeff Davis Water Hazard

Turning onto Tulane Avenue, with the sun directly in my face, I pick up the new bike lane that is the only reason I would ever consider riding down that road. I used to take Banks Street, a couple of blocks further down Jeff Davis, but the new VA hospital and University medical center confiscated most of that beyond Broad, so it's no longer a reasonable option. The Tulane Avenue bike lane is already pretty much of a mess. It's always covered with broken glass and small rocks and other debris. It's also often blocked with cars and trucks and buses that shouldn't be there, especially in front of the criminal court building at Broad Street where there's usually a car or two turning right.

Tulane Avenue bike lane, blocked as usual in front of the courthouse

Flooded car still there

Just past Broad there's a BMW that was obviously a victim of the flooding from nearly two weeks ago that is almost completely blocking the bike lane. How it hasn't been towed away is a mystery to me, but I called it in today because apparently nobody else gives a damn.  On other side of Tulane Avenue the bike lane is even worse, and I hate coming home that way. Portions of it are always blocked off for ongoing construction at the old Dixie Brewery that was also confiscated by the medical center or VA or whatever.  Plus, whatever isn't blocked off is covered with big rocks and stuff from the construction.

When I finally turn off of Tulane Avenue, I get a couple of blocks of welcome shade between the LSU Medical Center buildings where I can feel the cool air-conditioned air filtering out from the doors and hvac systems.

A left turn puts me in the sun again to ride under I-10, and then a couple of blocks to the building's parking garage that, thankfully, has a nice bike rack. I lock up there, pull off my hat and glasses, and wipe the sweat from my face and hair, walk into the building, roll down my sleeves, put on my ID tag, and attempt to look at least somewhat presentable before I get to the elevator. Commuting by bike in New Orleans in the summer is a challenge if you have to go anywhere near the CBD. The traffic is bad enough, but you also have to deal with a lot of stop lights and sketchy intersections, blazing hot concrete and asphalt, or, in the winter, cold wind gusts, not to mention the ever-present threat of rain, especially in the afternoons. Despite all of that, it still takes less time to ride my bike to work than it would to drive the car, park five blocks away, and walk to my building.

Crit on the Coast, Weekend of Crashes

Hanging on as usual

Candy and I rolled out early Saturday morning for the hour and a half drive over to Gulfport for the LAMBRA Criterium Championship. With the first race starting at 9 am, there was lots of time to pick up some coffee for the drive. I was planning on racing the Masters race, which was the first one on the list of start times that went well into the afternoon. Chris Lemoine pulls this race together with help from the City of Gulfport, and always has the course well under control by the time I arrive, so I wasn't surprised when, arriving a good hour and a half before the first race, I found directional signs and course marshals already in place.

Three OTB

This year's course was a new one. The traditional course was off-limits because of construction, so Chris had to resort to Plan B, which turned out to be a pretty interesting and challenging course on narrow old roads with lots of twists and turns. The whole course was on the grounds of the optimistically labelled "Centennial Plaza." This was actually an abandoned US Veterans Hospital that had never been rebuilt after hurricane Katrina. The surviving buildings, of which there were many, had been gutted but were still looking pretty good, having been built back in the 20s when people built things to last. The race director had patched a bunch of holes in the asphalt, so the road surfaces weren't really too bad. I think if we'd had a 50-rider field, however, the narrow twisting roads would have been a huge problem. As it was, though, I think the venue was fine.

I walked over to register and when they handed me the filled-in waiver from pre-registration I knew something was wrong. All of the waivers that they had downloaded and printed out were missing about half of the waiver text! Yikes. Luckily I had a bunch of waivers with me (this ain't my first rodeo) and also luckily only a few people had already registered and filled out the worthless waivers, so all was good. Half an hour before my race I went out to try and warm up and see what the course was like. What had looked on paper like a course with a lot of nice sweeping curves turned out to be a lot more challenging in real life. Turn #1 was a regular right-hand turn, festooned with a drainage grate and a few significant cracks that demanded some attention, that took you onto a narrower little road that curved first left and then made a long decreasing-radius turn to the right that put more than one person in the grass, or on the asphalt. For me it provided a few "oh shit!" moments as the left edge came up really suddenly when at speed and required a whole lot of lean. From there were more curves, then a slightly downhill off-camber right that was thankfully rather wide, followed by the final right, followed by a couple of curves before the short finish straight. This should have been a good course for me.

Well things started out quickly and by the time we were around the first turn there were already a couple of guys off the front. The narrow road and constant twists and turns made it difficult to go around anyone. Of course a chase ensued and after a few laps it came back together briefly. Having not been in a race, especially a criterium, in literally months I soon found myself near the back. A counter attack strung things out again and then on the back side of the circuit the rider in front of me started to fade. Then he blew up. It just seemed too risky at the time to try and jump around him, and so I just sat there as the gap opened. We never caught, of course, since there was now a break off the front that a chase group trying to close and all sorts of teamwork going on. With the small field in this race, there wasn't enough available horsepower to close what should have been an easy gap to close, not that my teammate Chris didn't try. Meanwhile, I got together with one or two others and we continued at a respectable tempo. Up ahead there ended up being two groups. We were maybe two-thirds of the way through the 45 minute race when the first group of five or so lapped us. We jumped on and hung in with them for a few laps until a surge split everything up again. I found myself with two others, one of whom I think had already crashed and taken a free lap. So that was nice and I figured we'd just ride it out to the end at that point. With six or seven laps to go I led through the sketchy right-hand curve maybe just a bit faster than usual, and behind me heard the sound of a crash. That left just the two of us to ride it in to the finish. At least we were never lapped by the second group. The course definitely kept the speeds down a lot, so I think if I'd held my position earlier in the race instead of dropping to the back I probably would have easily been able to stay in the second group. As it was, I finished feeling more hot than tired.

I spend the rest of the day helping with scoring, all of which was relatively easy since the field sizes were so small. There were a few crashes, but nothing too serious. We stopped for a couple of badly needed frozen margaritas and an early dinner before hitting the road back to New Orleans.

