Where'd Spring Go??

After a couple of days of decidedly Spring-like weather, I woke up this morning to what felt a lot like November. Not that it was particularly cold, but the skies were full of those low-hanging unsettled grey clouds and there was a gusty wind blowing out of the Northeast. As often happens under such conditions, there was only a skeleton crew out on the levee for the morning ride. Although we would be plagued by crosswinds much of the ride, there was definitely a bit of a tailwind component on the way out, but for some reason only a few of us seemed interested in embracing it. After Robin chastized me for surging from 23 to 24 mph when I took a pull, a few riders came through and next thing I know we're doing 25+ and the group has split. It was just Big Richard, Luke on his TT bike and me the rest of the way out, and as it turned out all but The Donald had turned back early. Quite a nice training ride anyway, despite the gloomy skies and buffeting wind.

I got another phone call a few minutes ago by a triathlete asking if his Cervelo TT bike would be legal for this weekend's 2-person Time Trial. It's kind of funny how the Tri guys have re-defined the term "road bike" to mean exclusively a bike without aero bars. Despite the fact that they don't seem to understand that for USCF events a "road bike" means a bike that isn't mountain bike or a recumbent, they have all somewhere heard about the much more stringent UCI bicycle specifications and are now totally confused.

So I'm still waiting for the info I need to finalize the LCCS standings, which is damned frustrating, and when I talked with Robin yesterday he informed me that he had not yet received the USCF event permit for Saturday's race, so I'm about to call the USCF to find out which crack it, and our $100 check, fell through.

I wrote up a race report for The Racing Post on the recent Rouge-Roubaix race and sent it along to the editor. I almost never actually see the publication, which is based in Texas. I presume some of the New Orleans shops must get copies, but since they went to a new format last Fall they haven't figured out how to put copies on their website. I think I'll write Christian and tell him he needs to at least put up a list of shops that get paper copies, though I'm sure he'll just suggest that I send him the $15 subscription fee instead! Anyway, here's a teaser:

"I hear a crunching sound to my left as Frank Moak looks down at his derailleur which has exploded and calmly says “I’m done.” Three riders lose traction and are off their bikes running up the hill. I’m over on the right in the tire track stuck behind a couple of riders who I’m afraid are going to lose it at any moment. A group of four or five riders shoots past up the hill on my left but there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’m in my lowest gear and all over the bike, riding very ugly as I try to keep enough weight on the rear wheel to keep moving. I see a photographer up near the top of the climb documenting the agony. I latch onto the back of a little group of six or seven riders as I come over the top and this group is definitely not throwing in the towel. I am having serious trouble now on the climbs and almost lose it in the loose gravel."

A Day Off

Yesterday afternoon The Wife called to say her flight from Austin had gotten screwed up royally and she would not be arriving until around 11 p.m. Apparently the person who had made her online reservation had selected the wrong month for the departure date (i.e. the 13th of April rather than March), which explains how they got such a low fare!! The result was that she had to rent a car and drive from Austin to Phoenix to catch the only flight back with an available seat and basically trash the return trip ticket and buy a new one-way ticket. As they say, "haste makes waste." Anyway, the flight was further delayed, so by the time I picked her up from the airport and got home it was nearly midnight and my lack of sleep had really started catching up with me.

When the alarm went off this morning, it didn't take me too long to decide it was time for an extra hour of sleep and a day off the bike. I'm hoping the rain that is expected tonight will be over by the time I go out to ride tomorrow morning, but I probably jinxed myself by taking a day off.

I've about got the LCCS points rankings finished, except that I am still waiting for some critical USCF license information from the Rouge-Roubaix promoter. Our 2-man Time Trial is this weekend and I want to have all of the rankings out well before that. Of course, the 2-man TT is kind of wierd and there is some uncertainty about what to do with mixed-category teams. If there's a team with one Cat. 5 and one Cat. 4, it is clear that they race in the Cat. 4 race, but when it comes to awarding LCCS poins, it doesn't seem right to give the Cat. 5 points toward his Cat. 5 ranking (after all, he had help from a Cat. 4 rider) and it doesn't seem right to give the Cat. 5 points in the Cat. 4 ranking (since he's not a Cat. 4), but there are those who want to do that because they are after the team points. I think we created a monster when we started doing the team points rankings. Anyway, IMHO, mixed-category teams should not qualify for points at all. The Cat. 4 LCCS ranking isn't a Cat. 4,5 ranking, it's a Cat. 4 ranking.

I'm having trouble with laptops at home lately and am rather concerned about using either of them for the 2-man TT results. There's another laptop here at work that I can probably use if it isn't travelling this weekend, but I will have to install a printer driver for my printer at least.

Springtime Weekend

I was up early on Saturday and on the road to Auburn by 6:30 a.m. I had borrowed my mom's Saturn which is only about six months old and was looking forward to a relaxing drive. You can imagine my surprise when I hit the cruise control button about ten miles out and nothing happened. It was dead. Nonfunctional. Broken. I stopped at a gas station to see if perhaps it was something simple - a loose electrical connector or vacuum line, but there was nothing obvious, so I spent the next 5.5 hrs monitoring the speedometer. At least the weather was great and the traffic was thin. The meet went OK, but the Iowa team is really battered this year. There were only nine girls in the lineup out of 13 team members. The rest are injured. The Daughter, in fact, is really too injured to be competing on her ankle, but the team is too thin to spare her right now. I hung around after the meet and went to dinner with the team at the home of the Auburn coach and then The Daughter and I went out for a cup of coffee near campus.

