Six Slow Gaps

The Tulane Cycling group, shortly before heading down to the 7:30 am start

Slower isn't really easier at Six Gap. Saturday morning we loaded up a couple of Tulane's rental minivans with eight riders and hit the road promptly at 8:00 am. It wasn't quite early enough, as it turned out. The weather forecast for my 12th annual flogging was calling for a nice dry weekend with Sunday morning temperatures starting around 65F but rising to around 90F. It was going to be a hot one. Before I left, I put two big bottles on the bike, one for plain water and the other for water with whatever electrolyte tablet I had handy, which turned out to be Nuun. Years ago I would have been planning to do the whole ride with whatever I had on the bike, skipping the rest stops in order to make up for time lost climbing like a turtle. This year, my plan was different. I was determined to stop at a few rest stops to down some Coke and Gatorade and refill my bottles. I'm pretty terrible at hydration and will typically ride myself right in dehydration territory without even realizing it. Anyway, I wasn't going to worry about my time this year, and was going to take a few minutes at the tops of the big climbs to catch my breath before plunging down the other side. I would, however, still be climbing like a turtle.

This year I went up with Gavin, Julia, Frank (Houting), Paola, Ben, Julie, and Kaitlyn. The first three would be doing 6 Gap and the other three would be doing 3 Gap. I knew that Gavin was planning on crushing it, but didn't know about the others. I was just hoping to finish quickly enough that I didn't delay our departure time back to New Orleans. Last year we'd left around 8 am and arrived literally as they were closing Saturday evening registration at 6 pm (eastern time), so I wasn't really holding out a lot of hope that we'd make it there in time to pick up packets on Saturday. The Tulane minivans will beep at you if you go more than 75 mph, so trying to shave off a few minutes by driving faster wasn't really an option. Anyway, the drive went fairly smoothly, but at one point everything came to a halt on the Interstate and we lost probably fifteen minutes. Together with a stop for lunch, and 5 pm traffic through Atlanta, we were looking at a 6:15 ETA. The first minivan was ahead of us by about ten minutes, but when they arrived at around 6:05 they were told they'd have to wait until Sunday morning to pick up packets. I'd never picked up packets the morning of the ride, so I didn't really know what to expect. We made a reservation at Pueblo's Mexican Cuisine, where we traditionally have dinner, and then wandered around town a bit until our table was ready. Dinner was nice and then we headed for the Super8 motel, the same one we'd stayed at the year before. When we walked in I recognized the guy behind the counter who'd given us all kinds of trouble the year before with the credit card situation. Tulane's club sports folks make the reservations, give them their credit card number, and send them a credit card authorization form. You'd think that would suffice, but no. Once again, this guy refused to use the credit card that the rooms had been reserved with. I ended up using my Tulane corporate card, which I'm sure is going to cause all sorts of problems once the charge hits my account and I need to move it to the club sports account.

Kaitlyn and Julia, with Haoting in the background
waiting for the start

So Sunday morning we got up around 5 am, had a quick breakfast at the nearby McDonalds, and got to the high school in Dahlonega around 6:15. Packet pickup was actually very well organized, so the only problems were Paola, whose packet they couldn't find, and Ben who was taking Seth's place. Even so, that was all handled pretty quickly. I rushed back to the cars to unload bikes and get my act together. Time goes by really quickly before something like this. We took a quick group photo, and I rushed through the rest of my preparations - Garmin, HRM, two bottles of HammerGel, electrolyte in one water bottle, shoes, phone, gloves, glasses - and rushed down toward the start a little late. We ended up standing on the sidewalk with about a hundred riders in front of us. Then I saw Gavin walking toward us and told him he needed to go to the front, in front of the rope, because he'd been under 6 hours the year before. I knew that if he wanted to be with the front group, starting where we were wasn't going to work. Julia had said she wanted me to ride with her, but I was pretty sure she was going to eventually ride away from me on the climbs (she did, remarkably easily). The start was the usual chaos as I was trying to keep track of Julia, Frank, and Paola behind me without causing a problem for the riders all around me. Eventually things started to thin out and Julia appeared next to me with, "Were you trying to drop me?"  I'd already lost track of Frank and Paola. We rode up the first climb pretty much together and I could tell Julia wasn't going to be having any trouble with the climbing. I was looking at my heart rate and trying to mostly keep it at or under 160 on the climbs. She waited for me at the top of the second and third (Hogpen) climbs. I think it was a pretty long wait at Hogpen! I'd lose her immediately on the descents, but she was easily climbing a couple of mph faster than I, so I wasn't surprised that she kept going on her own over Unicoi. I stopped there as well, and a few minutes later Frank and Joe showed up. The Unicoi descent was lots of fun, as usual, and basically I was on my own for the rest of the ride. Frank stayed behind a bit at the top of Unicoi and I'd lost Joe right away on the descent. I was never pushing it on any of the descents this year. The aero wheels did seem to make a difference, and so I was coasting a lot. I touched 50 mph for a moment, but mostly I was enjoying the swoopy downhills at speeds in the 40s.

Six Gap riders listed as Louisiana or Mississippi, Frank (Haoting) really flew up the timed climbs!

So after stopping at three rest stops and not bombing any of the downhills, and being old and decrepit, I wasn't even looking at my time. When I finally rolled across the finish back at Dahlonega and looked up at the big clock I was kind of surprised to see it reading something like 6:38. I'd expected to be more like 6:45. My final chip time turned out to be 6:37:43. The really surprising thing is that the year before, my time was 6:37:57. What are the odds that I'd be within 14 seconds of last year's time?  Anyway, I was pretty well-cooked by the time we finished. My neck was killing me as usual for the last 30 or 40 miles, but maybe not quite as much as last year. My quads were pretty sore, though. I spent a fair amount of time in the 39x28 and 39x27 going 6 mph, so I guess that's to be expected.

The drive back went smoothly and we arrived in New Orleans a little past midnight. One thing I know now is that going slower at Six Gap does not make it easier!  There were some impressive finish times from some of the riders I know, though. Elliott finished in 5:12, and Gavin, who punctured out of the lead group on Hogpen, at 5:20. Julia rolled in at 6:26, followed by Frank and Paola at 6:45 and 6:47.