Evan, awaiting transport

So on Sunday I headed out for the Giro Ride with surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, fresh legs hoping to make up for Saturday's lackluster ride. We were going pretty fast down Hayne Blvd. as usual, but toward the end there were doing some repaving and one lane was closed off. After making the turn at the end onto Paris Road, we found it covered with rocks and crap that had fallen from dumptrucks and it wasn't long before I heard someone's tire explode.

Took a while to get everyone rolling again

A few of us stopped, but most of the group kept going. The tire was slashed all the way across the tread. Luckily I had an old race number and piece of Mr. Tuffy in my bag, so we got him patched up, put in the minimum amount of air, and sent him home as the rest of us continued on with a nice steady paceline until we saw the group on its way back. The pace coming back down Chef highway wasn't too fast and by that time it was getting up around 90 degrees. We turned off onto the service road, crossed under the interstate and made the right onto the service road. The pace was moderate at best, but of course it got strung out going through the turn, so riders were kind of all over the place getting reorganized. I was kind of toward the back, luckily, when all of a sudden there were bikes flying all over the place in front of me. I searched for the gaps and slowed down dramatically. There were bikes all across the road. Behind me I heard another crash and was just waiting for someone to plow into me from behind. Luckily I came to a stop without hitting anything and without being hit. The road looked like a yard sale was going on. There were water bottles and computers and sunglasses and keys all over the place as riders started picking themselves  up off the ground. I think three or four actually crashed. I looked around and saw my teammate Evan sitting on the ground with his right arm in that classic "something's broken" position. He probably broke either his collarbone or scapula. Ben, who had just crashed a few days prior on the levee ride, had also gone down hard and was ripped up from shoulder to ankle but otherwise OK. We put Evan on some conveniently placed road furniture (the service road is a popular dumping ground) and called home for extraction. A number of us waited with him for half an hour or so until he got picked up.

Meanwhile there was a crash on the northshore MS Tour training ride that took down young Madison. Reports are that she's fine, but with a busted lip. Up in Colorado, a few of the regular guys were doing Leadville 100, which seems like pretty harsh torture for sea-level riders. Woody finished in 11:14. The winner finished in 6:15 apparently, which is hard for me to wrap my head around. 50th place took 8 hours. Woody was 883/ 1,259.

So it turned out to be a pretty low-mileage, low-intensity week for me. Woody may need a little more recovery time, though.

A Team of One

"What do we do now?" Cat. 4 team weights its options.

Sporadic efforts to assemble four compatible riders in the same place at the same time having failed miserably, by Friday night it was clear that Steve J and I were not going to have the requisite 4-person team for Saturday's LAMBRA Team Time Trial Championship. Various likely suspects had turned up sick or injured or out of town or unwilling, and by dinner time we'd run fresh out of old guys. Since I was going to be carting a large box of medals up there anyway, we decided late that evening to ride it as a 2-man time trial, just for the exercise, which was fine with me since you can't really drop your teammate when there are only two of you.

I made the easy 45-minute drive to the out-and-back course we've used for the past few years, arriving early enough to get a prime parking spot across from the registration table. Turnout was pretty low, but by the time the start list was posted it was obvious that everyone who showed up would be getting a medal! Well, except for us, of course. The 4-man NOBC Cat. 4 "dream team" was on hand and all signed up and zipped up and fired up when one of them got the call. It was from his wife. She had gone out for a walk or ride or something with the kids and was locked out of the house. Worse, one of them had a doctor's appointment that morning. Even worse, it was his fault because the hidden emergency key was missing. Luckily, Steve is a Cat. 4, so a quick swap kept the team in the race, but of course left me even more out in the cold than I'd been to start with. Actually, it was kind of a relief since I'd be able to do the 30 miles at whatever speed and effort level I wanted, and with no pressure whatsoever since I'm long past trying to impress anyone with my time trial abilities, or lack thereof. Also, I'd be starting last, so there would be no teams flying past to comment on my slowness. My only incentive was to get back to the finish line without holding up the results too badly.

Bayou Beer Garden

The day was almost perfect for a team time trial, assuming one had a team and was good at time trials. The sky was clear and the wind was light. I bolted the aero bars onto the Bianchi but didn't bother to remove water bottles or anything. My only concessions to the time trial were aero helmet and skinsuit. From the start I rolled up to 26 mph and then immediately backed it down to 24-25 where it felt more comfortable. By the time I was four miles in, and with a light tailwind, I decided that I'd keep the heart rate under 90% of max and just keep it smooth and steady. The team that had started ahead of me was never really in sight, given the two-minute intervals, so for the next 26 miles it was just me and the fog line and the computer. Rather nice, actually. The headwind on the way back dropped my speed down by a couple of miles per hour at the same general heart rate, so I finished up with a blazing average speed of 22.8 and an average heart rate just over 87%, so all went according to plan and my legs were none the worse for wear. The Cat. 4 team, meanwhile, lost Steve somewhere on the return leg, and came up a mere 6 seconds short of the gold medal, for which they are still getting grief.

No Giro Ride today

That afternoon there was a particularly heavy rainstorm that hung over the city for hours (10-11 inches of rain in 3 hours) and overwhelmed the pumping system, flooding much of Mid-city, Gentilly, and Lakeview. After telling everyone that all of the pumps were working at capacity, it was later determined at an emergency public city council hearing that in fact a number of pumps were off line for various reasons. It probably wouldn't have mattered much as far as the severity of the flooding went, but the City Council and the Mayor, almost all of whom are up for re-election or otherwise looking for work in the coming year, desperately needed some scapegoats despite the fact that they are, in fact, ultimately the responsible parties. As a result, a number of people will be losing their jobs, some of whom might deserve it, some of whom definitely don't. The public is still depressingly ill-informed about how the drainage system works and what its limitations are and all, but of course this is the era in which facts don't matter any more and everything is judged by emotion and hearsay and social media posts, so the mayor is taking no heat for the people he appointed and then fired and the city council is taking no heat for not being on top of the drainage situation and, in the end, nobody is offering any viable concrete solutions since that could cost actual money that the public is not likely to cough up anyway. But I digress....