I headed out around 9:30 p.m. and arrived back home around 3 a.m., so I got about three hours of sleep before heading out to the lakefront to meet the Giro ride. When I hit the lakefront I was greeted by a sad sight. A pickup truck whose driver was probably drunk and showing off by driving on the slope of the levee had flipped over on it's side into the parking lot. Apparently one girl was killed.

It was windy this morning but that didn't stop a large group from showing up in the warm weather. On the way out, we cross a drawbridge with a metal grating at the top. It was a little bit wet from the morning dew, so most of the group stopped to walk across - there have been some bad crashes on that thing in the past. Well, a few guys at the front didn't stop and worse yet they didn't wait for the rest of the group to catch up. The rest of us waited for everyone to regroup and by the time we started to chase the lead group was a little speck about a minute and a half up the road. The chase stayed pretty disorganized most of the way out. Every time the pace would get up to 28 or so the chain would break about six riders back and everything would slow down until the stronger guys went back up to the front. Three steps forward; one step back. We did make up some ground, but never caught the lead group that contained Jay, Brett and Noel amoung others. The return trip stayed pretty fast too. I rode back from the lakefront nice and slow!

It is suddently Springtime here in New Orleans! All of the Azaleas and Camelias in my front yard are in full bloom, the temperature is 74F, and there is a nice breeze blowing the oak leaves around. The Live Oaks like the one in front of my house and all along my street are beginning to flower, and when that happens in the Spring the trees drop all of their old Winter leaves. It is practically raining oak leaves today. I swear they drop more leaves in the Spring than in the Fall.

Anyway, I am way overdue for a nap!

Long Week

It's been a long week, but I just e-mailed off the document that's had me busy the last couple of days and it's definitely time to throttle down. The office has been empty except for me for the last half-hour. Everyone bailed out early today.

The morning ride was surprisingly windy and it made me work a little harder than I was expecting to on a Friday, which is probably a good thing. Kenny showed up when we were on the way back. I suppose he's en route to Austin right now for the Primavera race. Now there's one race that I've always wanted to do but never quite got around to it. La Primavera is about the same age as our Tour de Louisiane, and I remember teammates going over there to race back in the early 70s. The Tour de La is actually the oldest continuous stage race in the country, which makes both races de facto classics, I guess.

I'm looking forward to a nice quiet drive up to Auburn tomorrow morning. I'm one of those people who just likes to drive, especially on the highway. I never seem to get tired of it. Too bad I never got the chance to take many cross-country road trips like my family used to do when I was a kid.

Who knows, maybe I'll end up being one of those KOA motor home people in my old age!

Once I get the promoter and Chief Ref. from last weekend's race to clear up some USCF number confusion, I'll finally be able to get to work on the LCCS points standings, but it's looking like it may not be until Monday that I can do it. We shall see.

Crunch Time

Things at both work and play seem to be stacking up like a logjam this week and it is looking like it will be a long night at work tonight putting together a long capabilities statement for a grant collaboration that was supposed to have been done already by someone else. When I finally got a copy of what that person had done, I just shook my head. The best part is that, like many Mac users, this person decides to put headings in a font called "Apple Chancery." Brilliant choice for a collaborative document. The other 97% of computer users will therefore see some default Courier type of font. On top of that there's this ongoing issue with an inter-university collaboration that is causing some grief due to extraordinarily poor communication and it now has to be fixed after the award has been made, so there will be rebudgeting issues and retroactive payroll issues and a healthy dose of mistrust all around.

It was much cooler this morning - in the 40s - and although there was initially a smallish group for the levee ride, it eventually swelled to a reasonable size, which was good because it was pretty windy. I wasn't able to do the whole long ride today because of work, but as it turned out nobody else really wanted to ride the whole distance either so the group fired the retro rockets at "the dip," which got me back home early enough. That was nice, because I had not been looking forward to turning back early and then having to deal with the wind all by my lonesone on the way back.

I got the complete Rouge-Roubaix results from Shane this morning and got them up on the website around lunchtime. Three people e-mailed or called right away about mistakes in the results, but unless it's just a spelling type of error I'll have to refer them to the event's Chief Referee so he can investigate. Next, I have to go through all of the results and look up a bunch of USCF numbers that the promoter should have recorded and update the various spreadsheets that track the LCCS points, and then finally upload the results, along with a few modified web pages, to the LAMBRA webserver. I'll try and do that tomorrow, but this grant proposal will have to take priority for now, so we'll see how that goes.

Now I've got to go run over to the dentist to get my tiny little $700 crown glued onto what's left of one of my teeth. At least it won't be painful, except for the part where I have to listen to my lonely dentist try to engage me in conversation about football or something while various dental implements are hanging from my mouth.