Calm Before the Storm

Hills haven't gotten any lower since last year. I checked.

I've been trying to take it a little easy this week ahead of next Sunday's trip up to Dahlonega for the annual 6 Gap Century. It's not so that I'll have fresh legs and a full tank to attack the climbs and record a spectacular time. No. It's so that I'll just survive. Maybe. I first did this ride back in 2008 with a 39x25 low gear. It hasn't gotten any easier with time for sure. I did that one in about 5:44. Last year I think I was around 6:30. I blame it on the 39x29 I had. Having a lower gear to work with seems to just make me go slower without having much of an effect on how much the climbs hurt. This year I guess I'll use my new aero carbon wheels and a low gear of 39x28. Heavier wheels, higher gear, older rider. What could possibly go wrong? I'm definitely leaving open the option to stop at rest stops this year. The forecast is calling for a high of 90 F, which will make it one of the warmest I've done. Although I've survived the ride a few times on just the two large water bottles on the bike, that ain't going to be happening this year. So anyway, I figure at least I'll start without sore legs from the prior week's riding.

A new HRM for me!

This week I started using a new heart rate monitor. My old armband HRM was getting to be a problem, mainly because one of the pins on the charger got jammed so it didn't always make contact. I sprung for a Wahoo Tickr Fit this time. So far, so good. Although the instructions tell you to put it way up on your forearm, it seems to work just fine down closer to my wrist. Wednesday was the first time I wore it when I made a reasonably intense effort and I was surprised to find that it showed a max heart rate of 182 bpm for a second or two. Perhaps the old one's sample rate and algorithm didn't pick up the spikes as well as this one ..... or maybe I should see a cardiologist. Anyway, I put the carbon wheels and brake pads on the bike Wednesday, along with the new "6 Gap" cassette so I can put a few miles on it all ahead of time. The new wheels are SRAM/Shimano compatible, but seem to work fine with the Campi 11-speed stuff. The bike's been slow to drop the chain down to the smaller cogs for a while now but I'm probably not going to bother trying to re-cable things before the weekend. Slow shifts to bigger gears will not be the main problem at 6 Gap.

I was glad to see the U.S. having some success at Road Worlds this year. Dygert won the Women's TT, and Garrison and McNulty were 2nd and 3rd in the TT, and then Simmons won the Junior RR with teammate Sheffield 3rd. Guess there's still hope for road racing, eh?

There was a nice turnout for the Wednesday Night races on, you know, Wednesday.

Yesterday I rushed out of work early, rode home, changed, and drove up to Baton Rouge to help officiate the Wednesday night track races at the Baton Rouge Velodrome. Along I-10 over the marsh west of town I saw a pair of Bald Eagles at the odd nest to the north of the interstate. It has to be the lowest Eagle's nest ever - maybe ten feet above the water on this solitary dead tree - but they've been nesting there for years. Seeing Eagles again is a sure sign that Fall is coming. Eventually. Likewise, there are a lot of Brown Pelicans around. They always thin out a lot in the summer but start showing up near the lake around this time of year. There were about 20 riders doing the 4 km Pursuit, and then we ran a couple of Scratch Races. There was a crash in the Cat. 4/5 Scratch Race that fortunately took only two riders down on the back straight. They seemed OK afterward, so that was good. I guess I got back home around 11 pm or so but didn't go to sleep until midnight by the time I got something to eat and watched a little TV to try and relax a bit.

Mornings are getting darker and darker

In keeping with my strategy to take it easy and gain as much weight as possible before riding 103 miles and climbing 12,000 feet next Sunday, I started this morning's 6 am ride with the idea of taking shorter pulls and limiting the intensity. I didn't really succeed there, but I think I kind of made up for it by turning back early, at The Big Dip. I'd been expecting to turn back there and then have a nice relaxed ride back, but as it turned out the other three riders also decided to turn back with me, so the ride back was a bit faster than I'd planned. It is getting noticeably darker day by day now in the mornings already, and it won't be until November 3rd that Daylight Saving Time ends. I'm never very comfortable at the back of a paceline on the bike path when it's really dark, and usually leave a little extra room just in case. We almost always get surprised by a runner or something without lights or reflectors, even though everybody has nice bright headlights and we aren't usually going more than 25 mph or so. Anyway, last week was low-mileage with no riding at all on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, and tomorrow will be just an easy coffee ride, while Saturday will be sitting in a car for nine hours.

I may not be in shape, but I'm definitely not over-trained.

Colorado Springs the hard way

Things seemed to be going along nicely last week. I got my bike back from Bicycle World with a brand new Campi Record crankset (nothing feels as nice as brand new chainrings), and then on Wednesday my new Wahoo Tickr HRM arrived.

By Thursday afternoon I was kind of looking forward to my Friday morning flight up to Colorado Springs for the USA Cycling Local Associations Conference. I figured I could probably use a few days off the bike, and it would be nice to catch up with some of the USAC staff and other LA folks. It was mid-afternoon when I checked the weather and discovered that the FAA had just shut down the Houston airport until Friday afternoon because of flooding associated with a tropical storm. Houston was where I was supposed to catch my connecting flight to COS. Crap. I spent an hour on hold with United Airlines, only to find that there was basically nothing they could to for me but give me a refund. So I pulled up trusty Orbitz and luckily found a flight that went through Dallas that would get me to COS in time for the first meeting Friday evening. It seems that all United flights go through Houston and all American flights go through Dallas. So after shelling out another $200 I booked the flight and felt like all was good.  It wasn't.

