Dark Mornings

It's that time of year when the morning rides seem a little more stressful, and not necessarily because they're faster.  Lately, like since I crashed on a training ride in the dark because I slammed into a block of concrete nobody saw, I've been keeping my headlight on the highest setting a lot more. Man, that really drains the battery fast, though. I'm recharging it practically after every weekday ride. Earlier this week Brandon got hit by a car over on Robert E. Lee near the 17th street canal. I hate that stretch of road, between the canal and West End, where there's no shoulder at all and lots of broken concrete and manhole covers on the right edge. Brandon was kind of lucky, at least as far as injuries to, and got away with a broken thumb and ton or road rash. I've been following Steve Tilford's blog and it sounds like he's having a pretty rough time of it.  It's been two weeks since he crashed on his head in a training race after hitting a dog and fractured his skull.  Seems like the severe headaches haven't really diminished much at all yet. For someone like Steve, two weeks off the bike, all by itself, is torture. I think it's going to be a lot longer than that before he's able to ride again, though. I'm pretty sure Steve should not be blogging or reading computer screens or pretty much doing anything, since the consensus seems to be that all those things tend to interfere with recovery from a TBI, but I'm really not surprised and can certainly understand his need to stay connected and keep the blog going.  I'd probably be doing the same thing.

So I've been trying out a couple of new things on the bike lately.  Since I'd cracked my Giro Aeon when I crashed (apparently both times), I got one of the new Giro Synthe helmets.  As usual, I got the small size. My head circumference is precisely at the upper limit of the small size and the lower limit of the medium.  Comparing the old and new helmets, it's clear that the inside of the styrofoam is pretty much exactly the same shape and size.  Problem is, the new Synthe has this kind of plastic band thing that is supposed to create some space between your head and the helmet. Naturally that meant it was too tight since I didn't have any space to spare at the limit. As I usually do, I made some minor field modifications to the back to accommodate my apparently elongated skull, and then another modification to allow the band thing to sit flush against the front of the helmet.  That seemed to make it work OK for now, although it was still fairly tight.  It was obvious, however, that once winter came and I wanted to put a skullcap underneath it, I was going to have a problem. So, since they were on super closeout sale (I'm guessing there's a new version coming out soon), I went ahead and got a medium size as well.  That resulted in a couple of problems. For one, the straps are fixed at the back of the helmet, unlike all of the previous ones I've had.  That means that one side can't be shortened at all. Since my head is the smallest for the medium size helmet, that put the buckle so far over on the other side that there was practically no adjustability left for the other strap. I ended up folding the strap over itself and stitching it to shorten it, with kind of solved that problem.  The other problem, though, is that the larger helmet comes down far enough on the front and sides that it's contacting my glasses and kind of pushing them down on my nose.  Not good.  So perhaps I will now have a warm-weather helmet and a cold-weather helmet.  We'll see.  It's kind of the same problem I've had all my life trying to buy pants!

Pretty nice weather for the end of October.

Meanwhile, I finally got hold of that 80 mm stem I wanted to try.  It's all of 10 mm shorter than my current one, so I didn't know if I would even be able to notice a difference, but after using it for a couple of days I think I like it. For some reason 3T changed it from having two bolts for the steerer like my other, older ones have, to only one and increased the torque spec by 1.5 Nm. All to save the weight of one little bolt?  Go figure.  Anyway, it's working out fine, so I think I'll keep it on there and put the 9 cm stem on the track bike that I haven't ridden more than a couple of times all year.

Unfortunately, nothing seems to be helping with the wrist injury much, although it has changed a bit. Initially, the thing that was hurting the most was around the base of the thumb.  Now, that's feeling a lot better, but the outside of the wrist seems to be hurting more. I don't get the sharp pain when I hit a bump any more, so that's an improvement, and just riding along it doesn't hurt very much in most positions.  For some reason, though, when I lift it off the bars to change position, it seems to hurt the most. I guess it's just one of those ligament things that is going to take some time to heal.

I've been up on the river levee bike path a couple of times this week and it looks like everything is open now except for whatever temporary closures are still needed way upriver where they are building a new conveyor for the big grain elevator. Apparently when they need to work on that, they have to shut down both the bike path on the levee and River Road.  Getting around that is practically impossible.

This weekend is the start of Wes' cyclocross series.  I was scheduled to officiate on Sunday in Baton Rouge, but got Ricky to find a substitute so I could either not go at all or at least leave early.  Candy is having our annual Halloween party on Sunday evening, and with the last race in Baton Rouge not ending until 3:30 at best, plus probably an hour and a half to get home if I cut and run, that would be cutting things a little close, plus she'd be without a car for the last-minute grocery store trip(s) that always seem to be necessary.  I'm trying to decide if I should drive up and help out with the early races with the larger fields and then head back before the Cat. 1/2/3 race starts. I'd kind of like to get in some more practice with CrossMgr anyway.  We've had nearly a month of picture perfect riding weather around here, and it looks like it will last through the weekend at least. In fact, it will be pretty warm. Looks for certain we'll make it all the way through October without even having to search for the knee-warmers.

Blue Skies and Tire Boots

The collegiate ride had riders from ULL, Nicholls, LSU, and Tulane.

It was another weekend of great weather down here, unless of course you are plant life in which case things are getting kind of desperate water-wise.  For the Saturday Giro Ride I pulled on the arm-warmers for the first time this season. Although the pre-dawn temperature was just a few degrees below 60F, it was pretty windy and  felt substantially colder. Although it eventually warmed up to the upper 60s, I was never inclined to stuff them into my pocket. Out on Chef Highway I was toward the back of a long skinny line of riders when I heard a loud explosion followed by the sound of something metallic bouncing around on the asphalt.  One of the guys had slashed a pretty good hole in his tire.  A few of us stopped to help, which was a good thing because we needed the piece of an old Mr. Tuffy I had in my bag in order to get him rolling again. Even so, we didn't dare put more than about 40 psi in the tire, fortunately on the front wheel, for fear of blowing the entire tire boot right through the gaping, bulging hole.  He headed back home (don't know if he made it) and we continued on, eventually turning around to get back into the group that was already on its way back. Other than a mile or two where four of us were bridging across a big gap that happened at an intersection, it was a moderately paced Giro.

Lots of narrow shady roads

Sunday morning there was the Collegiate Family Ride up in St. Francisville.  Quentin had reserved one of Tulane's new passenger vans, and I was to pick it up at 6:45 am from the parking lot on campus.  Problem was, nobody was there.  I went back and checked the emails about it and realized that the person handling that must have thought the trip was on Saturday rather than Sunday. So I had to run back home and take my own car to meet the rest of the group.  Luckily there was another car available and only five of us going after one had backed out at the last minute, so it was no problem, but it would have been nice to have been able to work out the still unresolved issue of how many bikes we can get into the thing, which will depend on whether we can remove the rear seats. On the way over, along the elevated portion of I-10 where it crosses the marsh between New Orleans and LaPlace we spotted four bald eagles, presumably two mating pairs.  Nice to see them returning to the area for the winter.