Looks like I'll be making a solo drive up to Auburn AL on Saturday. It might turn out to be rather relaxing, assuming the old car cooperates. The meet is Saturday afternoon, so I might just stay around for dinner and then make the 5 hr drive back at night, stopping of course at every coffee machine along the way. I might at least be able to make the Sunday morning Giro ride that way, although if I'm too tired to drive I'll have to bunk in at whatever roadside motel I find.

Home Alone

Dropped The Wife off at the airport this morning at 5 a.m. to catch a flight to Tucson where she is working a meeting through the weekend. On the way back I dropped off about a thousand meeting flyers that we had spent a few hours working on (sticking on mailing labels and stamps) at the post office and still had plenty of time to iron a shirt before heading out to the training ride.

The 4:15 a.m. alarm sure had come fast, though. I guess I should have gone to bed earlier but I was fooling around with three laptops last night, none of which are quite fully functional. My usual workhorse Gateway has been sick lately and keeps freezing up. After some experimentation, I am beginning to suspect a device problem, specifically the modem or associated software, since it seems to occur only when I'm online. More research will be needed on that one, however. My usual backup laptop, an old Pentium 2 Dell that lacks a battery and functional charging system (after a co-worker spilled a cup of coffee onto the keyboard) and was rescued from the office a couple of years ago, suddenly stopped listening to the keyboard in mid-sentence a few days ago, so everything seems to work fine except that I can't type anything at all despite the fact that device manager doesn't indicate any problem with the keyboard. So after laptop number one locked up on me and laptop number two wouldn't let me type, I booted up laptop number three - The Daughter's old Pentium 2 Compaq from high school - which works OK except that it's very slow and you have to fiddle with the display sometimes to make it work (bad cable I guess) and the power cord connector on the computer end is bad and only works if you force the cord to bend in a specific direction, usually accomplished by wrapping it around the display a certain way and being careful not to move it. If there had been a fire at my house last night they would have found my charred remains tangled up in computer power cords and phone lines beside my bed. At any rate, I apparently have a very hard time accepting the demise of electronic devices. (Yeah, well OK, I know that probably extends to bike components and tires as well.)

So this morning's ride was cool enough for long tights but otherwise fairly nice, although the sun never managed to peek out from above the wall-to-wall cloud cover. Apparently the big surge in speed toward the end of yesterday's ride had been instigated by our visitor from Penn State and a couple of the guys were talking about that. Personally, I didn't have a problem with it at all since it was right at the end of the ride and it's always fun to kind of blow it all out at the end. I think Andy had brought us up to something like 34 mph before pulling off. Imagine that. A bike racer who likes to go fast. This is a surprise??

Anyway, all was good this morning until we were a few miles from the playground on the way back when I noticed my front tire going soft. I was in denial, though, and refused to look at it for a while until Clayton or Jeff said something about it. It was going down pretty slowly, though, so I made it to the playground before it bottomed out. Robin, whose Mercedes mini-van always seems to have a mini bike shop in the back, helped me change the flat and had even brought me a used tire with a nice slash in the sidewall because he knew I could sew in a boot and probably get another couple thousand miles out of it. As I rode home I noticed that the computer wasn't picking up speed any more. I guess the pickup got moved when I was fixing the flat.

Lots of action at work this week should keep me pretty busy. I was here 'till after 7 last night trying to sort a rather messy little inter-institutional grant collaboration controversy that could threaten some earmarks that we're working on for next year. The conference call about it this afternoon should be very interesting!

Pretty. Pretty Windy. Pretty Damned Windy!

A cool front blasted through yesterday afternoon dumping tons of water on us but leaving in its wake beautiful blue skies, moderate temps and a brutal North wind. The old legs weren't complaining very much as I rode out to meet the group for the long Tuesday ride. The turnout was a little lower than usual with maybe a dozen riders. The going was tough, especially on the way out with a strong and gusty crosswind much of the way. Rob was doing his own thing today, shooting off the front periodically to hammer out some longish intervals, then retreating to the safety of the wobbly back.

A visiting rider, Andy Munas from the Penn State cycling team was with us today on a bike that Robin loaned him for the duration. Penn State has one of the older and more established cycling teams and Andy turned out to be a quite capable rider. Toward the end of the ride things ramped up really fast for a few miles, taking the speed up to the low 30s and predictibly shattering the paceline about a mile before Jefferson Playground. At one point Rob pulls off at about 30 mph and gets a little irritated that Andy doesn't come around to take his pull. The problem was that the shifter on Andy's bike was sticky, as Robin had noticed yesterday in fact, and for a while he couldn't get it to downshift so he was spinning his ass off in something like a 53 x 17. Andy tried to explain but Rob had his earphones in and didn't hear a thing I guess and rode off into the sunrise. On the way home I took Andy for a little tour through Tulane campus since it'd be a shame to be in college and visit a city without checking out the local campus.

I'm hoping to get the complete results from Rouge-Roubaix from Shane some time today so I can work on getting the LCCS points updated. This weekend is up in the air for me since I'm supposed to be going up to Auburn for one of The Daughter's gymnastics meets and I haven't worked out exactly when I will have to leave. I'm sure I'll be able to get in a ride in the morning, but it will probably have to be earlier and shorter than the Giro.

I wonder if there's a group ride in Auburn on Sunday morning??