I got to the New Orleans airport very early for my flight that was scheduled for just before noon so that Candy could drop me off and then get to work. While I was hanging around the airport I ran into Brian and Laura on their way up to Alaska, so it was nice to be able to catch up. They were on the same flight to Dallas. So eventually we get onto the plane, buckle up, and back away from the gate, roll down to the runway, and then we stop and the pilot shuts down the engines. Crap!  Well, turns out they had just issued a Ground Stop for anything destined for Dallas because of the weather. We sat on the plane for a couple of hours while I online chatted with Orbitz since I knew I'd miss my connection in Dallas. The guy on the other end was amazingly helpful and got in touch with American, but in the end there was nothing he could do and the best advice was to just go ahead to Dallas and roll the dice rather than exit the plane and cancel the whole trip. By then the whole seemed like a challenge, so I went with it. By the time we landed in Dallas, Orbitz had rescheduled me on a later flight to Colorado Springs, which was kind of amazing since there aren't all that many flights into COS anyway. The downside was that I would be missing the 5:30 meet and greet and insurance presentation. So then I had to contact the USAC folks who were scheduled to pick me up at the airport to shuttle me back to Headquarters. They were super helpful and didn't have a problem picking me up later than planned. Over the next couple of hours the flight was pushed back another hour or so, and then moved to another gate on another concourse, etc., etc., so by the time I finally arrived in the Springs it was around 10:30. At least I was there!

The symposium agenda this year looked ominous, which is one reason I made the extra effort to attend. USAC has a brand new CEO plucked straight out of the business world (New Balance shoes) who had basically retired to his home in Utah until this job pretty much fell into his lap. I think for him it's just another challenge. So after all of the usual presentations about declining memberships and events, we started up Sunday morning for a long session about re-structuring the Local Associations model. If they had anything specific in  mind, they weren't saying, but what they were saying was basically that the current model was broken and was not going to continue, so we were tasked with making some suggestions about what a new model might look like. I don't know if they got out of it what they wanted, but we could all agree that three of the things that the LAs currently handle - event permits, upgrading, and officiating - would soon be almost entirely automated under the new system that was originally supposed to be in place about two years ago. Still, there are things like shared equipment, local knowledge, mentoring, etc. that need to be done more locally than centrally. Also, there's the whole issue of figuring out a way to pull new people into the organization as members. In the past, USAC was basically a race licencing organization that provided event insurance and rules for, mainly, road racing. Now there are all sorts of other cycling-related things going on that don't fit under that model - gravel, fondos, Zwift, eBikes, etc. The new president wants USAC to be the go-to place for all of that, so that's the challenge in a nutshell. At any rate, I expect we'll see some radical changes happening in a very short timeframe. Hopefully it won't be a repeat of the disaster back around 1999 when USCF abruptly fired all of the District Representatives, which led to the establishment of a few competing organizations like OBRA.

Anyway, the meeting was interesting and we had a nice dinner at a New Orleans style restaurant Saturday night, plus the weather was pretty spectacularly nice if you don't mind 12% relative humidity. The flights back were fairly uneventful but full - typical for Sunday afternoon and night flights. On the leg from Dallas to New Orleans I was way back in row 33 in the middle seat (remember, I had to make the reservation at the last minute) squashed between two huge people, one of whom looked like a Saints linebacker, complete with knee brace, and the other like yo' mama from the Nint' Ward. Good thing I'm small.  At least all the time I spent in airports and planes allowed me to read Draft Animals by Phil Gaimon, which I thought was quite good and very well-written.

To the Shop

It's sunrise season for the morning rides

A couple of weeks ago I put on a new chain, which I try to do every 2,500-3,000 miles. Every time I do that, I listen carefully the next morning when I go out to ride, and check to see if the new chain is skipping on the more worn cogs, which are usually the 14 and 15 in my case. What I heard, and felt, was a little different and I knew immediately what it was. I'd been looking around for replacement chainrings for my older 11-speed Campi crankset without much luck. They made those particular ones for only a couple of years before changing the inner ring so that they were threaded, thus doing away with the "nut" part of the chainring bolts. A couple of years after that they went to the newer 4-pin crankset with the smaller bolt circle. I could get the threaded type chainrings, but then I'd need the bolts as well, and with the chainrings were generally in the $100 and up price range - each - so I'd been reluctant. Anyway, it was getting obvious that something had to be done since I could now hear all those wasted watts every time I pushed on the pedals. Last week I just happened upon an eBay listing where a shop was obviously getting rid of some of the older Campi cranksets, and at $200 for the whole crankset, with bearings and chainrings, it looked like a great deal and easy solution. So on Monday evening I went down to the basement to do what I thought would be a really easy and simple crankset replacement. Unbolt the single bolt holding the two halves of the crank together, pull the old cranks off, clean things up a bit, put the new cranks on, re-install the bolt and torque to spec. Easy-peasy, right?  Well things were going fine until I pulled off the non-drive side crank and heard the sound of metal pieces falling on the floor. The "wavy washer" was broken into pieces and the bearing on that side was completely worn out. I'd noticed some play in the crankset, so I wasn't too surprised about the bearing, but the wavy washer situation was going to be a bit of a problem since that's something that comes with the BB30 cups, not with the crankset. I figured that under the circumstances I might need new cups as well, so I called Adam at Bicycle World and rushed over there with the bike before they closed at 6 pm. to see if perhaps they had a washer lying around or something. Not surprisingly, they didn't, so I left the bike and the crankset with them so they could order the appropriate parts and put it all back together since I'm a little reluctant to use the wooden block and hammer method of pressing in bearing cups with a carbon frame. Anyway, looks like I'll be riding the old Orbea for a while until that all gets sorted.

Here we go again.....

It's that time of year when the early morning rides feature sometimes spectacular sunrises, either on the lakefront for the WeMoRi, or along the levee bike path. It's also the peak of Hurricane Season, and sure enough, there's a tropical wave heading in this general direction that has rather suddenly gotten a lot of attention. Nobody's predicting it to be a major hurricane, if indeed it even gets that strong, but then again it's still a long way out and this time of year these things can blow up really quickly. The track models are kind of all over the place, which is to be expected, but at the moment it's looking like we could see some impact around the weekend. Or maybe not. Who knows?

The 6 am Tuesday and Thursday rides have been kind of different lately. Some of the riders have been going pretty hard from the start, but then turning back either at Williams Blvd. or The Dip, leaving just one or two to do the whole distance out to Ormond. Although that makes the average speed slower, it definitely increases the amount of work! With a bigger group, I might be taking a pull once every two or three miles, but with only two, it's obviously much more frequent. I guess that's a good thing, although I've ended up alone for the last six or seven miles a few times and when I'm alone I usually have trouble pushing myself as hard as I should. Yesterday I ended up with just Dave after the Dip, and although we pushed pretty hard out to Ormond, after we turned around we were in conversational mode most of the way back, and then I was solo after he turned back to go home.