Riding down Carrollton early Sunday morning

By Sunday morning the floodwaters had receded and the streets were mostly, kind of dry, so I headed out for the Giro Ride, hoping against hope that the Starbucks was in operation (it was). The streets in mid-city along Carrollton were covered with mud and there were a bunch of flooded cars around the I-10 underpass that had been pulled out of the depths of what becomes a lake in these situations, and the neutral ground was full of cars that the locals had wisely moved there before the water had gotten too deep. Shortly after I and a number of others arrived it started raining pretty hard and after fifteen minutes or so riders started bailing out and heading home. I waited around a while with the Westbank guys, and once the rain stopped I rode with them as they headed back through Metairie for the Huey P. Long bridge. Ben L, who had driven out to the Giro, met me on the river levee and since the rain had ended by then we headed out toward the Spillway, picking up Steve Johnson along the way. On the return trip where the bike path drops down to street level at St. Rose in order to go under some pipes and stuff, Ben touched my wheel and fell, fortunately, into the grass. He was completely unscathed since we weren't going very fast, but in the fall  his computer had popped off of his bike. We searched for it for quite a while and never could locate it in the tall grass. Otherwise, it was a nice 60 miles, albeit a lot slower than the Giro would have been. There was a lot more rain later on in the day, and the next day, and the day after that, and today, but a long as it's not a hurricane I'm not complaining too much.

Yesterday evening I went over to the little WHIV radio station as the guest for the weekly Out Spok’n show. It was just basically a conversation with Janneke about local bike racing. They had had a good six inches of water in the place on Sunday but were up and running. The show must go on.....

Northshore Sunday

The Sunday northshore group on Old Military Road

The time for a long Sunday northshore ride was long overdue, and it didn't take long to convince a few of the more likely suspects to set something up. By Wednesday there was a Facebook event and emails and, eventually, a route. The weather was looking to be particularly good with a very rare "cool front" coming through on Saturday that would at least take the edge off of the last weekend in July. The 73-mile route that Mark H. had put together wasn't exactly the kind I would have mapped out, but it was pretty typical of most of the regular weekend northshore rides in that it had a lot of turns and twists and tended to lean toward the flatter roads. Most of the roads were quite nice, though, and my overall impression was that much of the second  half of the ride consisted of a bunch of short but great segments strung together with equally short connections on not quite so nice segments.

So after a particularly fast tailwind-assisted Saturday Giro Ride (one three mile stretch averaged well over 30 mph) I was looking forward to a ride in the country. Thanks to the empty July racing calendar and other complications I'd six straight weekends of back-to-back Giro Rides. I mean, the Giro is great and super convenient and all, but it's also dead flat unless you count overpasses, which can get old after a while. Sunday morning I left early to pick up Ben Luongo (yeah, that's Tom's son) and we made the drive over the Causeway to the Abita Springs trailhead, arriving with plenty of time for the planned 7:30 am ride. There were tons of riders there since another group ride was also leaving around that time, plus there's a regular Sunday morning farmer's market there. We got one of the last parking spots along the school fence. Thanks to the cool front, the relative humidity was relatively low, which made the 77 degree temperature feel relatively pleasant. It would eventually rise into the 90s by the ride's end, but even that felt less oppressive than normal.

Before we headed out on the Tammany Trace, we took a little group photo with some of the NOBC riders who were on hand. Once we got out of Abita Springs a bit I took a head count and came up with 27, which was both good and bad. On the good side, it's great to have a big group that allows for some conversation and all. On the bad side, it means there will be a wider range of abilities than you'd have with a smaller ride composed of just riders you know well. Rolling out we saw Antonio (aka Tony) turn around to join in, at which point I heard someone groan, "Oh no....."  Tony is a great guy but is also pretty well known for pushing the pace on northshore rides. On that count he would not disappoint on this day. As the pace started to ramp up the group pretty quickly formed into a long single file, cruising along at a nice clip and regrouping after the intersections. About 15 miles in we turned off of Fitzgerald Church Road onto Hwy. 40/437 and had to wait for some traffic to pass. Unbeknownst to most, maybe all, was that Mignon had paused to eat something and ended up off the back at the same time that the pace picked up and we got into somewhat hillier terrain. It was over ten miles later that Mark realized she was missing and turned back to find her and they weren't back with the group for another ten miles when we stopped at the store in Isabel. From there the turns became even more frequent. There was one particularly uncomfortable stretch on Highway 21 at Sun where the road was under construction, but eventually we were back on less-busy roads.When we turned into Money Hill, which is a gated community, there was a guard there who initially refused to let the group through. I don't know what transpired, but eventually he relented. Of course, if you have to get through one gate to get in, that means you will have to get through another to get out. Well the exit gate six or seven miles later didn't have a guard or anything and had to be triggered by a car, one of which appeared right on cue, although a few people ended up riding around the gate and through a ditch. By then a number of riders had turned off to make for shorter rides, so we were down to maybe half the riders we'd started with. The rest of the ride heading back to Abita Springs was pretty easy.

After the ride a bunch of us had lunch at the Abita Brew Pub where the beer is readily available. The food there is nothing to write home about, and they always seem to be severely understaffed, so it was a long wait for a hamburger and fries, but the company was nice and I was glad I had no pressure to get home.

All-in-all it was a nice 70+ mile ride, even if it was a bit easier than I'd been expecting. On the plus side, nobody bonked or otherwise got in over his head on the ride. We need to do these more often, I think.  Just as well that it wasn't too hard, I think, since on Monday I was feeling pretty tired when I went out for a solo recovery ride on the levee where I averaged a blazing 15 mph. This morning I had to miss the long Tuesday ride on the levee in order to bring Candy to the airport. She has a conference in Florida near Jacksonville and won't be back until Sunday evening. In the meantime We're trying to get a 4-man Team Time Trial team together for Saturday's race. It remains to be seen if we will be able to find four 55+ riders for that. Somehow these TTT teams always seem to get assembled at the last minute. I'm thinking I may bolt the aero bars onto the old Orbea for this one and maybe do a few miles on that one day this week.