A Few Rouge Pics

Just to hold us over until we get some of the good ones. These were taken mostly by Kevin whenever he had a chance in-between feeding teammates. I took the ones at the hotel where the food was.

http://www.gnofn.org/~nobc//2005/images/rouge_rjl/rouge_rjl.html

I went out for a nice easy ride on the levee this morning with Joe and Robin. Robin was trying out a loaner bike he put together and was about to drop off to the guy from Penn State who is in town for a few days. I hope he rushed out and got in a nice ride this morning because the bad weather moved in here around 2:30 and it looks like lots of rain for a while. My legs are a bit sore, but they've been worse, so I think all will be well in a couple of days. My shoulders and upper back sure got a workout from my honking up the hills and doing all the body english needed to stay upright in the gravel yesterday. I uploaded the 20k TT results from a couple of weeks ago to the USCF Results and Rankings system. As usual, there were about ten mismatches between names and uscf numbers. I sure wish people would write legibly on their entry forms. It would save a whole lot of time. When I submit results, the system returns errors for all of the incorrect names and license numbers, so then I have to go look them up in the database and make the corrections before it will accept the file. BTW, the USAC has a new flash intro page on their website, which is a royal pain in the ass since clicking the "skip intro" link doesn't seem to work until it's loaded most of the page. Just for the record, I HATE flash intro pages on websites. I didn't go to the USCF website for entertainment. I went for information. So get the blasted flash stuff the hell out of my way, please.

Rouge Survivor

This year's Rouge-Roubaix lived up to it's reputation. The front half of the A race missed a turn and added a couple of bonus miles to their 100 mile race. Meanwhile, in the B race, one rider was broadsided by a deer (or a doe?) and knocked clear across the road. He got up out of the ditch and finished the race. Rob K. ran into a rider who had crashed by dropping his wheel into a crack in an old wooden bridge, breaking off his fork in the process and ending up down in the roadside ditch like Jan Ullrich. Frank Moak, after flatting in the A race and chasing back with the help of a couple of teammates, got all the way to the last dirt section when his rear derailleur exploded, getting tangled in his rear wheel and ripping off the derailleur hanger.

We started with about 65 riders in the A race and within a couple of miles of the start we were already going 29 mph. Things were still together when we hit the first dirt section at mile 25. The pace started out fairly reasonable- around 22 mph - but gradually increased. At mile 30 we were still in the gravel and I looked down at my computer which was reading 30 mph. It was definitely the fastest I've ever gone on dirt! The pace stayed brisk and when we hit the second gravel section around mile 65 I was near the front. The steep mile long climb at the start of this section split the pack big-time, and after a very hard but very disorganized chase a few of us who had lost a bit of ground finally regained contact with the front group which was itself chasing a solo rider who had escaped in the dirt.

The front group was down to about 16 riders by the time we hit the final and most severe dirt section at around mile 80. This section starts with a nearly impossible climb. A number of riders were quickly off their bikes. I was kind of stuck behind a couple of riders on the right side of the road who were climbing a bit slower than I would have liked. A string of five or six riders when flying up the climb on my left while I struggled to stay upright in the loose gravel at a speed of maybe 5 mph. My quads were screaming by the time I lumbered over the top but I was able to hang onto a small group of riders for most of the rest of this section, nearly getting dropped a couple of times in the hills. Finally, I hit the asphalt after letting a dangerous gap open between me and a group of four ahead. Chris was with me and helped a lot as we worked to close the gap. Our group of six would stay together for most of the remaining 10 or 12 miles, coming apart only in the last mile or so as a few of the stronger riders attacked.

I was pretty well toasted by the end, but a 12th place finish in this race is pretty satisfying for an old guy like me. I think I went through the equivalent of about 10 gel packs of Hammer Gel, but only about two bottles of water. The rest of the team did pretty well - I think everyone finished. My legs will be hurting tomorrow for sure and I think that an easy day or two is definitely in order!

Ridin' da Rouge

Heading out momentarily with Branden to scenic St. Francisville, a couple of hours up the river from New Orleans. Rouge-Roubaix starts at 8 a.m. and the weather is looking real nice. Nice weather could be a problem for some of us, though, because if it means that everyone wants to go hard and fast from the start, things will surely disintegrate early, making the last 25 miles even harder. Anyway, I'm all stocked up on HammerGel (the Orange flavor is my favorite), and should be OK with my two water bottles (one big, one regular) for most of the ride. After that it will be either dehydration or handups from kind strangers! As they say in AIM land,
g2g

On the Rooftop

It was kind of an odd morning today. First, I got up thinking it was Thursday instead of Friday, and by the time my brain got around to updating its calendar I was already dressed. Since we ride 25 minutes earlier on Thursdays, I had some time to kill and so the trash got put out early and the dog got fed early. When I first opened the door I was surprised to find that it was really quite foggy. Wasn't expecting that. If it's foggy at my house, you can bet it'll be twice as thick at the river, and it was, but at least the wind was negligible (which explains the fog, BTW). There were seven or eight of us this morning and we did a real easy ride, stopping once to fix a flat (mine) and another time to fix a sticky derailleur. Naturally I had to listen to people make fun of all the patches in my inner tube, but seriously, it is just plain wasteful not to patch and reuse those things as long as you can. I mean, I wouldn't generally use an old patched tube for racing (although I have been known to do so), but for training wheels used on the levee, why not?