This morning's WeMoRi seemed fairly fast, but I wasn't feeling very aggressive and was just following wheels most of the time. I can definitely feel the difference riding the Orbea, which currently has 25 mm Gravel King tires on it. Hopefully the Bianchi will be back in action fairly soon. We had the Tulane Cycling introductory meeting on Tuesday and had a few new members sign up, so that was good. They're gearing up now for Six Gap in a few weeks and I guess I'll be riding that again, possibly setting another record slow time. If it's not looking like rain I'll probably try and use the new carbon wheels just to see how they fare. Will the aero advantage on the flats and downhills outweigh the extra climbing weight?

Giro³

Friday coffee ride on Lakeshore Drive

Just back from the third Giro Ride this Labor Day weekend. Not exactly exciting stuff, but at least they were both fast and convenient. This morning, Monday, we had a surprisingly big group that showed up for the lagniappe Giro, but even so, I was expecting a nice moderate pace since so many of them, like me, had also done pretty fast rides the two days prior. As it turned out, the ride got quite fast here and there, which I guess was good because I wasn't feeling too drained from the Saturday and Sunday rides. On the way back when we were halfway between Chef Highway and Lake Forest, riding along the merge lane of I-510 as we've been doing ever since the city inexplicable shut down the service roads, a Levee District police officer decided to stop the whole ride and lecture us about how we shouldn't be riding on an Interstate highway. I doubt it will have much effect on the ride, given the lack of viable alternatives. If the road surface on Bullard wasn't outright dangerous, and if there weren't a number of traffic lights there, it might be OK, but we'd lose some of the best long stretches of fast riding. I used the new carbon Mercury wheels this weekend. Figured I should give them a good workout since I'm considering using them for Six Gap at the end of the month. If it looks like significant rain, though, I'll probably stick with my old aluminum wheels since I'd rather not learn about braking with wet carbon rims while plummeting downhill at 45 mph on unfamiliar roads.

Friday was the first Tulane Coffee Ride of the semester. There was a nice turnout, and the ride was pretty easy as planned. Looks like we'll be going to Six Gap again this year.

The Org Expo table with swag from USAC

Yesterday was the Tulane Organizations Expo over at the Reily Center. It was probably the nicest venue for that they've ever had. We've already had a few new riders come along on the club rides. I think we collected about 60 email IDs for students who were interested. Based on prior experience, that probably means three or four will still be involved by the end of the semester. Most of last year's riders are still at Tulane, so it should be a pretty good year. As usual, we haven't heard a peep out of the SCCCC. They pretty much seem to ignore us for mountain bike season. I see on the website that they have an Oct. 4 deadline for 2020 road race "bids" (as if...) but I don't know if they have bothered to contact the club directly.

Pulled the rear carb to start the rebuild. It was in surprisingly good condition, despite the frozen bolts.

Meanwhile back at home I finally got around to pulling one of the carbs off of the GT-6. It was surprisingly clean inside, other than the brown powder left from evaporated gasoline. I have the rebuild kits and will probably do them one at a time, just replacing the essentials to avoid changing any of the existing settings. Unfortunately, one of the Phillips-head bolts holding the dashpot cover on, and which I needed to remove in order to change the torn diaphragm, was seized so badly that it broke. I'm going to keep spraying it with penetrating lubricant for a day or two before trying to remove the rest of the bolt with some vice-grips. Wish me luck.

Water and Weather and Fourteen Years

Inside the Lafitte drainage canal.  Yes, that's a car down there. Probably floated in during the Katrina flood
fourteen years ago.

Today is the 14th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, and although for the most part things have been back to normal for years, we're still picking up the pieces here and there. To nobody's surprise the underground drainage canals in New Orleans are a mess. After a big and somewhat unexpected flood event back in July where areas of the city that don't usually flood, did, the Sewerage and Water Board started looking for answers.

Pulling a Mazda out of the underground canal

What they found about a week ago, were entire cars and tons of other debris, including other car parts, shopping carts, bicycles, etc., stuck in the Lafitte canal. That was probably just the tip of the iceberg, though. A big SELA project that took years to finish and that added some huge underground drainage canals along Jefferson and Louisiana are now being looked at as contributing factors, pushing more water into the system than it can handle. Less than a week after pulling the car out of the drainage canal, there was another flood event last Monday. I was sitting in the office looking at the torrential rain and watching the iron manhole covers along Poydras Street across from the Superdome get blown up into the air as high-pressure backed-up water gushed out from underneath them. By 5 pm there was a lot of flooding downtown. I'd taken the car to work because of the rain forecast and although it was safely parked on the third floor of the Tidewater parking garage, the exit to the garage was flooded, as was LaSalle street, so Candy was afraid to try and get out of the garage to pick me up. Instead, we decided to take the Tulane shuttle home and leave the car where it was. Candy walked over through the rain as we waited for the shuttle that was itself stuck in flood-induced gridlock. When it finally arrived, it was full. By then the rain had about stopped so we thought we'd walk back to the garage and see if we could take the car. We got a couple of blocks when we saw another shuttle coming, so we ran back there and squeezed onto that one, which still had to make its way over to Tidewater and the Med School and the Hospital, etc. I don't think we got home until around 7:30, but at least the waters had receded by then and the walk from campus to the house was uneventful, which to say I arrived with dry feet.

That's a lot of bugs. Smelled like dead fish.

Last weekend was affected by the rain as well. We had planned a nice 60-something mile ride on the northshore, starting at 7 am, which actually turned out to be quite nice...and dry... even though the turnout was a little low.

A little stretch as we got going after the Pine store stop. Always a few Tri riders on these Northshore rides.