The weather was pretty much as good as it gets.

There was a decent sized group for the ride this year, and by the time we arrived the temperature was just warm enough to leave the arm-warmers in the car.  This was a nice controlled-pace 60 miles or so on pretty quiet roads, which was nice. My injured hand/wrist is still hurting.  It seems to be more of a wrist problem now than hand problem, and the 12-hour naproxin that I took kept it from being very bothersome. We hadn't gone fifteen miles when one of the riders hit something and slashed his tire pretty badly.  Luckily I had put more tire boot material into my bag the night before.  This hole was so big I needed two pieces of Mr. Tuffy to keep the tube from blowing out, so Dustin gave him directions to the nearest gas station with instructions to sit tight and wait from rescue.  I guess he made it there. Later, of course, Dustin had us riding through a small section of gravel which of course resulted in another flat. Then, as we approached a fence line, a white horse snuck through a hole in it and started running alongside the group. When he turned toward the middle of the road everyone pretty much came to a stop, not knowing what he would do next.  Then we gingerly rode by as he watched us.  As if that wasn't enough, the whole group almost got taken out by a truck and trailer that came speeding around a bend on a narrow country road.  Lucky nobody was over on the left side.

Hope this horse made it back home safely

I felt pretty good on this ride.  The weather was perfect and the pace was moderate, so I was never stressed.  It was a nice morning to look at the scenery.  I spent most of the ride at the back keeping track of the newer riders who I knew would eventually hit their limits.  I think a few of them had never ridden more than forty miles at one time. The front of the group kept the pace down in the 16-21 mph range most of the time, at least until we were approaching "Red Bug Hill" a couple of miles before the finish. Naturally it became a race from there to the end so the group pretty much blew apart.  I turned back and picked up a few of the stragglers to pace them in the last couple of miles. Afterward we all drove into Baton Rouge for a late lunch at Kaminari Sushi and Hibachi, near the LSU campus. For a buffet style sushi place it was reasonably decent and inexpensive, which more than met my standards for that sort of thing.

So I was surprised to find Steve Tilford actually posting stuff to his blog.  Well, actually I'm not all that surprised since it's Steve Tilford, but if it was pretty much anybody else I'd be surprised. He's still having constant headaches and other neurological difficulties as a result of cracking his head on the road about 11 days ago. He hasn't been sleeping much and really doesn't have the energy to read emails or that sort of thing, which is expected after a severe head injury. He probably shouldn't be trying to type on the computer either, although he has been keeping it very short. On the plus side, his writing is pretty much normal, so that's a good sign.

Of course nobody noticed this inconspicuous label.

Meanwhile, I'd been waiting for a couple of weeks for an 80mm stem that I'd ordered.  When I had to get new handlebars I figured I'd see how a 1 cm shorter stem might feel and whether it would make any difference to my aging neck and back.  they called right away and told me it wasn't in stock but they could get one in a few days, and since I wasn't desperate for it, I was fine with that.  Anyway, when it still hadn't shown up by Saturday I called and they said they showed it had been delivered on the 11th and that the tracking said it had been left with an "agent." So this morning I made the rounds to the neighboring offices looking for it.  Turns out it had been shipped via USPS and they had delivered it to the university mail room.  The mail room had stuck a huge label on it with my office and name on it and brought it over to our satellite location along with the other mail.  Somehow it ended up in the personnel office a couple of doors over where we have a "slot." However, it didn't find its way into that particular slot, so nobody picked it up and it just sat there.  Shipping that little box involved the shipper, the US Postal Service, the University Mail Room, and the Personnel Department (aka the Workforce Management Office).  What could go wrong?

Bars and Braces

Sitting on the back of the group all morning.

I woke up this morning with the same dull ache in my wrist I've had for a week and decided it might be time to try something different.  I knew I'd miss the 5:45 group, since the alarm clock is precisely set to allow only the absolute minimum of time needed to dress, roll the bike out the door, and ride the half mile to the meeting spot. I went downstairs and dug up the clip-on aero bars and spent a few minutes bolting them to the bike. The idea was to minimize the repeated impacts to the wrist and hand in order to give them a chance to heal. Since I went down on the same hand I'd messed up a few weeks prior, it's been a constant problem, especially while riding, and most especially while riding on New Orleans streets in the dark.  So with the headlight no 'full' and steering with my elbows I finally headed out to the lakefront.  I don't ride with aero bars on a regular basis.  In fact, I typically bolt them to the bike minutes before a 3 or 4 mile stage race time trial stage, warm up, do the time trial, and immediately remove them.  So I was just a little bit apprehensive about a 2+ hour ride, mostly in the dark, that was going to include sitting on the back of the morning training ride train.

I rode out to Lakeshore Drive, and then town to Elysian Fields, where I looped around the traffic circle to head back to West End, waiting to get swept up by the group. Somewhere around Marconi The long, long line of riders rolled past and I easily latched onto the back, being careful to leave a little extra space between myself and the wheel ahead of me. I was a little uncomfortable having my hands so far from the brakes, but after a while I got used to it. I immediately noticed how much easier it was sitting in the draft in a TT position.  I also was glad to confirm my suspicion that doing so was a big relief for my hand and wrist.  So that was my morning ride.  A little shorter than usual, and a little easier than usual, but way better than sitting on the couch watching the sprained wrist heal.  I'm thinking I'll leave the aero bars on for the rest of the week and hope it helps speed things up a little bit.  Meanwhile, I'm wearing the wrist brace at work, although it does interfere with typing and pretty much everything else.  I guess it's worth a try, but realistically I know that this will just take time - probably a month or so of it - before things are more or less back to normal.

Injured Reserve on the Levee

The Bonnet Carré Spillway  

I hate riding when I'm injured, but I guess I hate not riding when I'm injured more. For the past week my riding has been a study in compromise. It's like being on injured reserve. I've been sitting on the back of the group rides, trying mostly unsuccessfully to limit the impact, both literal and figurative, on my achy wrist and thumb joint. The reality, though, is that it's practically impossible to ride the bike without putting a fair amount of pressure on that hand. The times when it would be nicest to have the hand off the bars are also precisely the times when a firm two-handed grip is most needed.

