Creole Navy and What's Coming Next

The rain bike has been getting a lot of miles lately.

Hurricane Harvey missed New Orleans but as everyone knows, it caused catastrophic flooding in south Texas and southwest Louisiana. Here in town we've had a lot of unpredictable scattered rain but nothing serious at all. I skipped riding on Monday because of the rain, but managed to get in a couple of rides on Tuesday and Wednesday, thanks to the Rain Bike, Weather.com, and some lucky lulls in the rain. Yesterday I went out on the old Pennine and was way out in Kenner when I noticed the front tire going soft. I really didn't want to have to change a flat since everything was pretty wet and nasty, so I nursed it all the way back home, which was over ten miles at that point. Somehow I made it back before the rim started hitting the ground. This morning there were just three of us who showed up for the Thursday levee ride, and one turned off for home as soon as a few raindrops fell. It was fairly windy, but we never did get any significant rain, although ten minutes after I got home it poured for a few minutes. That made three days of lucky timing.

What's coming next - Hurricane Irma.

Meanwhile, I've been getting regular reports and videos on Facebook from Kenny Bellau who went over to southeast Texas around Nederland, I think, along with a number of others, including Chris Harvey and Eddie Exposito, to help with the rescue efforts and bring as many stranded people and animals to dry land as possible.

Kenny and one of the smaller rescues

The have been called the Creole Navy, and someone has now set up a fundraising page to help cover some of their expenses, so drop them a few bucks to help out. It looks like the flooding was still pretty severe as of yesterday, despite the fact that the hurricane has finally moved on to the northeast. The photos from inside homes look a lot like those from Katrina, but fortunately the fatalities seem to have been much lower.

With Harvey pretty much out of the picture for us now, we are focusing our attention on What's Coming Next, which is Hurricane Irma.  This one is already a major hurricane even though it's still about ten days out from us. I'm a little worried about this one, but of course a lot could change between now and when it gets close to Florida.

Lots of wet dogs and people
happy to get a lift to dry land

This one could possibly affect the Pensacola Stage Race scheduled for Sept. 16-17 if it gets into the Gulf, but it's way too early to tell right now. The last LAMBRA road race isn't until the end of September and is up in Shreveport, so that shouldn't be a problem. In-between, though, are a few events like the Tour of Jefferson ride on Sept. 10 and the Tour of Tangipahoa the following weekend. There's also the Six Gap Century up in Georgia on Sept. 24. Anyway, we're all just hoping for the best at this point. I'll breathe a lot easier if we can get through the next three weeks without a major storm to deal with.

Outnumbered

Nice photo of the rest of the masters field coming over "the hill" after the breaks were up the road.

Road racing is often a numbers game. Unless you're one of the pack supermen who can ride away from everyone at will, success often depends on the help of your teammates, or, lacking same, a loose and temporary and sometimes unreliable confederation of otherwise outnumbered riders. The effect of the numbers game is greatly magnified when the field size is small. Yesterday, the field was small.

Masters start, Alex launches

Sunday was the LAMBRA road championship up in Flora, Mississippi where it, thankfully, wasn't raining or flooding or hurricaning. I drove up late Saturday afternoon since I unexpectedly had access to the car because Candy's weekend conference in Baton Rouge had been cancelled because of Hurricane Harvey. I'd be helping out with officiating for the 8 am wave of races, and then riding the Masters race at 10:30. Arriving at the start early on Sunday Townsend and I got things set up for registration as Ricky and Mike A. started setting up the cameras and Mike M., Robert L. and numerous volunteers got the course signage, flags, etc. set up. They sky was overcast and it was humid, but the wind was light, the chance of significant rain low, and the temperature reasonable, at least for August in Mississippi. After getting the first three races done, I changed into my riding clothes, strapped on the helmet and did about one mile of warmup before going to the start line. Things were already not looking too favorable. Cspire had three riders; Acadiana had five. Between them, they comprised half the field. Steve Johnson and I represented NOBC. I think everyone else was essentially without teamates. The course was a bit over 11 miles and we'd be doing five laps, finishing with a fast flat stretch right after a slight downhill section. To complicate things a bit, the 40+ and 55+ groups were combined, and about half the field was 55+. In situations like that you never know who is going to chase who and who is going to block for whom.