I'm starting to think about Rouge-Roubaix and wondering what surprises it will hold for me this year. It looks like we will have a few riders racing it this year, but not as many as I'd like to see. For most riders like me, the first goal for this race is not to crash. The second goal is not to flat (very sketchy wheel support and only for the main group). The third goal is not to get dropped before the last dirt section. The Fourth goal is not to get lost, which can easily happen on this course if you get dropped, and the final, often unattainable goal, it to finish with one of the first two or three groups. Goal 1 is largely in the hands of fate, and Goal 2 is too, for that matter. Goal 3 will require an adequate stash of HammerGels and Powerbars to avoid bonking and the common sense to use them wisely. Goal 4 requires having a map in your pocket just in case and not being too bonked to read it, and Goal 5 requires, well, an Act of God and perhaps the lighting of a more than a few candles!

So after a morning training ride during which the fog hardly ever lifted, leaving me with wet shoes, useless glasses and water dripping from my helmet, it's now a rather nice day down here at the curious bend in the river that I call home. The photo above is the view from my rooftop office on Canal Street, looking down toward the French Quarter, which is why you don't see any of the big buildings of the business district (they're all well out of the photo to the right.). The whole French Quarter has very strong restrictions on building heights and such since it's an historic district. In the very lower right corner you can see the traffic on Canal Street, where luckily they never quite got around to digging the canal that was originally planned. If you look closely at the larger version of the image, you can just make out the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral to the left near the river. Some years ago we had a criterium through the French Quarter and raced straight across the front of the cathedral on the flagstone. It was a blast! Maybe some day somebody will manage to put together another crit there. This particular bend in the river is called Algiers Point and we're looking kind of downriver, which in this case happens to be more or less to the East. Indeed, people often joke about being able to sit on the levee at the French Quarter and watch the sun rise over the West bank!

Nearly Normal

It was cold and raining most of the night, continuing into the morning, so any thoughts of getting out on the road were completely washed away well before sunrise. It's always a little bit strange for me when I miss my morning training ride - even stranger when The Wife gets picked up for an early meeting and I have the car too. It means that I can pretend to be nearly normal, which means wearing nicer clothes, driving to work with one of those bug insulated cups of coffee, and not arriving with windblown hair that looks like it's seen better days. It's still cloudy and misty around here but if the forecast holds true it will gradually clear and give us a few days of fine weather. Guess I should go register for Rouge-Roubaix.

P O W E R !!

Not me, my bike computer. I finally got a replacement CR 2032 for the old ErgoBrain which immediately restored all neurological function, leaving only a mild case of amnesia - it forgot what time it was, but remembered all of the other settings. I guess this is about the fourth battery it's consumed. Wish I could get replacement parts for the deteriorating carbon-based unit in my head!

The temp was actually down in the upper 40s this morning and we had a nice steady paceline ride this morning up on the levee. On the way back we resorted to a circular (aka double) paceline so we could deal with the relentless crosswind. A good but uneventful training ride.

There are some photos from the races in Texas last weekend that the Herring guys, decked out in their spiffy new jerseys, raced in. In fact one is the TxBRA Featured Photo. There are a bunch more at:

Team Bicycles Inc.

Pictures by Jimmy

There was a story on wwl-tv.com about the triathlete who crashed on the levee last weekend when a dog chased her down. Broken teeth, bitten-through tongue, cut lip, facial lacerations, broken wrist, and broken bike. Probably the same stray dog that took Joe F. down last week in the same place. The SPCA is now out on the hunt. I don't know exactly what it is, but those triathletes sure seem to crash badly. I guess if you're going fast on aero bars on a bike that has most of the weight on the front wheel it's hard to go down gracefully.

It was kind of hectic morning after I got back from riding. I had promised I'd look over The Daughter's Genetics Lab Report first thing, so that took a little while. Just as I hit the "Send" button on that, Frank called with a problem setting up the Active.com listing for the upcoming Mississippi Gran Prix. While I was talking to him I got a couple of call-waiting beeps that turned out to be an "emergency" up at the congressional meetings going on in D.C. today. Sharon and the President (of Tulane) had a meeting in five minutes and wanted a listing of the top five NSF grants, so I fired up the laptop again and got it from the NSF database so I could e-mail it to her handheld. Took about seven minutes though.

Damn, I'm good.

Looks like I'll have to commit to Rouge-Roubaix soon. I'll have to see if I can get a ride up there so I don't have to leave The Wife stranded all day.

One of Those Days

Man, for some reason I was just not feeling very strong today. Once the morning group coalesced around Jefferson Playground, Jeff and Ronnie shot past the group on their TT bikes with Ronnie on the front. I started to chase, kinda, but they were flying and when I looked back for help there was just air, so I eased up until the group, which had been caught off-guard, caught up. At first there wasn't a real concerted chase, but after a short while a gap opened and it was just Rob and me. That's when I knew I was in for a hard ride. I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I hate anything that even looks like I'm being dropped, but I wasn't feeling too hot this morning at all. So Rob was doing a lot of the work and I was just pulling through to give him a break; trying not to let the pace slow down too much, which wasn't so easy since my computer was running so low on electrons that the LCD was just a grey blank rectangle. Even so, we were not making up much ground on the aero duo that was a good 40 seconds ahead of us. It wasn't until we were well out of Jefferson Parish that they seemed to ease up a bit and we finally caught. Rob said later that he was pretty impressed with Ronnie's speed on the TT bike. Personally, I was pretty impressed with Rob's speed on the road bike. So I guess people are starting to think seriously about our upcoming 2-person Time Trial.