I rode the Saturday Giro, which fortunately turned out to be a bit on the tame side, as easily as I could, continually surfing around at the back for the best draft while constantly changing hand positions in search of something more comfortable. I'd taken some naproxin in the morning, and that definitely helped, but there were still plenty of bumps in the road to remind me that things were definitely not back to normal yet. The wrist was achy enough that when I got home I iced it for a while.  Don't really know if that helped or not.

So when Mignon sent a text suggesting a Sunday ride out to the Spillway on the relatively smooth bike path, I jumped at the chance. The weather around here continues to be unusually good for riding, although I'd have to say we are approaching drought conditions.  I don't think I've seen any significant rain in two or three weeks now. Anyway, we ended up with around fifteen people on Sunday. One of them was Brady, who was keeping the pace a bit higher than I'd been expecting.  It's funny how bad you feel when a group ride is faster than you were expecting.  I'm sure that if I'd done the Giro I would have felt fine, but for this ride I'd been expecting something in the 18-20 mph range and instead got something in the 21-24 mph range.  You wouldn't think it would matter much, but I guess I was just hoping for an easier ride and a chance to give the hand some rest. The good news is that the Mississippi River levee bike path work is almost complete.  The yellow lane divider has been put down on all of the repaired sections, practically all of the path has been cleared of dirt and rocks, and the contractor's two big mobile homes have been removed from the old PHI Helicopter site where they'd been for at least two or three years. The only remaining problems are the bypass around the new green pipes at Florida Street and the five or six places where the new asphalt has collapsed on the edges where I guess the underlying dirt hadn't been sufficiently compacted before a truck rolled over it. This morning I rode easy out to Williams Blvd. and back.  On the return trip I dropped down to River Road as usual to go around the green pipes and then was surprised to find the access road back up to the top on the other side blocked.  It looked like they were working  on repairing the collapsed asphalt up there, so that's a good thing.  I had to stay on River Road holding up traffic for a little while before I could take the next, unpaved, access road back up to the bike path.  A little while later I came across a guy walking his hybrid bike with a flat.  I asked him how far he had to go and when he said Carrollton Avenue, which was still a few miles away, I stopped and fixed the flat for him. That was my good deed for the day, I guess.

Meanwhile, I've been checking up on Steve Tilford's blog that is being updated by friends since he suffered a serious head injury on Friday during a group ride in Topeka.  We're talking fractured skull and brain bleed here, so he was in ICU for a few days and it was probably a bit of touch and go for a while there.  He'd been riding without a helmet when a dog ran into the bunch during a sprint. I suspect the no-helmet thing was an freak thing since just the day before he'd blogged about taking a bunch of old helmets to a community organization to give to riders who needed them. For those who don't know, Steve is the definition of old-school U.S. bike racer. There's an interview with him from 2010 here.  He's been racing about as long as I have, although always quite a few levels above.  He's been on the national team, raced in Europe and South America on numerous occasions, raced road and mountain bike at the highest levels, won a bunch of national championships and classic U.S. races, etc., and has just never stopped. They were writing articles about how old he is for over a decade now. It's been interesting reading his blog because I see him dealing with the same age-related issues as I, except for him it's like, "how come I'm having so much trouble winning this Pro/1 race," while for me it's like, "how come I'm getting dropped in a LAMBRA master's race." Anyway, I read this afternoon that he's been transferred out of the ICU and in classic tough old bike-racer fashion  "at 4:30am Steve decided it was time for a shower. He disabled his bed alarm,  rolled his IV stand into the bathroom and took one, he almost got away with it but for the noise from the water. He will not be going home until he can eat and drink without puking everything up."  I took it as a good sign, though, despite the fact he's clearly not quite out of the woods yet.  There's a pretty good chance of long-term neurological problems from that kind of injury, one of which is death, so the fact that he's communicating and responsive and all is probably a very encouraging thing. I wish Steve a quick and full recovery, and fully expect to see him back on the bike next Spring.

Not Too Broken

The X-Rays on Tuesday didn't show any obvious fractures, and it appears that the main issue isn't a broken scaphoid but instead an old and jacked-up Carpometacarpal Joint at the base of my thumb. This was both good and bad news, I guess. On the plus side, no bones appear to have been broken so there is no hand surgery in my immediate future.  On the minus side, it still hurts and serves as a constant reminder that I'm just that much older and arthritic, and the only cure will be to get younger. I went home (well, actually back to the office) with a  one-size-fits-all brace that comes almost all the way up to my elbow, to maybe give the joint(s) a little rest so they can heal faster, and the usual "ice and analgesics" advice. Wednesday morning I went out early and alone, wearing the brace, basically to see if I could actually ride a bike while wearing it. It was tolerable, and certainly did help to minimize the discomfort when riding over bumps in the road, but it was by no means comfortable and made it pretty difficult to do any effective braking with my left hand. So this morning I put two riding gloves on that hand and went out to meet the group.  It had all felt a lot better by yesterday evening, but in the morning I was still having trouble finding a comfortable place to hold the handlebar.  I quickly decided that I'd be spending the morning ride at the very, very back just to be on the safe side.  Fortunately, the group was going pretty easy and there was practically no wind to deal with. I took a few photos of the sunrise when we turned around out at Williams Blvd., but the camera was apparently not able to focus in the dim light. Suffice it to say the sunrise was pretty nice this morning.

The other day Danielle go a new 2-year brake tag (aka Inspection Sticker for those from outside New Orleans) and I was surprised to find that the entire design had been changed.  I mean, the New Orleans brake tag design had not significantly changed since at least 1969. Even more surprising, on the back of the sticker, facing the driver, was a "Share the Road" reminder.  Amazing.

So anyway, I guess I'll just take naproxen and wear the brace when it's feasible for a week or to and hope the hand and wrist calm back down to normal, whatever that is. It shouldn't keep me off the bike, but it's pretty likely to keep me well away from the front and may very well get me dropped now and then when I don't want to stand up to close a gap or go barreling through a bumpy section of road. Since I don't have any racing any time soon, that won't really be an issue.

What are the Odds?

Lakeshore Drive was wet from the surf breaking over the seawall on Saturday.  

Last weekend's weather was pretty great, assuming you don't mind a 10 mph wind. Actually, the weather's been pretty great for a pretty long time now around here. It also hasn't rained in a long time, which means the grass is turning brown and the back door won't close right.