I picked up Haoting, aka "Frank" before 6, stashing his entire bike in the back of the Volvo, with my bike on the roof. Driving across the causeway we were continuously pelted with swarms of Midges requiring five of six windshield washer attempts. By the time we arrived at the Lee Road ballpark, my bike was literally slimy with thousands of dead midges plastered on all of the leading surfaces. Fortunately I found a water hose over by the rest rooms and was able to clean most of it off before the ride.  It was a nice moderately paced ride for the most part, perhaps a bit easier than I'd have liked, so on the way back when we got to the "Watchtower hill" climb, just past Enon and where there isn't a watchtower any more, I kept a little pressure on the pedals which split a few of us off the front. At that point we were only maybe five or six miles from the end of the ride, and indeed that last stretch is traditionally where anyone with anything left has carte blanche to go hard, which we kinda did.

Dark clouds brought rain ten miles later

On Sunday I went out to the Giro Ride. Looking at the radar, I wondered if I'd just be having a cup of coffee and then riding back home in the rain, but eventually a pretty good-sized group turned up and we headed out. The sky, however, was clearly threatening, and by the time we turned onto Paris Road we could see the rain in the distance. A lot of people turned off at Lake Forest to avoid the rain, but a fair number of us continued on. Naturally we got soaked on Chef Highway, both going and coming, but by the time we got back to Lakeshore Drive the street was practically dry, so basically we had strategically ridden right to the only rain in the area. Regardless, it was a nice enough ride that got me a second consecutive 250+ mile week.

Hope this turns north after crossing Florida

So right now we're looking at a hurricane, Dorian, headed for Florida. The forecast tracks are still kind of all over the map but it looks like it will have built up to Cat. 2 or even 3 by the time it makes landfall around Monday. We had a little, and by that I mean very little, cool front come through last night that dropped the humidity down a notch and treated us to the first sub-80+ degree morning we've had in quite a while, not that it lasted much past sunrise. That front is, hopefully, going to force the hurricane north after it crosses Florida, if it crosses Florida, well before it gets close to New Orleans ... or maybe not.  Nobody's making any promises just yet. Jay and Laura are staying in Orlando, which at the moment is basically right under the center of the probability track, although usually by the time hurricanes get that far inland they've weakened considerably.  Anyway, perhaps because of the relatively nice weather we had a relatively good turnout with about a dozen riders for the 6:00 a.m. levee ride. As usual a lot of them turned back early but Rich and Matt continued on with me, and we picked up Dave and Steve along the way, so it was a pretty decent workout.

Tomorrow morning will be the first 6:30 a.m. Tulane cycling coffee ride of the semester. Should be interesting to see who shows up. On Tuesday I helped pick up a bike from Bicycle World that one of the students had shipped via BikeFlights. His pedals were missing, naturally. The shop had received another bike for another Tulane student the same day, and that one was missing its front wheel. Anyway, we went over to HQ where I "borrowed" a pair of Shimano road pedals from one of the TUCA bikes until Max gets his own pedals.

Giro Weekend - Catching up on Projects

The Saturday Giro Ride heading out on Lakeshore Drive

The only thing predictable about the weather around here lately is that it will be hot and humid. If you happen to be underneath one of the randomly located rain showers, it's slightly less of the former and a lot more of the latter. There was actually considerably less rain, at least where I happened to be, than I'd expected, though, so that was good. I had a long list of little projects I was hoping to get done over the weekend, so I knew from the outset it was going to be a double Giro Ride weekend for me.

Paola hanging out at the back of
the Giro group probably
wondering what she'd gotten
herself into

I'd heard from an incoming Tulane business school student from Mexico who was starting an exchange semester a couple of days earlier. She was interested in doing the Giro on Saturday, so I sent her all of the usual information, including a Strava link, so she'd know what she was getting into. She had just brought her TT/Tri bike but seemed confident enough about riding in the group. I arrived at Starbucks Saturday morning around 6:30 as usual, and a few minutes later a car, I assume an Uber or something, pulled up and Paola and her bike emerged. I introduced myself and a after a while Noel and all of the usual suspects started arriving. Paola and Noel got to talking in Spanish, so that was good. Anyway, as the group rolled along Lakeshore Drive I dropped back and warned Paola that it was going to get really fast as soon as we came down the second overpass onto Hayne Blvd. It did. In fact, it was a bit faster than usual. That was the last I saw or her, but looking back on Strava I could see that she hung in pretty well until, near the end of Hayne, the speed surged up to 32 mph. It turned out to be a really fast Giro Ride, averaging over 26 mph with a 34 mph maximum out to Venetian Isles. On the way back there was yet another flat, this time Brian Bourgeois, on Bullard. I swear, the Giro has about a 25% chance of making it down Lake Forest and Bullard without a flat lately. I wish the city would re-open the service road.

You can never have enough socket sets.

So after getting home I set about cleaning out the garage so that I could at least contemplate starting to work on the old Triumph. Lots of leaves and stuff blows in under the garage door, and there was a fair amount of other stuff in there that needed to be thrown out or cleaned up or just re-located. The best way to clean it out is with the leaf-blower, actually, so I put on a dust mask and blew out all of the accumulated dust, leaves, and even one dead mummified rat. Once it was cleaned out a bit I took a look under the hood and noticed that the coolant level seemed really low, and since I had some right there, I poured about half a gallon into the radiator before I noticed the steady stream of it running across the garage floor. The end of one of the heater lines had broken where it was attached to the rubber tubing. On the plus side, both carburetor pistons were free and I was able to turn the engine slightly with a wrench on the alternator nut, so at least I know the engine isn't frozen (there's lots of oil, so that's a plus). So I called it a day on that project.

Well, it was more than just a fuse.

I'd received some little fuses I'd ordered from Radio Shack for the NOBC P/A system that blew when we were in Jackson the prior week when it had gotten wet from a sudden rainstorm and Kenny unplugged and re-plugged the speakers while the power was on. The little fuse had blown and I was hoping that with everything dried out I could just replace it and all would be well. No such luck. As soon as I powered it on with the new fuse, it blew. Guess that will require a trip over to Galaxy Electronics to find out what the damage was. So with project 2 on hold, I loaded the big old bike case that I hadn't actually used for the trip to Olympia back into the car and took it back to University Square where TUCA "HQ" is. From there I went over to Lowes so I could make a couple of spare keys to the garage door since I'll likely be leaving tools and stuff in there as I start working on the GT-6. While I was there I decided to pick up a nice little Craftsman socket wrench set. It's been so long since I worked on an English car that I couldn't find many SAE sockets any more. Then, on the way home I stopped at O'Reily auto parts to get a few feet of heater hose and some hose clamps.