Woody & Alex

From the gun, Alex (Acadiana) attacked and of course opened a big gap by the time most riders were clipped in. I figured if he could stay out there for 57 miles solo he deserved a gold medal. Once the pack got rolling you could tell that Alex wasn't pulling away very much, so I wasn't too concerned about it. Of course, none of the Acadiana guys would do anything but soft-pedal at the front, but there were enough others occasionally rolling through to keep the gap from growing. We were at least halfway through the first lap when suddenly Woody went flying out of the group on the right. Alex was only maybe 30 seconds up the road, so definitely within range for someone like Woody. I was stuck over on the left up against the centerline. Well of course at this point both the Acadiana guys and the Cspire guys, who were on the front at the time, stopped pedaling. I knew that if Woody got together with Alex they would probably be able to stay away, given the blockade potential. For the next couple of laps there were enough occasional efforts getting through to the front to keep the duo in sight, but in-between the blocking would slow the group down into the teens so the gap was slowly expanding. There were probably only three people willing to do any work at this point, so not enough to sustain the steady speeds that would be needed to bring them back.

I guess we were on about the third lap, about 35 miles into the race, when someone at the front made the dastardly decision to attack the friggin' feed zone, which is about the lowest thing you can do in a road race. I was toward the back going about 18 mph at the time, trying to stay as far away from people grasping for slippery bottled water as I could when I looked up and saw the attack and said under my breath "What the F*^k!" Three riders at the front quickly opened a gap. The group was immediately all strung out and I had to make a big effort just to make contact with the back of what was left of it. I caught my breath, complained to Steve, and made my way to the front to try and get a chase going. Fortunately there were a few others who were willing to take a pull or two, and after a pretty big effort with Steve, me, Peter, and even Rick we rolled up to the back of the break, but many matches had been burned in the process. Just before we caught I said to Peter, who was in front of the chase, something like, "get ready to go!" No sooner had the words gotten out of my mouth, Kevin (Acadiana) and Michael (Cspire) launched the entirely predictable counter-attack to which the rest of us who weren't on one of those teams couldn't really mount much of a response since we were still gassed from chasing while those guys sat on. This is where having a couple of teammates in reserve would have saved the day. Without any reinforcements (I think we'd dropped a few riders at that point), it was a little while before we could really get going again, but the chase was again sporadic thanks to blocking by the remaining Acadiana and Cspire riders. Even so, at one point, with me offering some verbal "encouragement," we got to within maybe ten seconds of the duo, but when I pulled off the front, exhausted, for someone to come through, all I heard was the sound of freewheels. There are two things you never, ever want to hear when you pull off the front of a paceline.  One is the sound of someone shifting to a larger gear.  The other is the sound of freewheeling.  At that point Steve said we may as well just save our legs for the finish.

Kevin & Mike

The next lap was rather painfully boring and pretty slow as the Acadiana guys sat on the front and I tried to recover a bit from the earlier efforts, and nobody else was interested in racing. I guess I should mention that Steve and I didn't really, you know, technically, have any good reason to be chasing the four guys who were off the front since they were all in the 40+ age group, but you know I always have a problem riding like that. Finally, when we got about half-way around on the final lap, things started to pick up a bit. Butch (Acadiana), who is 55+, launched a few attacks on the rolling hills hoping to dislodge some people (especially me, I suppose) before the sprint. While I didn't have any problem staying with him, and in retrospect would have been wise to have counter-attacked in hopes of splitting what was left of the pack, I was not feeling confident about the sprint at all. I knew it was going to be a high-speed drag race from the final curve, which is not exactly my forte. As things started ramping up for the sprint, Steve let me take Butch's wheel. We came around the final slightly downhill curve at 31 mph with me glued to Butch, which is pretty much where I remained as he and Peter sprinted for the line at a final speed of about 38 mph. I think I was in the 11 by the time we rounded the curve 175 meters from the line, which was of absolutely no help whatsoever as I never made up another inch on Butch.

The sprint for 5th, or 1st, depending on your age - Butch is out of the frame on the right ahead of me.

Anyway, I ended up 2nd in the extremely old men category, but a somewhat disappointing 7th among the regular old men.

NOBC 4s in control

Meanwhile, the NOBC Cat. 4 team of Christian Fontaine, Branden Morvant, Adam Layburn, Andrew Do, and Travis Berger made an excellent team effort that got Branden within a hair's width of the win in a tight sprint against Will Buquoi. At 22 riders, that was the largest field of the day, which might ordinarily seem pretty bad, but considering that the race was pulled together on pretty short notice, and was the week that classes were starting at a lot of universities, and there was a hurricane tearing up Houston and possibly heading toward Louisiana, it wasn't too bad. Total turnout was 73, with predictably very low turnouts for Cat. 5s and Women. Surprisingly, there were seven Juniors, so there's hope!

The event itself went off quite well and was a lot of fun, thanks in no small part to the folks like Robert Lee, Townsend Myers, Mike MacGown, Scott Kuppersmith (who won the Cat. 1-2 race), our officials Ricky Dunn, Mike Abshire, motorefs Ian and Dean, and a whole lot of volunteers that Mike MacGown somehow rounded up from the local clubs. The course, while certainly not the most difficult we've had for this event, seemed to get good marks from the riders. It's just hilly enough to offer some opportunities for the stronger riders, but easy enough that newer riders shouldn't be intimidated.