Saturday's Giro Ride was unavoidably affected by the combination of crosswinds and whoever was on the front. Although I wouldn't say it was a super-hard or fast Giro, it was certainly a lot worse at the back than at the front. They had part of Lakeshore Drive closed off because the wind was blowing water across the road.  Naturally we rode through that anyway.  Riders were getting spit off the back for most of the way out Hayne Blvd. By the time we got a little ways down Chef Highway an actual paceline finally formed up and things got way better.  That is until Ben S inexplicably came blasting through after I'd taken my pull. I glanced over and nobody was going with him, so I slid over into what passes for his draft as he continued what looked like a sprint leadout.  Well, it would have looked like a sprint leadout if (a) we hadn't been two kilometers from the turnaound, and (b) there had been someone other than myself on his wheel. Once the rest of the pack closed the gap the paceline was pretty much shattered. On the return trip we had more of a tailwind, and around the time the group was getting up to a sustained 29-30 mph, I saw Jerry and another rider who had been dropped earlier making a U-turn to try and get back onto the group. Unfortunately, they executed that particular maneuver behind us rather than ahead of us, and when the group's rolling a tailwind at around 30 mph that rarely works.  I heard someone yell to them "SPRINT!" as we went past, but it was already too late. Jerry ended up riding like 100+ miles that day anyway, so he got in a pretty good workout anyway.

Photo opp. at the Spillway.  

For Sunday we had a planned NOBC ride out to the Spillway on the levee bike path. I think there were only about four of us at the start, but lots of people were waiting at various points along the levee to join the group, so I guess we had close to twenty at some point. The weather was great, although there was still a pretty good breeze blowing. Somewhere along the way out we lost Charlotte who flatted (didn't even realize she was gone until we got to the Spillway) and Robert Lee who was in town from Jackson (we found him on the way back - he'd stopped for food). Anyway, it was a great weekend for riding and I ended up with an unusual 300+ mile week.

Then it all went south on Monday.

Frank Colangelo at the front. Probably the oldest
NOBC member going back to 1969.

Monday morning I decided to do an easy recovery ride on the levee. The weather was still really nice and I was out the door half an hour before sunrise looking forward to some alone time with the bike. Turning onto Willow Street I decided to stay in the right lane, which meant crossing a whole bunch of curved streetcar tracks where they turn into the Streetcar Barn. Since they re-paved all of that last year, it hasn't been much of a problem to do that rather than swinging out into the oncoming traffic lane for a whole block to avoid them.  I was going 12 mph.  That particular morning, however, there was a streetcar kind of sticking out into the street that hadn't been pulled into the barn itself. As a result I couldn't go as far to the right, where the tracks are more perpendicular to the road, as usual.  That was my downfall, literally.  I was going to make a hard turn to the left to cut across them when I heard a car coming up from behind.  Well, the last set of tracks caught my front wheel and I fell like a sack of cement on my left side. Unfortunately, I also tried to stop my fall with my already injured left hand and when I got up I knew I'd done some damage.  What are the odds of falling on the same freaking hand twice in three weeks when you haven't crashed for well over a year prior? I was pretty pissed off, and it hurt pretty much, but I went ahead and rode around 20 miles hoping it would feel better eventually.

It didn't.

So I skipped riding this morning and will be visiting Tulane's Sports Medicine Institute where I'm fully expecting to see a pretty picture of a broken scaphoid in my left hand. It will be interesting to see if it had already been broken and was starting to heal from the crash three weeks ago. It definitely hurts more now than it did after the last crash, so I'm taking that as a bad sign. Anyway, I'm already thinking about how I'm going to keep riding with a brace or cast or even surgery.  I'm thinking some short clip-ons and heavily padded gel gloves?  We'll see. There's always the WattBikes, I guess.

Road Racing Season

Last weekend was the last event of the 2016 LAMBRA road racing season. The Team Time Trial and Criterium had been re-scheduled because of the disastrous flooding in August.  In fact, it was amazing that the folks down in Thibodaux and Houma were actually able to pull off the re-scheduled race since I'm some of them were still in the process of repairing their homes. On the plus side, the weather for the entire weekend was beautiful thanks to the season's first cool front. Morning temperatures were in the upper 60s with mid-day highs I guess in the low 80s.

The week before the event I started contacting people about trying to get a TTT team together. My first attempt was an email to what I considered the most likely group.  From that I got a quick positive reply from Steve, with whom I've done this particular TTT a number of times. After that was just silence. Eventually, one person said he was already committed to another team and another was out that weekend with baby duty. I then expanded the search to the whole NOBC email list but still didn't get a solid bite except for David, whose arm Steve had twisted.  He was not exactly enthusiastic, but still willing to fill out a 4-man squad if needed. By Friday night the situation had still not improved, so Steve and I were considering just riding it as a 2-man for the exercise.  I had to make the trip anyway since I had the USAC medals and the LAMBRA radios.

Early in the race as Adrian was closing the gap.

So I made the 1-hour drive Saturday morning, arriving early enough to help with registration a bit. I soon received a text from Steve saying he wasn't coming, so that pretty much ended any hope of my getting on the bike that morning. Turnout was pretty low, which wasn't too surprising under the circumstances.  There were a bunch of other things going on that weekend, and by this time in the season a lot of riders have already switched, mentally at least, into winter ride mode or cyclocross training mode or festival mode. On the plus side, results were quick and easy and I was back home in time for lunch.

Sunday's race started early, so I was out the door in the dark in order to get to the course around the time of the first race at 7 am.  Well, although the local club had done a fantastic job with the race and had lots of course marshals, police, jambalaya, drinks, awards, etc., turnout was again pretty dismal. The Women's and Junior's races had zero entries.

The Masters race had four, including me. I was not feeling too good for this one.  My left wrist and hand were still kind of hurt from the crash, so I didn't really know how they would hold up to the very technical 8-corner criterium. As usual, Kevin Landry attacked at the first opportunity. Peter responded and I went with him, but Adrian was I guess caught a little off-guard and got gapped off a bit. Our chase seemed more for show than effect, however, and within a lap or so Adrian was back with us. The rest of the race was essentially a nice smooth 3-man time trial at decidedly sub-maximal effort levels. I was a little surprised that Kevin didn't lap us, but I think he knew where we were and since he was planning on doing the Cat. 1/2/3 race later he had no reason to go any harder than necessary. By the time we were halfway through my left hand was going numb and I was glad we weren't going fast enough to require a lot of braking. The road were old city roads, so every once in a while I'd hit a bump on a right turn and really feel it in my left hand. Going into the last lap Adrian was on the front and so I figured I'd stay on his wheel in case Peter attacked. Coming into the last two turns I eased just a bit in order to give Adrian a gap for the three-block finish straight. He was able to hold out all the way to the line. My own attempt at a sprint was kind of short-lived and Peter came around me at the end easily. I think I still went home with $70 which more than covered entry fee and gas for both days, so that was nice.  I probably should have entered the Cat. 1/2/3 race since there were only six entries and prizes went seven deep, but I wasn't willing to put myself, or my hand, through an hour of corners.