Although it seemed like there was little wind on the way out this morning, by the time we were half-way back it had picked up considerably, and naturally it was in our faces. The group stayed mostly together, although there were usually just a handful of guys rotating at the front with the rest content to hang on. I would take a few pulls in the rotation and then drop back for a rest every now and then. When the pace would get too fast, the guys in the recovery line would just kind of stay there so eventually the last guy would take his pull and nobody would come through for a while while the riders reshuffled themselves into a revised paceline. Donald seemed to be kind of keeping an eye on the front and whenever it was in danger of splitting he would pull things back together. Eventually I started feeling better, but I just don't know why all cylinders didn't seem to be firing this morning. I think three people asked me if I was doing Rouge-Roubaix this morning. I guess the answer is still "probably." If you want to find the Rouge-Roubaix website, just Google on "stabbing yourself in the forehead with a fork." It's usually the first hit! One of my writeups on the race is on the Baton Rouge Cycling website.

Sounds like fun, huh?

Sweet Day!

It's pretty nice down here today! Temperature around 61F, breezy, dry and clear. It wasn't quite so nice early this morning before the cool brisk North wind blew the last of the grey clouds away. Joe F. and I did what is becoming a pretty routine Monday morning ride where I pull at a steady but easy pace on the way out, and then we ride back mostly side-by-side talking. We ran into Luke and Richard on the way back and they turned around and rode in with us. We were all a little bit surprised not to see more riders out this morning because Sunday had been so inhospitable riding-wise.

The bike computer is begging for a new battery and this morning I really couldn't read it at all. It was kind of wierd riding without the speedometer and trying to keep an even pace. Not that it was all that hard to do, it's just that I kept looking down to check my speed and coming up blank. Afterwards, when I took it off and brought it upstairs so I could write down the battery type, the display was much darker. So what's that about?? Anyway, I guess I'll probably go get a new battery anyway.

I see that Tim Reagan (Herring Gas) was 36th at Pace Bend, so I guess the Herring boys had a hard race while the Mercy guys got their guy across the line first. Must have been one tough race. Jason Sager has a few comments about it on his blog.

Beth (from D.C.) sent a nice thank-you e-mail when she returned home yesterday. I think stories of Robin's legendary tire-fixing services have now expanded to include the greater D.C. area! Right now, there's a collegiate rider coming in from Penn State who we're trying to fix up with a bike. Of course, he's coming in for Spring Break, so it will be interesting to see if he is able to get to any of the early morning rides after spending the typical collegiate night in the French Quarter. I should probably offer to give him a wake-up call.

Marathon Day

Today was the Mardi Gras Marathon here in New Orleans. I went out in the cold early morning drizzle to meet Robin at the Superdome, where the race begins. Robin organizes the "lead bicycle" contingent for this race, and a number of us help out each year. It's been quite a few years since I did this, but I clearly remembered how cold you can get riding for three hours at 10 mph, especially when wet, so I dressed as if I were heading for a ride in 35F weather rather than the 50+ weather we actually had. It was a good decision.

The race broke up quickly with a 3-person group that included only one full-marathon runner opening a pretty big gap. The other two were half-marathon runners, as was the next rider who I ended up leading. Once I got to the half-marathon finish, I waited around for literally minutes until the second full-marathoner appeared. I helped Brian lead that guy the rest of the race. It was easy work until we got to the park where the course doubled-back on itself and we really had to work to make sure this guy didn't get run into by stray joggers or other racers going in the opposite direction.

We were really lucky with the weather. It had been storming most of the night but by the time the race started the rain had stopped, so at least I didn't have to wear my non-breathable rain jacket very long. It was rather amaing to be riding back home nearly three hours after the start and seeing runners (or walkers to be more accurate) wearing full marathon numbers who still hadn't gotten to the half-marathon point. They would be out there for maybe six hours today.

I don't know if I can count 30 miles at an average speed of about 10 mph as training, though!

The Herring Gas riders had a pretty good day in Texas yesterday at Walburg with Troy taking 4th and Frank 6th in the Pro,1,2, race. I think they may be doing the Pace Bend RR today in Austin.

The Iowa GymHawks had a good meet last night in Milwaukee, and even though they didn't quite win the meet, they had their highest team score so far this year and were pretty stoked about it.

Went Long

On the way to the Giro ride this morning I came across a pickup truck stopped diagonally across the road with a big chunk of concrete lamp post under it. The airbag had deployed and the front end was totalled - coolant spilled out onto the street. There was nobody around, so I checked to see if there was anyone inside, but as I expected the drunken driver who had failed to negotiate the little curve on the otherwise straight street had taken off. Better to be cited for leaving the scene than for DWI, I guess.