Not too bad for a year and a half or so.

That evening I broke down and removed the tape from the Bianchi's handlebar, somewhat afraid of what I would find underneath. Surprisingly, there wasn't much corrosion. I have a replacement 3T Ergosum handlebar on hand, so I'll probably go ahead and replace it anyway. The real reason, though, was to replace all of the brake and derailleur cables. They're actually working pretty well, but the rear brake cable housing is basically snapped off where it goes into the frame at the head tube ferrule. I'll probably tackle the rest of that project tonight.

The Sunday Giro Ride was considerably more tame than Saturday's had been, which is to say the average speed on the way out was a only 25.8 mph.  We weren't even to Chef, however, when the rain started. As has been typical lately, it was a short rain shower, but of course enough to get everyone fully soaked. By the time we were near the end of Chef Highway the street was dry. After the turnaround, I rolled past most of the group that was hanging out under the tree as usual. After a while a little group formed and we rode together waiting for the main group to overtake us, which surprisingly never happened. It turned out there had been a flat and a long delay somewhere on Chef Highway, so our little group rode all the way back without ever seeing anyone from the main group.

There's a significant rain threat in the forecast for the next couple of days, although I got in a nice easy Monday recovery ride this morning, and as of noon it still  hasn't rained despite the threatening sky. Tomorrow we're hoping to staff the Off-campus Move-in Fair in the vacant lot across from The Boot. Any significant rain is probably going to cancel that, however, so it's a wait-and-see thing right now. Then on Wednesday it move-in day for the new students on the uptown campus. I was hoping to get some help from whatever TUCA riders are in town but it's not looking like that's going to happen. I have a ton of USAC national championship brochures and some other stuff, so I may end up leaving that with Adam from Bicycle World who always has a tent in front of Bruff Commons for move-in day.

At the Crossroads

First new wheels in over a decade. Lipstick on a pig??

The long weekend started halfway through Friday. A few days before, Mike Lew over at Gray Cat Cycleworx had called to let me know my new wheels were ready. He had worked out a deal for me with Chris Mogridge at Mercury Cycling, and although it had been a bit of a long but not entirely unexpected wait, they were finally ready. Since the Crossroads Cycling Classic weekend, which included the LAMBRA road race championship, were being held that weekend up in Jackson, and since Hammond is on the way to Jackson, I packed up the car early Friday afternoon and headed for the shop. Now, you have to understand that a visit to Gray Cat is no trivial exercise where you run in, pick up something, pay, and run right back out. No, visits to Gray Cat should always be scheduled with the expectation that there will be a couple of hours of discussion with Mike covering everything from his most recent vintage bike acquisition (an anniversary Schwinn Paramount) to Spinachi aero bars (currently on his bike) to doping to the wereabouts of any number of long-lost local cyclists. Anyway, I knew it would take a while and that I'd probably run into a complication or two trying to squeeze these new wider carbon wheels and their 25 mm tires onto the old Bianchi Sempre that was designed for what, at the time, were standard width rims and standard width tires, neither of which seem to be standard any more. The wheels themselves looked great, and if I trust anyone to build racing wheels for me, it's Mike. We mounted the tires and changed the brake pads to carbon-specific ones. The SRAM 11-speed cassette worked fine with my Campi shifters, so no problems there. Now I had to re-adjust the brakes with the new pads, which meant opening them up as wide as they would go. That left about 1 mm of clearance between the tire and the Campi rear brake arm, but it was enough -- barely. I'd brought a wheel magnet, but of course forgot to put it on the rear wheel for my old-style chainstay mounted Garmin speed and cadence sensor.

I got to Dean's house (Dean is a moto-ref who lives in Jackson) where I'd been offered couch space, and met up with the other two officials, Ricky and Randy, after stopping in Brookhaven to eat at Broma's and pick up a couple of folding chairs since one of the LAMBRA ones had apparently disappeared.

It was fun while it lasted

We were out the door Saturday morning before 6 am to get things set up for the Jackson criterium. The course in downtown Jackson would be a bit different from last year since the city had installed a bunch of ridiculous road furniture in the middle of what used to be the finish straight. The only solution was to run the race in the opposite direction, leaving only about one block between the last turn and the finish. There was a heat advisory all weekend, and by the time I went to get into my race kit for my race I was already soaked from a combination of sweat and a brief rain shower. The rain shower had gotten something in the NOBC P/A system wet and it had stopped working entirely, leaving our announcer, Kenny Bellau, high and dry, but fortunately Ricky had brought the compact LAMBRA P/A system, so we eventually got Kenny back in business.

The Master's race had a reasonably good turnout that included Scott Kuppersmith and Frank Moak with four of their 601 Racing teammates, six Acadiana riders, and a handful of lone rangers like myself. I was still not quite back to normal from that upper respiratory cold I'd picked up in Olympia, so I was strictly in survival mode from the start trying to at least limit the impact on my lungs despite the occasional deep cough. I'd done a little warmup with the new wheels, which felt fine, so I didn't have any concerns there. The course was on old city streets where almost every one of the six corners featured a minefield of strategically placed potholes. Although I'm sure I could ride these new wide tires and rims at 75 psi under most conditions, under the circumstances I figured I'd go up to 90 psi with the expectation that I'd be slamming into a few sharp edges at speed. The race started out pretty fast with Scott launching right away and the field splitting. I was in basically the second group for most of the time, although even that split toward the end. Despite the road surface and fact that I was just tail-gunning, I was liking the course that featured a nice little one-block climb after the two-block generally downhill finish straight. A couple of laps into the race I looked down to see my Garmin showing 0 mph.  WTF??  Apparently it had paired with the speed sensor and for some reason was ignoring the GPS data. I actually re-started it during the race to no effect. Anyway, I was feeling pretty good and having no trouble staying with the little group I was in when, about four laps before the finish on the back stretch my front tire suddenly went "pffffft!"  It was like deja vu.  I'd flatted a front tire on the same road, but in the opposite direction, with three laps to go, the year before. This was a little different because it was clearly not the result of a pinch-flat. I rolled gingerly through the next few turns to the pit and put on my backup front wheel, only then realizing that there were no free laps since we were inside of 5 laps to go. Meanwhile, Peter had blown both tires on a pothole, and Frank had crashed when his handlebars slipped down after hitting another hole. My front brake, adjusted for the wide rims, didn't even touch my old aluminum rims, but it didn't really matter since I would just be riding out the last few laps by myself. I ended up 12th. Afterwards I took a close look at the wheel with the flat and realized that the non-adhesive rim strip had gotten folded over a bit when we'd mounted the tire, so eventually the tube got into one of the spoke holes and blew. I put in a new tube and carefully checked the rim strip before inflating it again. As they were last year, USADA showed up to do testing on selected riders, mostly the winners I think. Two riders from Alabama, husband and wife, tested positive at this race last year.