Back to the Levee

Took a ride out to the Spillway on Saturday     

Since a lack of  Team Time Trial teammates, together with the necessity of my presence at said Team Time Trial, caused me to miss riding on Saturday morning altogether, I set my sights on the afternoon.

Near Moss Rd. - all clear

Fortunately, the weather around here has been pretty spectacular lately, and Saturday afternoon was sunny and dry and not particularly hot. Rather than trying to survive mid-day weekend traffic I decided to see what the river levee bike path had to offer.  I'd been out there the Monday before and found the barricade at Moss Road down but with heavy equipment still at work nearby, so we'd turned back. The levee work should be nearing completion around now, and as far as I can tell it's what I'd call "substantially complete," which is to say the bike path is fine except in a few places, although there's obviously more work to do around the edges, so to speak.

Dirt and ongoing work around
River Ridge

Out around Moss Road where there has been a barricade, fence and signage for the past year or more, it's now open.  There were no signs at all on Saturday, nor any indication that the bike path was closed, although the center stripe is missing and there are still some bulldozers working on the sides of the levee in a few places. I rode on through unimpeded.  There were a number of places where the path is covered with dirt, and a couple of little spots where it seems there's no asphalt at all. It's not at a point where I'd be comfortable doing a group ride at fast speeds, especially in the dark, but otherwise it was pretty nice.

Williams Blvd. - Kind of Clear

The area around the Florida Street pipes is a mess and is obviously serving as a major access point for heavy equipment, much of which was parked there.  It was necessary to pick my way through the tractors and mud and rocks, but fortunately it was dry and not much of a problem.

At Williams Blvd, where there had been more fences and barricades, I again found the path to be open, although the barricades were sitting there alongside the path. From here to the Jefferson Parish line where the levee-raising project ended there were a number of spots where the edges of the new bike path had already kind of caved in under the weight of cars, trucks, or other heavy equipment.  This was bad enough to be dangerous to a cyclist, especially in the dark. Riding alone during the day, however, made it easy to avoid the problem areas.

Some sections of missing asphalt

Farther down the bike path and up the river the big grain elevator has been building a huge new conveyor over the levee.  There they have put up this little narrow slightly elevated access lane with "walk your bike" signs.  It looks pretty permanent. I don't know if it is or not. At any rate, it's really only wide enough for one bike.

From there I rode all the way out to the Spillway.  The only thing I noticed was that much of the bike path in Jefferson Parish and above seems to have eroding edges where I assume the grass has degraded the asphalt. Effectively, the path is about a foot narrower than it used to be.

Grain elevator

They announced that they would start working on the Lakefront "levee lift" project some time this month, starting with Phase 1 from the western end of the bike path to Williams Blvd.  I guess that should take a couple of months at least, so it shouldn't affect the rest of the lakefront bike path, which is the part that the group ride uses.  Hopefully the river levee path will be back to normal before Phase II starts on the lakefront. One can hope.

Some broken up sections of new asphalt

More broken new asphalt

Rider Down

Brian Guerrero

The weekend before my recent unfortunate incident with the asphalt one of our area riders, Brian Guerrero, was on a group ride up in Alabama when there was a crash and he was hit by a passing vehicle. When I crashed last week I was lucky enough to walk away with minor injuries, and although VJ is still on injured reserve with reportedly cracked vertebrae, he will no doubt be back on the bike soon. Brian was not so lucky. While I don't know all the details, I do know that his injuries were very severe and included major head trauma. Eric Heyl of Eastbank Cyclery immediately set up a Gofundme site, knowing that even with the best possible outcome there would be major costs for his family. That was quickly followed up by the Herring Gas Cycling Foundation, which had been set up a couple of years ago for just such a purpose, donating its funds as well. I learned this morning that he passed away. Brian was a well-liked member of the Green Team Bayou Country Cyclists club and was a regular on group rides and mountain bike races. Although I didn't know Brian very well, I'm sure I rode with him on a number of occasions. This morning on the news they were showing the video of a hit-and-run on Magazine Street involving a cyclist who luckily escaped with fairly minor injuries. This was someone who was just riding to work, in the bike lane, when she was hit from behind by a car.

It seems I see something like this almost on a daily basis nowadays.  Perhaps it's because there are just that many more cyclists on the roads, or because the news of these incidents travels so far and wide thanks to the internet. Whatever the reason, whenever we go out for a ride now we always have, somewhere in the back of our minds, the knowledge that we just might not make it back home.  I am always reminded at such times of a conversation I had as a child with my father. After learning to fly in the Army right around the end of WWII, he maintained his pilot's license and would sometimes take us out to Lakefront Airport for little trips over the lake, out over the Chandelier Islands, to Baton Rouge, or any number of little airstrips scattered around Louisiana and Mississippi. I remember asking him why he flew airplanes if they were so dangerous (no doubt that idea came from my mother who was never very fond of flying).  He just looked over at me and said, "Sometimes the enjoyment you get out of something is worth the risk."

No doubt Brian was well aware of the risk. That particular crash might have normally resulted in little more than scraped skin and bruises like the ones I received a week ago, had there not been a vehicle going by at just the wrong time. I've been involved in lots of crashes in group rides and races out on the road, and it's been just a matter of luck that a car or truck hasn't been involved in them. Last Sunday, for example, I was careening down unfamiliar roads in Georgia at speeds in the 50 mph range, held to the pavement by tiny patches of rubber pulling me around sweeping downhill curves on open roads. I was focused on the issues on hand, choosing lines through the turns, regulating speed, anticipating the next braking point, dealing with other riders and the occasional car. That was fun and satisfying, and required sufficient concentration that there was no room left for fearing the possible but unlikely things that could always go terribly wrong. I'm not going to stop riding on the road because even though the odds may have shifted a little bit in recent years, I still think they're largely in my favor, and as my dad would have said, "worth the risk."

Six Gap Nine

Early on Saturday I headed up to Dahlonega, Ga. with six Tulane riders and Dustin for the annual Six Gap Century. I was still feeling pretty beat-up from the crash on Tuesday with bandages all over my right elbow and knee, that long scrape on my back, a sore neck, and various bruises in seemingly random places. On the plus side, the weather was looking like it would be warm and sunny. Being right at the end of September, this ride has offered up all sorts of weather conditions over the nine years I've been doing it. This year was the warmest yet, but under the circumstances I wasn't complaining.