There was a big group for the Giro, but the pace stayed fairly reasonable. As it turned out, a lot of riders were planning on doing a longer ride out to Slidell and back. Charlie asked me if I was "going long," and my reply was "got any food?" He said he had some cash, so I figured I go ahead and do the long ride which would give me a 93 mile day. After we passed the usual turnaround there were about 15 riders who continued on toward Slidell. Unfortunately only a handful knew how to deal with the crosswind. I tried with limited success to get a second eschelon going, since there wasn't room for everybody to get a draft without blocking the whole road.

After a remarkably tasty Little Debbie marshmellow filled cake thing that Charlie got me, we headed back. I was already getting cold and rolled off the front a little bit trying to keep warm. Bob came up to me and started taking long and slightly faster pulls so we rode together until we got to the Fort Pike bridge over the Rigoletts. We slowed down and waited for the pack to catch, and I was surprised when Rob and someone else came blasting past by themselves. I looked back and saw the pack and figured we'd all come together in a minute, but as it turned out the pack had just split too. So I ended up in a small group of four chasing a lead group of four of five. I'm not really sure because I never saw them again! We chased pretty hard for seven or eight miles, but every time we would start to close the gap our group would start to come apart and we'd need to slow down. After we got off of Chef Highway we waited up for the rest of the group and rode in at a pretty decent pace. So my legs are a little sore and I noticed that my odometer passed 40,000 miles at some point over the last week while I wasn't looking.

I think tomorrow I'll help Robin with the Mardi Gras Marathon. The club always provides most of the lead bicycle riders for the full and half marathon groups and besides, the forecast for tomorrow looks pretty lousy. I figure if I'm going to be riding in the rain at 10 mph, I can dress pretty warmly.

Dropped my sister and her husband off at the Port of New Orleans cruise terminal today. We'll be taking care of their dogs for a few days while my mom takes care of their kids.

Easy Friday

A cold front moved through overnight and it was cool and windy this morning. I had spent the night dogsitting at The Mom's place, and was kind of wishing I had thought to bring my tights this morning. Robin showed up on his track bike and towed us most of the way out and back today as I lounged in his draft looking at the scenery. We spotted a nice red-shouldered (or maybe red-tailed) hawk this morning; probably the same one I saw a couple of days ago in about the same spot. It was a nice easy and uneventful ride along the levee with only the blustery North wind to contend with. The Daughter heads off to University of Minnesota today for a meet Saturday night. For some reason their "inside stuff" website that I handle has been inaccessible for the last day or two, so I sent an e-mail out to my only contact there to see if I can get some info on that.

One of the tri guys e-mailed me yesterday night asking if it was legal to ride a Softride in the upcoming 2-person time trial. There is always a little bit of confusion about what bikes are legal since the UCI's rules and the USCF's rules don't currently match and riders often don't really understand the distiction between the two organizations. Although the UCI has extremely strict technical guidelines as to what constitutes a legal bike for road racing purposes, the USCF's requirements are much more flexible. The USCF is gradually moving toward bring their rules into agreement with the UCI rules by 2007, though. One sign of that is the recent rule change that requires bikes used for olympic or other international qualifying races to meet the UCI guidelines. Of course, any USPro or Pro,1,2 race that is sanctioned by UCI rather than the USCF would require UCI-legal bikes. For now, though, bikes like the Softride that don't have the traditional "double diamond" design (but are still within the USCF dimensions) are perfectly legal in regular USCF races, and it may be that they will always be legal in those kinds of races. Softride is definitely not happy about the UCI rules and has a page on its website explaining the rules and soliciting its customers to complain to the UCI.

What the USCF says now is pretty simple:

"Dimensions. Bicycles may be no more than 2 meters long and 75 cm wide . . ." and "Bicycles commonly known as recumbent may not be raced in USCF races unless there is a separate race for this category of bicycle, and then may be used only in that category. "

The UCI, on the other hand, has a long technical section on bicycle specifications that includes:

"the frame of the bicycle shall be of a traditional pattern, i.e. built around a main triangle. It shall be constructed of straight or tapered tubular elements (which may be round, oval, flattened, teardrop shaped or otherwise in cross-section) such that the form of each element encloses a straight line. The elements of the frame shall be laid out such that the joining points shall follow the following pattern: the top tube (1) connects the top of the head tube (2) to the top of the seat tube (4); the seat tube (from which the seat post shall extend) shall connect to the bottom bracket shell; the down tube (3) shall connect the bottom bracket shell to the bottom of the head tube. The rear triangles shall be formed by the chain stays (6), the seat stays (5) and the seat tube (4) with the seat stays anchored to the seat tube at points falling within the limits laid down for the slope of the top tube."

Not Raining

The Daughter's AIM Away Message today: "If you see me...pass me a cup of strong ass coffee, back away slowly and you might survive the encounter!"

The Weather Gods smiled on us this morning and although it was cloudy and the road was a bit wet, it was NOT RAINING! We had a good group of about a dozen for the Thursday long ride this morning, and I was packing two freshly patched tires and riding on another, hoping to avoid a repeat of yesterday's adventure.