Quiet Week

The Sunday Giro rolls out along Lakeshore Drive

The past week or so has been mostly a dull routine of morning group rides, hot commutes to and from work, and weekend back-to-back Giro Rides. I wish there were more races this time of year because it's hard to keep up the motivation when you haven't pinned on a number in two months. Fortunately, things should be picking up in August with the team time trial, and criterium championship on the calendar. Speaking of the calendar, there's finally some movement on the LAMBRA road championship that had been in limbo since Zack pulled out of promoting it on the Natchez course. I think everyone's in agreement that the course up there has just gotten unworkable because of the deteriorating road surface. It's a real shame because the course itself is great and the state park is a good location. It's also super-easy to control with only one intersection and practically no traffic. So last week I started rattling some cages about getting the race back on the calendar. Initially Stephen Mire offered his place on the northshore near Bush as a staging area. There was a nice low-traffic 10-mile course there that was pretty flat for a championship but definitely not out of the question. Given how late it is in the season and the fact that LAMBRA is going to have to promote it itself rather than getting one of the local clubs to host it, I figured we should make things as simple as possible. With a date at the end of September, I'm not expecting a huge turnout, so it looks like it'll be a one-day event with a few combined races which means that some of the masters will have to chose whether to ride their category races or their age group races. Guess we'll see how that plays out, but anyway it should at least allow for reasonable sized fields at the starting line. Anyway, after kicking around a few dates Scott Kuppersmith suggested a course up by Jackson, MS and offered to help. We had used some of that course before for Tour le Fleur many years ago, and the 11-mile loop he had mapped out looked pretty good. It has only two stop signs to deal with, pretty low traffic volume, few intersections of any sort (really only three turns per lap), and lots of parking. So that's in the works right now and unless the local police and sheriff balk, I think it will work out fine.

A coyote hanging around the water intake at the parish line

So last weekend I rode both Giro Rides, which were fine but otherwise unremarkable. I did do a few of the sprints and felt pretty good about that. We've been riding the river levee on Tuesday and Thursday now and usually have about a dozen people for that. They have kind of patched up the bad asphalt around the green pipes, but haven't done anything with the hole that caused the crash other than put a traffic cone on top of it. On Mondays and Fridays I've been riding mostly solo on the levee, which is pretty nice since I can sometimes go really easy and look at the scenery a bit. Wednesdays have been the WeMoRi, which for me is usually just about half an hour of any sort of intensity, but that works out well if I'm doing 40 mile rides on Tuesday and Thursday.

Patch job. Hope is lasts a while....

Even though it's only the end of July, I'm already noticing the shortening days. When you're out on the road every morning before sunrise, you really notice the small changes like that. It was the beginning of the week that I started using my bigger, brighter headlight again after not needing it for the past couple of months. I got a new tire and Mr. Tuffy for the commuter last week and before installing them I finally broke down and changed the hub spacing to accommodate the frame. For the past decade or two I've been cramming a 27" wheel with 8-speed spacing into an English 3-speed frame. The wheel came out of the shed behind Adam's Bicycle World some time around 2000, I guess and it's been a royal pain in the ass every time I have to fix a flat. It took quite some time to change out the spacers and locknuts on the axle, however, because the threads on the ends were completely mangled. I had to file down the axle anyway to make it the correct length, so it wasn't a big issue, just rather time-consuming. I should be good for a while now. Meanwhile, I flatted the front tire on the Bianchi the other day and noticed those tires are getting pretty worn down now and I'll be needing to replace them soon. Maybe next month. I just spent $800 on tree pruning, so the bank account is pretty anemic at the moment.

50% of racing licenses are in 8 or 9 states.
LAMBRA represents 1% of all USAC licenses.

This time of year I miss all of those races we used to have that offered big prizelists. Coming home from a weekend of racing with an extra $50 was always nice.  Now, the USAC is hearing from people, mostly professional promoter types, that they want to limit cash prizes to just the elite categories. I don't know how that is going to work out in areas like ours where it's a challenge to get people to show up for races. Sure, it would be nice not to have to come up with the cash, but if you remove that incentive and don't replace it with something else, like free beer and food, I don't see how it's going to help. Anyway, we'll  have to see where that goes. I don't think they are thinking about making it illegal to have cash prizes, but I do think they are thinking of ways to reward promoters who eliminate them. Meanwhile, there's the push for equal prizes for men's and women's races. That's something that just doesn't make sense for smaller races where you're lucky to have a dozen people in an open-category women's race but you might have 45 in the men's Cat. 1/2 race. I think this stuff is all coming from the promoters in the areas with lots of riders and lots of competing professional race directors. I see a huge gap between the ten states that have 50% of the licensed riders and the rest of us. Maybe something good will come of it eventually. I think everyone in the USAC road racing world is kind of grasping at straws right now. Licenses, especially road racing licenses, continue to trend down and are currently about 7% below last year, which wasn't exactly a great year either. I have to admit that I kind of fear the triathlon model where there are relatively few events each year, but each event is huge, professionally run, has lots of amenities, and costs a pile of money to enter.  It's great to have some of those of course, but I miss the steady stream of weekend club-promoted races we used to have. I think USAC tends to pay the most attention to the big race promoters since those are the kinds of races that the USAC people are always involved with.

More Rain, More Crashes, More Family

Think we'll get wet? Heading home from the Sunday Giro Ride

The summer rain just keeps coming and it's just impossible to predict. Last Friday around noon I got an email from Chris Harvey saying that they wanted to try again to trim the oak trees that are growing over my house. This was both good and bad. We'd tried to do this on Wednesday, but by the time I got home a big rainstorm was about to hit and they decided to postpone since of course you don't want to be up in a tree thirty feet off the ground during a thunderstorm. I rushed home and the two guys got to work. The only problem was that family had started arriving the day before for my father's 90th birthday (which is actually today but was celebrated on Saturday). Most were staying a couple of houses away at a neighbor's place who does that air b&b thing, which was super convenient. They were away at the Zoo with the kids, so I thought the timing might work out well. Naturally another thunderstorm came along and the tree work got stalled for a while, and in the meantime the brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and their kids came back from the zoo. The tree guys ended up working until it was almost dark, but fortunately they didn't drop anything on the family members going back and forth between houses.