The 9-hour drive went pretty smoothly except for the gas shortage in Georgia that caused us to try a second gas station. With premium gas apparently non-existent, the Volvo would have to make do with a tank of regular. This year we were right on schedule and despite getting stuck in traffic going through Atlanta arrived at packet pick-up at around 5:30. They had moved up the criteriums by at least an hour, so when we arrived the Cat. 1/2/3 race was already in progress. I stopped for a minute to chat with Debbie Milne who was launching her "Supra" line of nutritional food bars, which were pretty good. She had just finished winning the Women's race and would win the Women's KOM the next day. We headed over to Pueblo's for dinner and then made the drive over to Gainesville where the hotel was. In order to get to the parking lot in time the next morning we planned on getting up at 5 am, which I knew was not going to fool my internal clock that was still on Central time. To make matters worse, I didn't get a lot of sleep because of some sort of nasal congestion.  I must be allergic to something that was in the air around there.

Pueblo's in Dahlonega

Anyway, everyone was remarkably, surprisingly, on time and so we had time to stop at the local Starbucks before heading off to find a parking space at the school.  That worked out quite well too, and we easily got a couple of parking spots in the middle of the huge parking lot. There were four of us in the Volvo and another four in a rented minivan for this trip. Ben Bradley had been kind of training for this ride since medical school responsibilities had been interfering with his racing this year, so he was anxious to get down to the starting line early.  I stationed myself just behind the "6-hour" line with Quentin, Cameron, Ben S., and Jerry, and where I also found Adrian and Steve J.

Looking pretty good post-ride

The start was the usual minor chaos, but somehow most of us stayed pretty close together for the first ten or fifteen miles. Ben, Dustin and Sven were up ahead, and I never really saw them once we started. I was happy to find that my left hand wasn't bothering me as much as I'd feared. The right knee was a little uncomfortable, and I knew my neck would eventually be an issue, but in general I felt pretty good. Even so, given the prior week's events, my plan was basically to cause myself as little additional pain as possible. That meant climbing at a relatively easy, steady pace without necessarily trying to keep up with everyone else. I was probably climbing about 1-2 mph slower than normal, which was unfortunate since normal for me is still pretty slow. However, the plan was indeed keeping me largely within my comfort zone, which for me seemed to be around 85-88% of maximum heart rate or in the  vicinity of 160-162 bpm. There were a couple of brief jumps into the 90% range, but they were few and far between. This strategy, while certainly not conducive to impressive climbing speed or finishing time, was successful in keeping me more or less out of the red for the duration. 

Age and ride times - how sad!

This year there was fresh new asphalt on the Hogpen descent, which was a vast improvement over prior years, and although I got stuck behind a couple of cars on the downhills, they were fun as usual. Strava showed a max speed of 55.5 mph, but mostly I was looking at speeds more in the area of 45 mph. The climbs of course were a different matter altogether. For those I spend a huge amount of time in the 4-7 mph range, quite a bit slower than I'd have liked, but I really wasn't in the mood to push it much harder than that on the steep sections. At one point I shifted to the small ring and something kind of jammed up in the drive train and I stopped to see what had happened.  I never figured it out, though.  I think perhaps the chain had gotten jammed up against the anti-chain drop thing or something.  I was afraid that something had either broken or was about to break, since I was still a little paranoid about the bike because of the crash earlier in the week. Anyway, after checking it all out for a minute or two, I got going again without incident.

Damn, statistically significant (F-test p-value: 0.0118)!

The day started out in the mid-60s and ended in the low 90s, so toward the end it was starting to feel kind of hot.  After the last long descent, I finally looked at my ride time and realized how far behind I was actually running. With ten miles to go I didn't need to do much math to know there was no way I'd be finishing near the six hour mark, which I generally consider as my goal.  Of course, this year I'd intentionally thrown that goal out the window from the start, so it wasn't a surprise. Thanks to day's strategy, my legs were actually feeling remarkably good, so the last ten miles that are usually pretty painful were a lot more enjoyable this year.  This is the section of the ride where I'm always passing a ton of riders who did the shorter 5-gap ride and are, in some cases, moving really slowly.  Anyway, I finished up with an official time of 6:13:22, which I guess was OK under the circumstances.  Ben B. just killed the course and finished with the 5th fastest time at 5:21:17 which was pretty impressive. On the long ride back home I started wondering just how many times I'd ridden Six Gap, and how my results have changed, so I went back through the old blog and found a pretty significant correlation between age and finishing time. Sad but true.

Timing the Crash to Perfection

VJ hit pretty hard

Tuesday started out as usual. I met up with the regulars, a couple of whom were MIA, at 5:45 am and we rolled out to the lakefront.  This time of year is always seems to get noticeably darker from one morning to the next.  The night before I had carefully installed some nice fresh handlebar tape with a little more cushioning than what I'd been using for the past few months. I was looking forward to Six Gap next weekend and figured it might make those six hours on the bike a little more enjoyable. Yeah, I know it was just psychological, but sometimes that's all I've got to work with.

The groups all came together along Lakeshore Drive as we approached the Bayou St. John bridge, and soon we were a long line of blinky lights as the pace started to pick up a bit. As it has been for the past year or two or three the right lane was barricaded off at the London Avenue Canal to create a safe lane for the trucks entering and leaving the pumping station construction site. The pace eased up as everyone moved over to the left lane over the canal. I was somewhere around the middle, pedaling serenely along, escheloned a bit to the right against the moderate north wind, planning on staying in the draft until I got really warmed up.

The block of concrete

After the bridge the front of the group swung over to the right to get out of the left lane, I think maybe in-between some of the traffic cones marking the cordoned off truck lane to the right, and as usual the rest of the group followed. I remember thinking we were getting back into the right lane a little earlier than usual, but we were going only 20-22 mph and it didn't seem like a problem. The next thing I knew it felt like I'd hit a brick wall and was sliding along the concrete with VJ, who had been behind me.

As the friction between my skin and the road ground me to a halt, I sat up and thought, "What the hell just happened?" I took a moment to assess the damage.  I'd hit pretty hard and bumped my head just a bit, but nothing seemed to be broken.  Just to the left of me was VJ, was still flat on the ground. I looked back and immediately saw the culprit. A big rectangular block of concrete was lying in the middle of the right lane. It looked like a section of rectangular concrete curb about the size of two large bricks. I'd never even seen it. I think that the riders toward the front  had come back into the right lane beyond the chunk of concrete and hadn't even seen it so nobody called it out, but with the crosswind coming from the left, the rest of the paceline, along with myself, must have been moving into that lane just a bit earlier, with each rider going a tad farther to the right than the rider ahead of him. Obviously my timing had been perfect and I'd just nailed the thing without even seeing it, and then VJ had crashed into me as I was going down, or more likely, over. I guess I must have done a solid block with my left hand before flipping over onto my back. VJ had taken the brunt of it on his head, however, and was a little concussed. We dragged ourselves and bikes to the curb as one of the contractor's pickup trucks that had been on it's way to the worksite stopped behind us.