Photos mostly by Kirk Giessinger.

Hurricane Season

Hoping for the best for Corpus Christi to Houston tomorrow.

It's been almost twelve years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of 2005. The Saturday before it hit, I wrote, "I think this is going to be bad." Although I am often wrong, that time I wasn't. So here we are looking at another rapidly intensifying hurricane, this time farther to the west of us, that the models are having a hard time dealing with beyond tomorrow. Despite the uncertainty, however, there seems to be an increasing possibility that it could back up into the Gulf a bit and drift farther in our direction before heading inland again. That could be bad, especially if it brings a big tidal surge and long and heavy rainfall. Of course, in the midst of it, we are holding our LAMBRA road race championship on Sunday over in Jackson MS. By all indications, there shouldn't be any severe weather for that. It's looking like it would be Tuesday before that's a real possibility. Even so, it's definitely something to monitor.

This is a little concerning for us.

It's an interesting coincidence that this week I have been working on summarizing some of the history about Tulane's rebuilding efforts and the federal funding and reimbursements that the university received to cover a lot of that. Even this far out, it seems that the Katrina story still isn't finished. As the years have gone by, some have forgotten, and others never even knew, the extreme sense of urgency and extraordinary efforts that allowed the university to re-open that January. For a while, there was the very real possibility that it wouldn't happen, that the medical school and hospital would be shut down permanently, and that there would be even more massive layoffs than there were. Since the university was at the time, and still is, the largest private employer in the city, it would have been a major blow. Now, many years afterward, that doesn't seem to matter much to some federal bureaucrats who probably watched it on TV from their dorm rooms as if it was all just some reality show.  Just a few weeks ago they quietly removed Kenny Bellau's Katrina boat display from under the Cabildo in Jackson Square. So a lot of hurricane-related things seem to have come together recently - the flooding a few weeks ago and the broken pumping system, lingering Katrina federal funding issues, Hurricane Harvey, Kenny's boat, etc.  But I digress.....

Quietly removed from the Cabildo recently

Actually, I'm not too worried about this one, at least not yet. Despite all of the gloom and doom surrounding the New Orleans drainage pumps and the Sewerage and Water Board, the city is probably in far better shape to handle storm surge and heavy rainfall than it was twelve years ago, or ever. There are massive new levees and gigantic floodgates and pumping systems and generators and stockpiled fuel to get rainwater over closed floodgates, none of which existed in '05. On the plus side, I'm looking at the weather out in the Atlantic and not seeing anything that's a threat. If we can get through the next three weeks or so, the chances of a major hurricane making it here start to go down dramatically.

This morning I did the first Tulane coffee ride of the semester with Grayson and Elliot. It was actually a little premature since most students will be moving in today and over the weekend, so it wasn't surprising that there were just the three of us. As I rode past the stadiums and athletic facilities there were lots of student athletes around. They are usually required to help with move-in day, so I guess that had something to do with it. There was a pretty good northeast wind blowing on the lakefront today and it felt just a tiny bit like Fall weather. Of course we won't see anything remotely like cool temperatures for another couple of months, but one thing about early morning rides is that you always seem to get a few of these early seasonal premonitions.

A Week's Worth

Perfectly sized group for a training ride on the northsore

In the office not feeling too good. Perhaps I'm coming down with something, or maybe I'm just a little worn out and need a little down time. Whatever, I figured I'd update the blog rather than dig back into the ten years of back-and-forth audit stuff I've been rather unsuccessfully trying to summarize for the past couple of days.

Last week was a pretty solid training week for me. I logged nearly 300 miles and, more importantly, a fair amount of intensity. Down here in New Orleans it's been either hot or raining or both, so being able to get in my regular weekday training rides without incident was just dumb luck, I guess.

Saturday Giro warm-up along Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans

On Saturday I did the usual Giro Ride, which turned out to be pretty fast. With a little tailwind on the way out, the group was going faster than normal almost from the beginning. Once we came down onto Hayne Blvd. the speed ramped up quickly into the 28-30 mph range and just stayed there. I hate those first few miles on Hayne. There are a bunch of dangerous lengthwise seams in the concrete that you can't see until you're on top of them, even if you aren't cross-eyed and glued to the wheel of someone a foot taller than yourself and going 30 mph with sweat dripping into your glasses. I usually end up riding more or less in the wind just so I can see what's coming, but on Saturday it eventually came down to "trust the wheel in front of you or be dropped." The average speed for the 5-mile stretch of Hayne Blvd. was 28.6 mph. It didn't slow down much after that, so the subsequent 7-mile stretch of Chef Menteur showed an average of 28.8. After a quick turnaround, the ride back into the wind was slower but not a whole lot easier, and we were back on Lakeshore Drive by 9 am. I was planning on doing a northshore ride the next day and knew I'd be feeling Saturday's ride on Sunday.