Yeah, don't think we can fix that here.

Saturday's Giro Ride was a little thin for some reason, but turned out to be a good workout despite the fact I'd had a bit too much wine the night prior. Sunday's Giro had a larger turnout and I was expecting it to get pretty fast, which it did. Shortly after we turned off of the service road onto Chef Highway, where there's always a very brief lull in the action as riders make it across the four lanes of traffic, the paceline started to form up as usual. Up ahead I saw Adrian reach down toward his front hub. I couldn't tell exactly what he was doing, but I've seen riders do this before and it never ends well. Turned out his quick-release was loose and he was trying to tighten it while riding. I instinctively backed off and started heading for the grass because I knew there was a 90% chance there'd be a crash in about half a second. There was. Adrian got a couple of his fingers between the bladed spokes and his fork, broke a spoke or two, and then the whole wheel started to collapse as his bike swerved wildly from side to side before ejecting him neatly over the handlebars. Fortunately for everyone we were going only 24 mph at the time. He popped up right away but there was blood pretty much pouring from his left hand and his front wheel's rim was connected to the hub by only one thin spoke. Jaden called Samantha who drove out to rescue him and his bike, so after a while the rest of us continued on. He ended up having to get two fingers stitched up.

As we were heading back along Hayne Blvd. the sky to the east was looking really bad, which is to say it was black. When we hit Lakeshore Drive, I could see the rain out in the lake and said, "we're going to get wet," which was an understatement for sure. A couple of minutes later we getting pelted with rain as my shoes started filling up with water. It only took us five or ten minutes to ride through it, and by the time we got halfway home the streets were completely dry. Typical summertime rainstorms. Later, someone posted video of Rachel crashing on the slick underpass by Southern University.

The birthday celebration for my father was nice, although not without its challenges. My job was to go over to the nursing home to ride with him in the wheelchair compatible transportation service van that was to be there at 12:30. Well, someone dropped the ball, either at the home or at the van company, but the upshot was that there was no way there would be a van any time soon. Plan B was to get him into my car, which we had tried once before without success. This time, though, we had some help from the nursing home staff, so that was good. We were, of course, half an hour late by then. Fortunately, one of my brother's sons is a nurse and knew how best to get him from the car to the wheelchair. I think we had about twenty people at the two tables at the New Orleans Country Club, and with a hoard of small children it was a loud and animated lunch. It made me think of the opening scene of "Home Alone." Anyway, it all worked out and despite him whispering to me as I was getting him into the car at the beginning, "Let's never do this again," by the time we got him back to his room he said that he had really enjoyed it.

This morning I went out for a nice spin on the levee, and then just as I stepped out the door to ride to work it started to rain. I thought about my options for a minute (Danielle had already taken the car) and decided to go ahead and ride, so I put my bag down and pulled out the rain jacket and took off. Half a mile later I realized I'd left my bag at home and had to turn around, still in the rain. When I got home I thought I'd just ride over to Tulane, lock the bike there, and take the shuttle in order to minimize how wet I'd be. Well after getting to the shuttle stop I realized that because of the summer schedule it would be a good 45 minutes before I'd get to work, which is only about four miles away, so I put my rain jacket back on and got good and wet from the waist down. Looking out the window right now at 5:20 pm, I'm only giving myself a 50% chance of getting home dry.

Cracks and Crashes

The nicely lighted streetcar barn was a convenient place to fix my flat tire  

It turned out to be a complicated week for training. I hadn't been planning anything out of the ordinary - just the usual weekday morning routine. On Monday morning I did a nice solo ride on the levee as usual, with plans for a faster ride on Tuesday. I didn't go in to work on Monday because the air-conditioner had stopped working and I had to wait for the repair guys to show up. Fortunately, we keep a couple of window units down in the basement for just such an occasion. They also come in handy after hurricanes, assuming you can get hold of a generator. We lugged them upstairs and stuck them into the bedroom windows, so it was fine. When the repair guys arrived I explained the symptom, which was essentially that there was power to the shut-off, but apparently no power to the  unit. I'd looked inside but hadn't noticed the tiny little DC fuse. It took the guy about thirty seconds to pinpoint that problem. While he was there, I had him check the rest of the system and ended up having him clean the condenser unit which was pretty clogged up with dirt and gunk, but decided to hold off on re-charging the refrigerant which was just a bit low. I felt lucky to get off with a $250 bill.

This bypass around the pipes is a complete disaster

So on Tuesday I headed out to meet the group on the levee and, just as I rounded the turn from Carrollton onto Willow, heard air escaping rapidly from my rear tire. I rolled to a stop in front of the nicely lit streetcar barn (it was still a bit dark) and had to pull out my pocket knife to pull the packing staple out of the tire. Glancing at my watch, I knew I would miss the group. So once I got patched up and out onto the levee I settled into a nice steady pace, planning on meeting the group out near the turnaround. I figured I'd be about five minutes behind them, and since they take a little bit of a break out at Ormond, I wasn't expecting to miss out on more than a couple of miles at the worst. So I was surprised to see them coming toward me much earlier than I'd expected. Turns out the bike path was closed off at the grain elevator, apparently because they are removing the odd little crossover they had constructed about a year ago when they started building something out there. That evening as I was riding the commuter bike back home from work I again heard the sound of air rushing out of my rear tire. I was only a mile and a half from home, and it was hot, and I didn't feel like dealing with the dirt and fender and single speed and pannier, so I just leaned forward more and rode the rest of the way on the flat tire. Later that evening I pulled off the rear wheel and discovered that I'd worn completely through the tire in one place and then also worn completely through the Mr. Tuffy that I'd apparently been riding on for a while. Guess I got my money's worth anyway. I threw it all in the trash and ordered a replacement tire for the antique 27" wheel with 7-speed spacing that's crammed into a frame made for 26" 3-speed wheels. I pulled a tire off of my rain bike, which also sports old 27" wheels, to use in the meantime. On Wednesday Chris called to say he had a crew nearby and could come over to the house in the afternoon to do some badly needed tree-trimming that I'd gotten him to give me a price on a couple of weeks ago, so I rushed home just in time for a thunderstorm which of course cancelled any possibility of tree work for the day.