Tire Track or Road Rash?

VJ finally recovered enough to sit on the curb, but then had a very brief seizure or just fainted, at which point we called 911. It could have been worse. I lost a lot of skin from my right knee, left shin (probably from the bike), and right elbow, along with a few other random minor cuts that included my lower lip and left  hand. I must have really jammed my left hand because the heel of my hand and wrist are still pretty painful when I put weight on them. Luckily, none of the road rash was very deep. Meg was on the ride and she met VJ at University Medical Center's ER where he got some X-rays and perhaps a CAT scan. From what I heard he may have cracked something in his lumbar region, but seemed to be in pretty good spirits a couple of hours later.

That afternoon I had to get checked out in one of Tulane's new 12-passenger vans so I could drive them for the cycling club when needed. I was surprised and disappointed to find that they not only expect people to drive no faster than 60 mph on the interstate, but have also installed GPS tracking so they can enforce that.  I consider driving 60 mph on rural interstate to be extremely more dangerous than driving at the speed limit, which is 70 in most places, but 75 in some areas of Louisiana and Texas. Also, of course, that means over an hour more time on the road for most of the team's road trips, meaning even later arrival times. It seems that the long-awaited passenger vans for Club Sports are not going to be very useful.

Broken 3T Handlebar

Last night I pulled the fork out of the Bianchi to make sure the steerer looked OK, which it did. The crash broke my handlebar, so I was planning on using the road handlebar currently on my track bike until I can get a new one. Then I discovered that the shifter clamp bolt on the right lever was stripped and seized.  I ended up having to drill it out.  Luckily, I have an old Campi shifter from which I can salvage a replacement bolt (although it won't be Ti or Al or whatever the one on the Super Record one was).  The shifters are about at the end of their useful lives, and the new versions aren't very compatible with the older derailleurs, so sooner than later I'll be in for new shifters and derailleurs that I can't really afford.

This morning I went out on the Orbea to assess the damage.  I was happy to find that the legs felt fine and the scraped up knee and elbow didn't seem to be problems at all.  The left  hand, however, was pretty painful over the bumps. At present my plan is to take it easy riding the rest of the week in order to give the hand as much time to heal up as possible. It's not like I'll get in better shape for climbing Hogpen Gap between now and Sunday anyway. I know one thing for sure, though.  While I had earlier been contemplating putting some serious effort into the Six Gap ride this year, plans have changed! I'll just have to play it by ear and see how I feel by Sunday, but I'm thinking a sub-6-hour time is going to be pretty much out of the question.  I'm also thinking of bringing a bottle of Advil with me.

September Lull

Tulane Cycling Friday ride

While I kind of hated to miss last weekend's Pensacola Stage Race yet again, I guess I had some semi-valid reasons. Since we didn't get back from Destin until Tuesday, I would have had to basically turn right back around and drive back to Florida, likely leaving the rest of the family without a car for the weekend unless I found a ride. Then of course there was the cost issue. It's not that the $70 (plus service fee, plus the $10 rental of a chip, plus gas, plus two hotel nights, was particularly unusual. It was more that we'd just spent a long weekend in vacation mode and there were other expenses looming on the horizon this month, one of which being the annual Six Gap (it's not a race) Century.

So on Friday I did the usual Coffee Ride with some of the Tulane riders and set my sights on the Giro Ride for Saturday.  Friday afternoon was a little complicated since we, as in the Tulane team represented in this case by me, were selling the big trailer that the club got a couple of years ago and never, not even once, used. Will, from 4D Fitness, was buying it, and met me to go take care of the title transfer.  Thankfully we had gotten hold of the title without too much trouble, so all of that went pretty smoothly. Then we went back to University Square where the trailer had been parked for over a year.

Right off the bat we discovered that we couldn't raise the trailer nose high enough to latch it onto the hitch on Will's big truck.  Fortunately, he found a couple of chunks of concrete lying around and MacGyvered it using a car jack. Then we discovered that the side door was locked.  I had no recollection of where the keys might be, however, and then just to make things more difficult the power at my office was out.  So using a tiny little LED flashlight in my dark office I hunted unsuccessfully for keys.  A couple of days later I researched old emails from 2012 and discovered that apparently I'd never actually had those keys, which at least explained why I couldn't find them. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to know where they are either. My guess is we'll have to replace the whole door latch.

The guy from Switzerland, appropriately named Sven,
on the Independence ride.

Soooo anyway, the Saturday Giro was pretty normal - maybe a little bit easier than usual since a few of the regular riders were in Pensacola.  Late that afternoon I decided that I really needed to do a ride that wasn't flat since Six Gap was coming up, so I went ahead and joined the small group that was planning on riding out of Independence, about an hour away. Theoretically this was a Tulane ride, but really it was a Dustin ride. The only actual Tulane people were an exchange student from Switzerland riding one of the team's loaner bikes and me. Three of us drove up there in my car, arriving quite a bit later than the planned 7 am roll-out, a fact about which I did not feel guilty in the least. I mean, really.  7 am when you know people are going to have to meet up and then drive at least an hour?  At least it was still relatively cool when we finally got on the road around 7:30.  The ride itself was pretty nice since there were only five of us and the pace was fairly controlled. They guy from Switzerland didn't have any trouble, and with only five people there weren't any of the big-group complications like having to wait for riders lagging behind or having to chase down riders who want to go faster. We ended up with 65 miles and an average speed of 19.2, so moderate distance and moderate speed with about 1,900 feet of easy climbing. All of that was followed by a visit to Pontchatoula on the way home for Mexican since the Bar-b-que place in Independence was closed. I felt pretty good for the ride and was glad I'd made the drive instead of doing another Giro Ride.

Monday morning there was some rain around.

Monday morning I decided to do an easy ride on the river levee to check out the progress on the bike path. Basically, I didn't see any.  The barricade at Moss Road had been torn down again, but just up the road from there I could see a big backhoe working along the batture. I took that as a good sign since cleaning up the batture should be one of the last things to do for the contractor, other than putting down the centerline stripe on the bike path, which still isn't there.

