(32-1)

Crack! I wasn't quite sure what it was. I had just jumped onto someone's wheel in the third sprint in this morning's Giro. My first thought was that the sound had come from the bottom bracket. I didn't pay much attention to it and finished the sprint.

After the sprint and the turn-around at Venetian Isles the group goes easy for a while to regroup. It was there that Clayton rode up to me and said my rear wheel was wobbling all over the place. I knew immediately what had happened. That loud sound I had heard was a spoke breaking. I released the quick-release on the brake lever and made sure nothing was rubbing. Not a big problem, really, just an unusual one for me. At 125 lbs, I don't break spokes very often.

This particular wheel is my training wheel. I guess it's got around 25,000 miles on it. Everyone should have wheels like this - standard 32-hole spoked wheels. I don't really understand why so many guys do all their training on expensive wheels. Tonight I'll pull a few spokes out of the big bundle of spokes that I've accumulated over the years, find one that fits, replace the broken one, true the wheel up (more or less), and I'll be riding the wheel again tomorrow morning. If I had broken a spoke on an expensive 18-spoke wheel, it wouldn't be so simple. For one thing, the wheel probably would have gone so out of true that I would have had to stop and call for extraction.

This morning's ride had a big group and was mostly pretty fast. On the way out we were at around 28 a lot of the time, and on the way back with a little tailwind, it was more like 30. I was feeling surprisingly good today and when Tim rolled off the front on the way back, I tagged along, hanging onto his wheel as he motored at 28 mph for three or four miles, dropping only to 24 or so to climb the overpass and bridge near the old airport.

I'm sitting in my office right now where it is about 90 degrees because they turn off our a/c on the weekends. I had to come in, though, because there was a bad link on the Donzaroo website for a benefit bike ride that's coming up and it needed to get fixed right away so people could download the registration form. Donnie is a well known and respected triathlete who came down with Lou Gehrig's disease, and the tri/cycling community has been holding lots of benefit events to raise money for him and his family. For my part, I built and maintain the website.