Crash precipitated by another sinkhole on the levee bike path

On Thursday I again met the group up on the levee for the long ride. There were some big clouds around but it looked like we had a good chance of missing the scattered thunderstorms that have been the routine around here lately. We carefully negotiated the broken-up asphalt bypass around the Jefferson Parish "pump to the river" pipes. That section was built no more than four months ago and is already a complete and utter disaster. The asphalt is cracking, the roadbed below it is sinking, there's always mud and water washing over it, and it's generally gotten really sketchy. It's a real marvel of bad engineering and sloppy work. A few miles past that we go around the pipes at Florida Street. My turn at the front came up right after that and I had my head down a bit as I pulled us back up to speed when I heard Rich, who was on my wheel, say "look out."

This one caused the crash on Thursday

I looked up and saw the other big section of sinking, broken-up asphalt right ahead of me and curved around it to the left. A moment later I heard Rich say something and realized there'd been a crash somewhere behind me. Apparently the group had gotten a little strung out going around the pipes, which always happens, and the guys toward the back were pushing it to close up the gap when someone hit the broken asphalt, or swerved to avoid it, or something like that. The result was three or four people hitting the ground pretty hard. David banged up his elbow pretty badly (ended up with a few stitches after a visit to the ER) and also broke his carbon seatpost. Tom, whose son Ben was on the ride, also went down pretty hard with a little gash above his eye, probably from his glasses. One rider tumbled down the concrete side of the levee and was pretty slow to get up. I think they all called for extraction, and after the JP police patrol guy showed up and started filling out paperwork, the rest of us continued on with a plan to turn around at The Dip. So I turn around and we're heading back and we see Ben standing on the side of the bike path. He'd broken a spoke on his carbon wheel - the kind that has maybe six spokes on the non-drive side. The tire was hitting the frame, the rim was hitting the brake, and it wasn't looking very promising. After much fiddling around, we finally got it seated in the dropout just off-center enough that the tire, after letting out a substantial amount of pressure, was barely clearing the chainstay. By now we were half an hour behind schedule, at least, so the rest of the group continued on while I rode back with Ben at an easy pace in case things got worse. Somehow it all held together and he made it all the way back.

The Sprint

Great weather and a good group for the July 4th Holiday Giro Ride

With most people off from work for July 4th, there was the usual Holiday Giro Ride last Tuesday. Initiated by a single email with a subject line of "Giro Tues" and a message reading simply "7 AM from Starbucks," the large accumulation of riders rolled out promptly just two days after what had been, at least for me, another weekend of back-to-back Giro Rides. With summer fully upon us down here in New Orleans, it promised to be a brisk and sweaty affair, of the sort that transfers a gallon of salty perspiration from skin to headsets and seatposts and gets you home with wet shoes and a soaked kit that has to be peeled off inside-out and hung out to dry. Being only the beginning of July, it could have been worse of course. We started with a temperature around 84F and ended with it at a relatively subtropical 95 about three hours later. That was just a taste of what's to come later this month and next, no doubt.

With almost no wind and a big holiday group containing a lot of people whose game plan didn't involve being in the front half, it was easy sailing for those who wanted it. The 18 or so miles from the overpasses out to Venetian Isles was completed at a nice brisk average speed of 25 mph, ramping up to 35 at the turnaround sprint for those so inclined. I backed off at about 34, myself. By then the heat was getting hot and the hot guys were getting toasted, which kept the speed on the return trip down Chef Menteur more in the 23-26 mph range, which was pretty casual with such a large group on such a windless day. After crossed under the interstate and got onto the service road I was near the back when Pat came riding up and said that Brian Bourgeois. had a mechanical. I looked back, but we were already around the bend and I couldn't see anyone, so I turned around to see if he needed help while the rest of the group continued on unaware. Shortly after I'd turned another rider came by and said that Brian had told him he was OK and to go on, so I turned around again. By then we were probably two minutes behind the group. We started a nice two person time trial at a moderate pace, knowing that the group had already dropped back down to holiday ride speed, and finally caught back up somewhere around the end of Bullard. Almost everybody who started was together all the way to Lakeshore Drive, which is kind of unusual for the Giro but really nice for a holiday ride.

Two people at a table for one

So I got home, peeled off the wet kit, and got onto NBC Gold to watch end of the Tour de France where things were setting up for a big classic pack sprint. It's the final 200 meters and I see Sagan and Cavendish in pretty good positions as the whole sprint starts drifting right. Sagan sees an opening to the right along the barricade. Cavendish is already trying to accelerate from behind into the same opening. I say out loud, "there's not enough room!" Cav tries to make some space for himself by, I can only assume, leaning onto Sagan, but it's like a little bird trying to push a tank out of the way. Sagan holds his line. Cav practically bounces off of Sagan and hits the barricade and goes down, sliding left right in front of two others who launch into and over him like it's a ski jump.

Lots of theories about that elbow

Sagan, completely unfazed by what's happening behind him, takes a close 2nd place. Cavendish eventually limps across the line with a bandaged hand and holding his arm in that classic "I've broken something" position across his chest. The officials relegate Sagan, presumably because he threw his elbow out and moved a bit to the right when Cavendish tried to squeeze through, and then they think about it more and decided to disqualify him completely. Cavendish has a broken scapula and is out, Sagan is out, fans start armchair officiating. From what I've seen, I can't find much fault with what Sagan did. Cavendish took a big risk trying to come through an opening that was already closing. Had it been anyone but Sagan in the way, he might have pushed his way through, or he might have caused an even bigger crash. Had the leading riders not drifted right, none of this would have happened in the first place, so I think there was a lot of blame to go around. From the officials' perspective, I think the key thing here was that they had earlier warned the sprinters that they would not be tolerating dangerous riding like they usually do, and I think Sagan's DQ was basically used as an example. Certainly we've seen much worse in prior years' sprints that didn't warrant disqualifications.