This morning it was a little breezy for the Tuesday ride. I rolled out the house an hour before sunrise to meet the group at Fontainbleau and it felt almost cool for a minute or two as we rode into a moderate east northeast wind. By the time everyone came together on Lakeshore Drive there were, I guess, 25 riders. Up at the front things must have started coming apart on the way back with the tailwind because right away I could see a couple of riders pretty far down the road. As has been happening lately, VJ, who I think had been up there with the lead group maybe 20 seconds ahead, kept pushing the pace a bit after West End, and considering that the group had gotten pretty strung out toward the end of the Lakeshore Drive stretch it wasn't until we were past Causeway that things kind of came back together, except maybe they didn't because next thing I knew Matt and Brian were off the front again, which precipitated a half-hearted chase, which precipitated a split in the group that, of course, I was behind.  After contemplating the odds for a moment I finally went around and made a big effort to bridge, getting within about five seconds as I maxed out around 32 mph with Max on my wheel. I motioned him to go, and he was able to close that last little bit as I eased up and waited for the rest of what was left of the group. A little while later Max came back.

After the turnaround I looked up and realized that most of the group had turned around early and was already pretty far up the road. We were riding into a headwind and holding anything over 23 mph was a bit of a struggle, so a few of us who had been abandoned got together and plodded away, very gradually closing the gap an inch at a time. It wasn't until around the Suburban canal that we finally made contact again.

Destin

Destin Harbor. East pass and the Gulf of Mexico to the right. Town of Destin to the left.

Destin, Florida has been a popular vacation destination for New Orleanians for generations. I was so young when I first visited that I don't remember it, but suffice it to say that we probably arrived in something like a 1959 Pontiac when the interstate system was still a gleam in Eisenhower's eye. Back then it was indeed a "sleepy fishing village," on the outskirts of which were a couple of small motels and the Silver Beach cottages. The outskirts at the time were barely half a mile from the edge of town, which itself was basically a one mile stretch along US 98 overlooking the well-protected Destin harbor on one side and Choctawatchee Bay to the north. We would return there many times over the succeeding years, sometimes in the middle of summer, but more often around Easter vacation time. By the time I finished high school there were a couple more hotels, including a modern-looking Holiday Inn, but beyond that to the east were miles and miles of untouched sand dunes and pristine beaches with the finest, whitest sand you will ever find on planet earth. As a result, I have been terribly disappointed with virtually every other beach I've ever visited. After high school graduation a few friends and I drove to Destin towing my "ski boat" with I think a 40 hp outboard and spend three or four days water skiing in the deserted eastern end of the harbor. Soon thereafter the entire area was discovered by developers, originally from Dallas, and things started to change. A little later the Hilton operation bought a huge tract of land in the adjacent county to the east, co-opted the name of the city, and established the "Sandestin" resort.

There was rain.

Today most of the dunes around the city are long gone, replaced by high-rise condominiums and the shell road down by the harbor is basically a carnival boardwalk. Thus, my trips to Destin are always a little bittersweet. This trip, in fact, wasn't really to Destin itself but to the Tops'l resort just to the east of the Hilton. At nearly ten miles from Destin itself, it represents the eastern edge of "development."  Fortunately the old 4-mile Village remains mostly intact as a buffer and residential community nestled among the high dunes to the east, providing the only glympse of how things used to be closer to Destin before the bulldozers moved in.

Sand beaches do not get better than this.

Anyway, despite a less than encouraging weather forecast I clamped the old Orbea to the roof of the car and we headed east on Friday for a little vacation. My penance for this particular luxury would be missing the age-graded road championships in St. Francisville, so I was determined to get in a few miles while I was there, even if it meant riding in the rain. This is not really the greatest place to ride a bike.  Highway 98 is to be avoided at all costs, and Old 98 is narrow and full of vacationers and hotel and restaurant staff. Over the years I've worked out a reasonably safe approach to riding when I'm there.  The key thing, of course, is to hit the road early - somewhere in the 6:30 -7:00 am timeframe - before the tourists start looking for donuts and coffee. There's a mile or so along 98 in a narrow bike lane before crossing over to "old 98" which of course was highway 98 before the built the 4-lane "new 98" mainly to service the Hilton.

Beach people

New 98 is now a practically unbroken six or seven miles of chain restaurants and retail operations, including a big outlet mall. Fortunately a few of the restaurants aren't bad. When the created the New 98, they closed off a section of the old highway to create a little park, which was probably just an excuse to make it impossible to take the old more scenic highway instead of the new one. For cyclists that means you can take old 98 most of the way to Destin, but then must cross over new 98. For a few years, I had to ride a couple of miles on the new highway, but now the retail developments alongside the highway have their own little winding service road, complete with the required traffic circles, speed bumps, and faux-brick pedestrian crosswalks. On the plus side, it's not too bad of a ride and makes it easy to get into Destin proper. Once in Destin, I do a couple of out-and-back type laps along the bay side of town where, thankfully, things have not really changed all that much.  There are a number of modern homes along Indian Bayou Road, and a couple of real mansions on Bayou Road, but a lot of the older houses are the little cinder-block type houses that were always there and that remind me of the kinds of houses that military personnel retired into. Indeed, there are a lot of retired military in Destin thanks to its proximity to Eglin AFP and Hurlbert Field.

Looking west toward Destin

So bright and early Saturday morning I headed out for Destin, eventually logging around 50 miles. The rest of the day was rainy and I just hung around the very nice condo suite while the girls "went to the grocery" which ultimately took them about five hours since there were so many retail outlets to explore.  I was extremely thankful I'd decided not to go with them.  Sunday morning started out looking pretty nice, but I was only five or six miles out when the first little rain shower came through. Somewhere in Destin that turned into a pretty significant thunderstorm.  I was of course drenched and riding through semi-flooded streets, but the temperature was still warm and I had my rear blinky light, so I did pretty much the same ride I'd done the day before. The rest of that day was fairly rainy, of course, but not too bad. We went into Grayton Beach for dinner at the old restaurant there where the food was mediocre at best, the service inexperienced, and the prices painfully high. Oh well.

Danielle and Shannon

Finally on Monday the weather was a little better. I pulled on my still-wet shoes and did another repeat of the 50-mile ride I'd done the previous two days. The only notable riding incident was a rather embarrassing fall I took right in front of the condo when I was heading out one morning. As I clipped in with my right foot, my left foot slipped on the brightly painted concrete and I fell like a sack of rocks right on my lower back, still clipped into the pedal.  Unfortunately for me this happened right in front of a family that was loading up a car. They thought I'd killed myself, of course.  My only thought was to smile, say I was OK, and get the heck out of there as quickly as possible. My back still hurts. Anyway, the rest of Monday was fairly sunny and windy, so I spent much of it hiding under an umbrella on the beach.  It was a little too rough and full of seaweed to make swimming very appealing, and years and years of bad experience have taught me it's not worth getting sunburned on a three-day vacation.

So it was a pretty nice break over Labor Day weekend, and I was pretty good about avoiding the non-essential work emails. Naturally that means I'll be pretty swamped for the next few days while I attempt to catch up.