Hate it when races start with attacks like this!

Sunday's road races started at 8 am, although the masters race was in the second wave that didn't start until 10:30 or so. I was again fully dehydrated and hot from helping set up the finish area, radios, signage, etc. by the time I headed out for a little warmup. I'd put on a wheel magnet but right after I started riding the Garmin stopped showing speed. I looked down to see that it had slid down the spoke. As it turned out, that particular magnet couldn't be tightened enough on the thin aero spoke to stay put. Luckily I had another magnet that worked, and the Garmin was finally happy again. My plan for this race was pretty simple. Try not to get dropped on the hill on the back side, at least on the first lap, and ignore whatever else was going on at the front. Strictly survival mode.

See those 4 Acadiana guys?  Handwriting was already on the wall.

On the start line I could see the writing on the wall. Acadiana had plenty of matches to burn, and it was pretty obvious that they were employ their usual tactic, which is to start launching attacks from the gun, one after another, until something got away. Of course, knowing what is going to happen doesn't necessarily mean there's anything you can do about it. Hence, the first four miles were done at about 30 mph, and by the time we got to the first turn, maybe five miles in, Troy and Alex, both of Acadiana, were already off the front. There was some effort to chase, but with so many teammates in the small pack and the general lack of horsepower, I didn't figure we'd see them again. Back at the back, where I was for pretty much the whole race, someone looked over at me and asked, "Are they just going to let that go?"  I replied, "Well, it works for me!"

The sprint for the scraps

With the break off the front the pace had settled down a bit. It was still fairly fast and the break was still visible up the road. On the second of the three laps there was an attack on the 1 km long hill on the back side and the pack split with a couple of Acadiana guys trying to make the bridge up to the front break. They caught the break and at that point, with one lap to go, it seemed like our gap to the break had actually come down a bit. Soon, we could see that Trey and Troy had come off the back of the break and we caught them around the big hill on the back side. That meant that there were now just, I think, a couple of riders off the front, namely Kevin and Stephen, both from Acadiana. Then, just a couple of miles before the finish, Alex and Bronson went clear, leaving the rest to battle it out for 5th place. With a kilo to go I found myself on the wheel of a strong rider from Tuscaloosa who ended up giving me a nice little leadout. Then Butch jumped from behind to the left and I went to the right and the Tuscaloosa rider, Bernd, launched as well. Butch made it to the line ahead of us as Bernd and I drag-raced the last 50 meters side-by-side with me finishing ahead by barely a tire's width.

The old guys

So I went home feeling pretty good about the weekend. I hadn't had any expectations considering I was still recovering from a cold, and although I basically sucked wheels all weekend I felt better than I'd thought I would and it was generally a fun weekend. Unfortunately, it was also the last road race of the season around here. There should be some Track stuff happening later in the month, and I guess I'll be doing Six Gap again with the Tulane riders at the end of September, but I don't really have any plans racing-wise. Cyclocross starts up around mid-October, so who knows?

Rider Down

Up in the piney woods north of the lake

I'd been struggling with a cold ever since I was up in Olympia, and although I'd been riding I still had the occasional deep cough and lung congestion. The weekend weather was looking to be pretty nice, though, and when Mignon suggested getting a group together for a northshore ride I figured it was about time for me to jump back into the deep end. For some reason, the only southshore riders to show up, other than myself, were Mignon and Randy H. Maybe it was the 7 a.m. start time that put people off, although for an early August ride around here you'd think earlier would be better. Anyway, we headed across the lake a bit after 6 am and arrived a bit before 7 am to find a nice sized group at the Ballpark on Lee Road. We kind of rushed to get on the bike since we'd arrived a little late and everyone else was waiting on us. The planned route took us straight north through Enon to Pine, and from there up to Stateline road, which is not coincidentally near the town of Stateline, which is not coincidentally at the state line between Louisiana and Mississippi as originally defined by the northern border of West Florida, a kind of orphaned area north of the lake but east of the river that wasn't actually part of the Louisiana Purchase and was controlled by France or Spain or Great Britain, and for a while existed as its own Republic. But I digress. Suffice it to say that there's some great riding up there with quiet country roads and some nice rolling terrain. Anyway, it was just the kind of route I like - long stretches between turns, light traffic, and a few little hills.

Heading back south from Pine where there are a lot of Pine trees

As usually happens on these northshore rides, a number of riders split off at various points, leaving maybe ten of us to do the full ride, which was around 65 miles. The pace of this group was pretty steady, which was probably a good thing considering the status of my lungs. After crossing back over the Bogue Chitto river on the way back, with maybe six or seven miles to go, we came to Firetower Hill where there is no longer a fire tower, and someone started to put a little pressure on at the front. That ended up splitting the group and so the last section turned out to be the fastest of the day. I was glad to find that I still had plenty in reserve as the group got down to just four or five by the end.