On Thursday we had a nice big group up on the levee for the long Thursday ride. The weather hadn't changed much except that there were some big clouds scattered around, and the pace was pretty good most of the time, depending on who happened to be at the front, and never got out of hand. On the return trip we averaged around 24 mph with perhaps a bit of an occasional tailwind that kept my heart rate at an average of only 138. As we neared the Huey P. Long bridge I figured that a few of the riders were going to sprint as usual, and after a few of them went by I got onto someone's wheel, but there was already a big gap so after a short effort I eased up. The next thing I know I see Brian Baum rolling down the grassy side of the levee as his bike flies through the air. Apparently he sprinted for the bridge, then eased up just as Matt, who he wasn't expecting, came flying past him to his left, causing him to crash. Unfortunately, he hit the asphalt first, taking a lot of skin off of his arm and leg. He got back on the bike right away and hurried back the last few miles home before the epinephrine could wear off.

Summer Doldrums

A room with a view

It was another weekend of back-to-back Giro Rides, and there was no doubt that summer was upon us. As often happens when it starts getting hot and miserable, I was feeling fine and spent more than usual in the wind, which isn't actually saying much. Saturday's Giro was kind of a series of flat tires - not mine. I turned back to help for the first one, along with a few others, as the rest of the group kept rolling. We made a really fast tire change and I was kind of looking forward to the team time trial that would be needed to get us back to the group. I figured they were not catchable, and was planning on taking the Bullard shortcut, but as is turned out they had been soft-pedaling and we caught them within a couple of miles. Then, right after turning onto Chef Highway, there was another flat. Fewer people stopped for that one, but it went quickly. We had just gotten going when we saw Judd off on the shoulder up ahead. I assumed he'd flatted, but in fact it was slightly more dramatic than that. Apparently Jaden had chucked a water bottle at him when he rolled through the red light at Michoud Blvd., and then there was some kind of confrontation about it that ended up with Judd going down or almost going down and dropping his chain. Anyway, we all got going again and rejoined the group when we saw it coming the other way, a couple of miles from the turnaround. Sunday's ride was relatively civilized. Both days I made a couple of efforts that got my heart rate up into the 178 bpm range, which would be around 92% of max, so I guess that's good. I felt strong sprinting up the overpasses, anyway. On the down side, I haven't been reaching into my pocket for my camera very much since it's been hot and humid and sweaty and in general there hasn't been anything very interesting to take pictures of.

In the middle of last week we finally got the office furniture installed, which basically involved a couple of days of disruption. I've still got a few boxes on the floor and haven't taken time to hang anything on the walls, but at least it's coming along. With today being the day before July 4, things are super quiet around here, not that I'm complaining.

So halfway through the year, I'm showing around 5,700 miles, which is pretty decent considering the low-mileage weeks after the collarbone incident. Since I've been using Strava I have four full years of data with annual mileage totals ranging from a low of 11,724 (another collarbone year) to 12,378, so I guess I'm on track for a normal year mileage-wise. I have to admit that I really use Strava mainly just to keep track of mileage, both mine and my equipment. For example, I know that the Campi group  that I bought used from Matt a few years ago has over 50,600 miles on it now, and the "new" Bianchi has over 30,000. Where it really comes in handy, though, is keeping track of specific equipment items. The current headset is at 18,200 mi., and the most recently installed chain is now at 2,100 miles, which means it's time to start looking for a replacement on sale. Surprisingly, I have over 25,000 miles on the Bont shoes, which are a little beat up from the crash into the car a while back but still serviceable. I really hate having to change shoes. The sizing is always inconsistent, the new models are never the same as the old ones, they're expensive, and the local bike shops never, ever, have the brand and size that I need in stock so I can try them on before buying them, so getting new shoes is always an expensive roll of the dice.

It's neat to kind of know someone in the Tour

The Tour de France started on Sunday, and it's kind of fun for a lot of the local guys knowing that Nate Brown, who won the 2011 Tour de Louisiane, is riding it with the Cannondale team. Even better, he was in the KOM jersey after stage 3. Meanwhile, the USAC National Road Championships were going on over the weekend. There were a number of LAMBRA riders there, but no outstanding results. I got to watch a few of the races on the live web stream via VeloNews, which was great. The commentary, however, was pretty lame. The Women's race had a big crash with five laps to go and they ended up stopping the race and re-starting it with six to go something like thirty minutes later. The two-person break that had been off the front survived, which must have been hard. I was sorry to see Debbie Milne go down hard in that crash. I wasn't sure it was she until today because the commentators never said which riders went off in the ambulances. Apparently she whacked her head, so they didn't want her to continue. Everybody else got to re-start, so in a way it was lucky for some of the riders.

Brings me back!

Anyway, I pretty much killed Sunday afternoon sitting in front of the computer watching the criteriums. I did, however, get rid of an old bike that I'd had sitting around in the basement since 2006. It was a French 10-speed from around 1971 or so that I'd gotten from a faculty member who was moving after Katrina. He'd also given me a really nice Peugeot mixte that I subsequently fixed up for Candy as her commuter. The "Olympique" bike, however, was in pretty rough shape and way too big for me anyway, so I hadn't done anything with it. About a year ago I kind of cleaned it up a bit, thinking I'd put it on Craigslist for $20 or something, but that never actually happened, so it was just kind of in the way for a long time. When Tim posted that he was looking for a frame to build up I told him about it and he came over and picked it up in exchange for a bottle of wine. I think I may have gotten the better end of that deal, but it will be interesting to see if he is able to fix the bike up. It's a solid old lugged steel frame with some vintage parts, so it does have some historical interest. It's exactly the kind of thing that was being sold around here during the 70s "bike boom" when I first started riding.