As we headed out today, I noticed Howard and Jeff (I think that was Jeff?) were repeatedly drifting off the front. Eventually, I saw Eddie C pull his TT bike out of the line and start motoring up to them, so I figured I'd get on that train. Like the other day, Eddie lit the afterburners and I had to make a pretty hard effort in a way too big gear to finally catch his draft. Howard and Jeff latched on as we went by with Eddie on the front in full Time Trial mode. I heard Jeff and Howard talking at some point but didn't catch what they were saying, but next thing I knew it was just Eddie and me. Turned out Jeff was getting a flat and I guess Howard dropped back to help. I hung onto Eddie's wheel and pretended I was motorpacing for the next five miles or so until he had gotten in his workout and sat up. The thought of coming around him and actually taking a pull never really crossed my mind since we were already going so fast. We rode the rest of the way to the turnaround pretty easy, and since nobody caught us it finally dawned on me that somebody must have flatted behind us.

I was glad to see that Beth from D.C. was with the group when we all finally got back together for what eventually became a somewhat disorganized paceline ride back. The bike is a real mess after the last few days of riding on wet roads covered with worms, horse manure, mud and other debris, but the forecast is still decidedly on the wet side for a while and I guess I'll just hold off on the cleaning duties, except perhaps the chain, until it improves.

When I got back home I grabbed a can of black spray paint and painted over the black part of the fire hydrant outside the house where someone had scrawled some white graffiti. At least it wasn't the garage door this time! Ahh, life in the big city. We are constantly picking up other people's trash that they throw out the car windows; everything from fast-food containers to empty vodka bottles.

Beth was asking about bike shops in town, so I gave her the run-down on the local favorites. Since she has a rental car that she is exchanging for another rental car today, she said she would probably stop by GNO cyclery. I often recommend GNO to folks from out of town because it is probably most resembles the typical larger suburban type bike shop a lot of people are used to, but since Beth is familiar with the inner-city shops in D.C., I'm sure she would have been just as comfortable an Todd's shop or Bayou or even Bicycle Michael's. I think GNO just seemed to her to be the easiest for her to find since she had already ridden down St. Charles and could picture where it was. I wonder if the bike shop folks ever know about the people that I send to their shops? Probably not, I guess.

Strike Three

Woke up a bit early this morning and was rather surprised not to hear it raining outside. After searching for the TV remote, which had fallen underneath the bed, I finally checked the weather radar. No doubt I'd be getting wet, but it wasn't cold and the heavy stuff wasn't likely to get here for a few hours so I put on an extra jersey and light shoe covers to keep my shoes from getting too dirty and headed out. As has been the case almost every morning lately, there was enough fog near the river to make me want to keep my flashing headlight on for most of the ride. Since I was early, I rode through the Carrollton neighborhood and got up on the levee bike path around the Corps of Engineers operation. Just before I got there I saw a rider go by, so naturally I had to chase. It was a woman in an unfamiliar jersey, and I was figuring it was probably Beth M. from D.C. who had e-mailed me recently about where to ride while she was in town for a Physical Therapy conference. She looked over at me and said she had been in touch with somebody named Randy and did I know him? Small world -- especially at 6:30 a.m. Anyway, we were still a few minutes early, so we rode out to the Jefferson Playground, and turned around there, riding back to meet the group at the "pump hill." I was surprised how many guys were there this morning because we were definitely going to get wet.

Beth turned back just past the Country Club when the raindrops started falling, but most of the group continued on in a light off-and-on drizzle, riding just a bit faster than usual for a Wednesday ride. On the way back I could feel my rear tire going soft and finally had to stop and fix it while everyone waited.

Strike One.

I checked the casing and pulled a couple of pieces of rock out, and ran my finger along the inside pulling out another piece of glass or rock before sticking in one of my two spare tubes. If you train on worn-out tires like I do, you quickly learn to always carry two spares! Well, I only made it a mile or two before that one went soft, so I told the rest to go ahead, not wanting them to have to wait around in the drizzle again and get cold. Richard H. stuck around with me while I changed flat No. 2, and Joe F. turned around at the Playground and rode back with us too.

Strike 2.

Now I was wishing I hadn't left my cellphone at home, because I was now out of tubes and might want to make a call to request emergency extraction. Two flats in a row like that could mean only one thing. There was still something stuck in the tire, and I probably wasn't going to find it in the rain without a magnifying glass or somebody with much younger eyes!

So it was now the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes, and a tube with four patches on it was at bat.

I almost made it home! When I made the turn off of Oak St. onto Carrollton, I could feel my rear tire squirm around a bit like they do when they are almost flat, but seeing as how I was now out of spare tires and the patch kit wasn't going to be very useful with everything soaking wet, I switched over to a smoother street, stood up to take the weight off of the rear wheel, and hoped for the best.

Strike Three.

Didn't make it very far before it bottomed out, but I kept riding, basically on the rim, with the wet tire and tube squirming around underneath me. It was kind of like riding the gravel sections of the Rouge-Roubaix course. By the time I got to Neron Place, the tire bead had come out of the rim and so the tire was catching on the brake, so I was reduced to walking the last four or five blocks home. Happily, it wasn't cold enough to make it too uncomfortable, though.

On the plus side, we have a staff meeting today which means .... Free Lunch!! Whoo Hooo! I went for broke and ordered a Muffaletta!

Looks like I'll be patching tubes tonight.