Sunday morning I threw the bike in to the car and headed for Lee Road Junior High to meet what I figured would be a small but determined group for a 65 mile training ride. Despite the prior day's effort, I was determined to put some effort into the ride, so at least I was prepared to suffer a bit.  There was a big MS Tour training ride starting from the same location at 8 am (we'd planned to start at 7:30 to avoid them), and I was surprised to find so many people already there when I arrived around 7:00. We rolled out just a minute or two after 7:30 with six or seven riders to do the standard winter training ride route up past Enon and back around through Plainview.

The first fifteen miles or so were surprisingly comfortable. We were rolling along in a nice smooth paceline for the most part, at 20-22 mph, and with the slightly drier air and shade from the trees it felt absolutely cool. It was nice while it lasted. Once we got to the top of the course around 30 miles in, and headed back toward the south we lost the shade and kind of put the hammer down. That 15 mile stretch is pretty much the traditional sprint zone for this ride where we don't take any prisoners, regrouping only at the other end on Sie Jenkins Road. So we pushed the pace along there, up and down the three significant hills, spending a fair amount of time in the 25-28 mph range. Along the way we lost Pat and Mignon, so at the end of Sie Jenkins Road we stopped and I turned back. I figured they should be maybe two minutes back, but after riding a while I still wasn't seeing any sign of them. That's about when I got a text from Pat saying that Mignon had flatted. I tried to reply but my phone and hands were so sweaty I couldn't get it to work, but Kyle had better luck. Anyway, we found them a little farther down Sie Jenkins, thankfully in the shade. We stopped for water after turning off of Sie Jenkins Road (Jim had left his bottles at his car, so he had just my small bottle and was probably already getting pretty dehydrated). We stayed together for Hwy. 60 and South Choctaw, and Dummyline through Enon, where we stopped again for fluids, and then of course we had to make an effort on the climb up to the fire tower. After that I was starting to fade at a logarithmic pace, taking shorter and shorter pulls. Kyle, on the other hand, started taking longer and longer pulls at seemingly faster and faster speeds. For the last few miles it was all I could to do stay on his wheel. Anyway, it was a good training ride and a good end to a solid week.

What's coming this weekend

Meanwhile, we have been planning the LAMBRA road championships for next weekend and carefully watching the weather. There's a Tropical Storm named Harvey out in the Gulf, and the forecast models are having a really hard time predicting where it will go, or when it will make landfall, because there isn't much other weather to steer it. At the moment it's looking like we'll be OK for the road race on Sunday up around Jackson MS, although rain is certainly a possibility. Actually, for a road race in August, a little rain isn't such a bad thing at all. I'll be going up early to help officiate the first wave of races that start at 8 am, and then I'll be riding the master's race at 10:30. Hopefully the weather won't scare too many people away. I'm not expecting a huge turnout anyway since there's always a lot going on this time of year. I'm hoping to be able to drive up Saturday night so I don't have to make the three hour drive at 4 am on Sunday.

Minutes after uploading the earlier storm track, Harvey was upgraded to a hurricane.

Yesterday I did the WeMoRi, getting there almost early enough to do the entire ride start to finish with the group. The speeds were kind of all over the place for that ride, but at the end I found myself on a good wheel and although Woody was already like ten bike lengths off the front at 200 meters I went ahead to sprinted. When he was about 50 meters from the end I saw him ease up for a moment and look back, but when he saw me still coming he put his head down and powered the rest of the way. That short effort with a little tailwind got me up over 38 mph, so I was happy with that. This morning I was feeling pretty lousy, still am, and decided from the start I was going to try and take it easy for the long Thursday ride on the levee. Even so, it felt hard to me, and I still feel like something's not right, so I'm about to take some Ibuprofen and hope for the best.

Current Stats:

• Sempre Pro frame:  32,343 mi.
• Campi Shifters & Derailleurs:  52,696 mi.
• Bont Shoes:  26,855 mi.
• Year to Date Mileage (not counting commuting): 7,768 mi.

The Morning Commute

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Davis Water Hazard

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

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

Flooded car still there

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

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

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

Crit on the Coast, Weekend of Crashes

Hanging on as usual

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

Three OTB

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

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

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

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

Evan, awaiting transport

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

Took a while to get everyone rolling again

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

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

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

A Team of One

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

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

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

Bayou Beer Garden

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

No Giro Ride today

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

Riding down Carrollton early Sunday morning

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

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

Northshore Sunday

The Sunday northshore group on Old Military Road

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

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

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

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

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

Quiet Week

The Sunday Giro rolls out along Lakeshore Drive

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

A coyote hanging around the water intake at the parish line

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

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

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

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

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

More Rain, More Crashes, More Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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