Jim O'Daniel

So while we were playing in the hills of West Florida, a tragedy was going down over in Mississippi at the Bikes, Blues and Bayous ride near Greenwood, MS. This is a fairly well-organized charity type ride that's been going on for a few years. Early in the ride the front group came to an intersection with a state highway. As I understand it, there was a state trooper stationed there to control things since probably a thousand riders would be crossing that four-lane highway. For some reason the rider who I assume was leading the first group, Jim O'Daniel, entered the intersection and was hit by a truck and killed. Maybe he thought the state trooper had stopped traffic, or maybe he just didn't see the truck. I don't know. When I heard about it after the ride I thought the name sounded familiar. Jim rides a lot with Scott Kuppersmith, although he didn't actually do much, if any, road racing. Still, he was obviously a very experienced rider, having logged nearly 10,000 miles already this year.  Back in the spring he had been the third finisher of the Red Bluff century ride, finishing a good 20 minutes ahead of me and having done most of the ride with Patton and Jack who race a lot and have a combined age younger than some of my underwear. So I'm still trying to come to terms with how this sort of thing could have happened on a clear day, on a clear road, with a police car, on a fun ride. So sad.

The Giro Ride heads back toward town on Chef Menteur Highway

Sunday morning, with my legs surprisingly less sore than I'd expected, I headed out to do the Giro Ride. That ride was fairly routine and for the most part I kept myself safely in the draft toward the back. I could still feel the congestion in my lungs and I figured after the prior day's ride I should probably take it easy. On the way back a rider unexpectedly crashed all by himself on Bullard. I think he caught one of the seams or cracks in the road there. He seemed OK, though and rode back with us, but I swear we've had a ton of crashes and flats along that stretch since the City closed off the service road because they were too lazy to deal with the illegal dumping going on there.

Upper-Left Corner

A week ago today we took a little trip over to the upper-left corner of the contiguous U.S. for a brief visit with Danielle and Shannon.

After some internal debate, I'd decided to take the old steel Cervelo with me, and after some more internal debate decided to just put it in a 40-year-old un-padded bike bag. Risky, of course, but easy to carry around. Considering that we'd have to get from the terminal to a shuttle to a rental car, and then drive down from Seattle to Olympia (actually Lacey but close enough), the prospect of lugging the big hard-sided case I had available seemed like more trouble than it would be worth. At best, I'd get in three rides. More likely just two. So I wrapped the bike up in pipe insulation, braced the dropout ends, and put in into the bag with some cardboard at the bottom and on the sides, and hoped for the best. The Cervelo was a great racing bike in its day, and I rode it nearly to death. All of the return springs in the shifters are broken and there's some serious rust in places, so if it met its demise at the hands of Southwest Airlines it wouldn't constitute a huge disaster. As it turned out, not only did it survive the trip with nothing more than a new scratch on the downtube (my fault for not being careful packing it for the return trip) and a slightly out of true rear wheel, but Southwest didn't charge me anything extra either way, which kind of made up for some of the cost of the SUV we rented but didn't use except to go to and from the airport.

No, it's not Disneyworld

Anyway, it was kind of a long travel day because we had a plane change in Denver, but we eventually made it to SEA and headed down to baggage claim. Since I had been under the illusion that an airport in the PNW would naturally be a model of urban efficiency, I was surprised when we had to wait about half an hour before the luggage started appearing on the carousel. Finally, with bags and bike in hand we followed the signs to the rental car shuttle where we shocked to find a line of Disneyworld at Christmas time proportions. WTF?  As we soon discovered, people in Seattle could take driving lessons from people in New Orleans and be no worse for the experience. On one of the access roads to the airport some kind of shuttle bus had been hit and knocked on its side, and the police had shut down some streets for the duration, exacerbating an already clogged transit system. In Google Maps parlance, everything was red.  Dark red.  Eventually we pushed our way onto a fully packed shuttle bus and made it to the Enterprise car rental desk where everything was thankfully running with military precision.

We were in the car and out of the garage in no time, only to plunge ourselves into two hours of Interstate 5 gridlock. Google Maps was showing something like 13 incidents between Seattle and Olympia, which extended what was normally be a one-hour drive into over two hours of stop-and-go. That evening I put the bike together. Then I put Danielle's bike together since it was still in its bike box since she had moved back there. In her defense, she had recently moved, unloaded two U-Haul moving pods, started her second or third week at her new job as an epidemiologist at the Office of Public Health, had ankle surgery and was clunking around in a big boot. On the plus side, the weather for the next few days was looking great.

The next morning, Friday, I headed out for a nice 40-mile ride that I'd mapped out after consultation with Strava. I was keeping it simple and using a lot of the bike trail system and not going where I really wanted to go, which would have been to the west rather than the south, but then this was vacation and not training camp.

The ride was nice and soon after I got back we drove back up to STL to pick Shannon up from the airport on her way back from a work trip to Japan. We were going to take a look at the Glass Museum and maybe meet up with Charlotte, who lives there now, pick up lunch before heading back, but when we looked at Google Maps after the visit to the museum it looked like a repeat of the prior day, so we decided to wander around a bit, have lunch, and hang out at the biggest REI store I've ever seen until the projected return drive time dropped below the two-hour mark. By the end of the day I could feel the start of a post-nasal drip and sore throat and knew I'd caught something in the airplane. The only question was how long I'd have before it went from a scratchy throat to the plague.

Saturday morning Ben and Charlotte came down from Seattle for a ride. We did the same 40-mile course - this time a bit faster since Ben was on the front most of the time. That evening we strapped a kayak to Danielle's car and put two paddleboards into Shannon's antique pickup and headed down to Lake St. Clair to float around for a while. The weather was pleasant, the leaking paddleboard didn't deflate too much, and the virus continued its slow trip down my throat. By Saturday night I knew I was in for a chest cold and so we raided Danielle's medicine cabinet. I settled on a box of NyQuil.

Ben and Charlotte

For Sunday, Danielle had arranged for a boat ride with some friends who have a big boat. Unfortunately, I was in no shape for that by morning and basically spent the next twenty hours or so in bed. That night I packed the bike back up and we headed back to STL in the morning, arriving back in New Orleans around 10:30 pm. By then I was actually feeling considerably better, although even now there's a lingering but only occasional cough. Could've been worse, I guess. Fortunately, I'd taken Monday off from work, so although there was still a little stuff to take of online I had an extra day to recover. I pretty much overslept every morning since then, but have still gotten in some miles each day, so I should be back to normal, whatever that is, but the weekend.