Giro and Genes

The Saturday Giro offered up a little surprise last week in the form of a random rain shower. I'd ridden out to Starbucks as usual, this time under particularly hazy skies and with a truly awesome humidity level. As the first riders started to filter in, one of them said that it was pouring rain out at the lakefront, barely half a mile away. I was rather surprised, but soon realized that the thick haze had been hiding the big black clouds off to the northwest. Looking at the radar, we had a good chance that we'd miss most of it by the time we hit Lakeshore Drive, and indeed we did. All we got was a brief and very light sprinkling of drizzle that was unfortunately greatly augmented by the still soaking wet streets and associated wheel spray. Otherwise, though, the ride was good -- and hot. Sunday was similar except that there was no rain and for some reason the group was a lot larger. As we were flying down Chef Menteur Highway, all strung out because someone at the front had boosted the speeed up to around 30 mph, I figured the line of riders was a good two city blocks long. On the return trip I found myself ahead of the group with Taco, mainly because neither of us likes to stop half a mile from the turnaround to stand around under the only shade tree in the area for five minutes of doing whatever those guys do when they're standing around under the tree. Anyway, it was clear that the group was lagging behind a bit. Normally, I'd expect to be caught by the group a few miles down the road, but on Sunday every time I looked back I couldn't even see them. Pretty soon Taco's speed started inching up. I was just sitting on his wheel think how much it was like being behind a motor and wondering when he would motion for me to come around and take a pull.  He never did, though. What had started as a leisurely 22 mph soon became a brisk 24 mph, and then for a long time stayed at like 25.5 mph before a final little push up to 30 over the last mile. All that time I was just glued to Taco's super-smooth wheel. Despite having never put my nose into the wind, it was a pretty decent workout for me.

So some time around Christmas, I think, my daughter had given me a 23andMe kit that I finally sent off for testing about a month ago and for which I got the reports last week. Having already seen Danielle's report, I wasn't too surprised with anything in mine. I'm apparently 98.4% European, with a lot of Irish and Iberian/Spanish and French, which is what I'd expect from what I know about recent ancestors. Like Danielle, I also had 301 Neanderthal variants, which is apparently more than 83% of those who have thus far been tested, so I guess some of my distant ancestors were, shall we say, open-minded about sexual partners. Most of the predicted traits consistent with mine - no bald spot, likes salty stuff, detached ear lobes, long ring finger, straight dark hair, predisposed to weigh less than average, lactose intolerant, not a deep sleeper, etc. It also suggested that my muscle composition would be "common in elite power athletes," which kind of calls into question the whole thing I guess. That's based on a ACTN3 gene variant that increases production of  a particular isoform of alpha-actinin. This is the most-highly specialized of the four mammalian alpha-actinins, with its expression restricted largely to fast glycolytic fibres in skeletal muscle. Theoretically, I think it would mean that my muscles contract particularly rapidly. Looks like I'm heterozygous for it, though, for whatever that's worth. The implication is that without that genotype I'd be better at endurance. Also, my weight is likely to be similar on diets high or low in saturated fat with the same number of total calories. That's related to the gene for apolipoprotein A-II, which I gather is normal. Anyway, it was kind of interesting.

Making the Best of It

Wet asphalt, worms and solitude on the levee this morning

It was a dark and stormy night.  Really.  It was.  What it wasn't, however, was the kind of life-threatening storm that the media had been hyping. Basically, there was a lot of intermittent rain and a fair amount of wind, but it was, in a way, disappointing. The power flickered once and that was about it. Still, the forecast was for nothing but rain and I saw no reason to doubt that part was accurate, so when the alarm went off at five-whatever in the morning and I could hear the cars on the wet streets outside, I shuffled off to the kitchen and made some coffee. Outside, it looked like the rain had practically stopped, at least temporarily. I drove The Wife over to the shuttle stop on campus around 6:15, and on the way looked up to see a little patch of blue sky through a gap in the thick cloud cover. I was already making plans as I drove home. I could probably get out the door around 6:45 on the rain bike so perhaps there was hope. A quick check of the radar confirmed that the city was in-between rain bands and would probably be that way for at least a couple of hours. I threw on some riding clothes, pumped up the Pennine's tires, stuffed a rain jacket into my pocket, pulled on shoe-covers, and headed for the levee. The streets were wet but whatever was falling from the sky was could hardly be called rain. I ended up getting in a perfectly fine twenty-two miles, thankful that I had a rain bike with full fenders as I rolled through puddles and over the stretched-out bodies of the hundreds of earthworms that covered parts of the levee bike path. It wasn't a hard workout or anything, but I was glad I'd made the best out of that little lull in the weather.

Soon after I got to work this morning -- yes, I took the car -- it started storming again, and later in the morning my phone lit up with a tornado warning. The sky is still dark and the streets still wet and the rain is still falling, but I got in a ride today when I'd have bet money I wouldn't have. The Volvo place still hasn't called about the tail light they were supposed to order, although I did have some fun on Monday when someone from the dealership called to check on how nicely I'd been treated and whether everything had been done to my satisfaction. It would be nice to have a right turn signal again, but I have to admit I'm not all that anxious to deal with the hassle of getting the car out to Metairie and all, so I'm good with waiting for now.

Keith emailed that the latest kit order had arrived. I had ordered a second pair of shorts and a second jersey, so now I'll just have to figure out how to get over to his office now that mine isn't so conveniently located any more. Unfortunately, the next reasonably nearby race isn't until August. I've been thinking about looking for something outside of LAMBRA next month, but it seems like promoters in the south are afraid to put on anything big in July because of the heat. There's a weekend of races in Crockett, TX. I had to look up the location on Google Maps to find out it's kind of halfway between Houston and Dallas, so around 6.5 hours drive time and no chance of winning enough to pay for lunch, and it's the weekend that Danielle comes in from Washington. There's something the following weekend up in TN but now we're talking about 9-hour drives.