Fall Already???

What great weather this morning! Usually, this time of year, it's 80 degrees and 95% humidity at sunrise when I ride. This morning the Jet Stream decided on a little road trip to the deep south and we had a Northeast wind, temperatures in the low 70's, and ultra-low humidity. Sweet! Friday is the easy day on the levee when we do an easy 25 miles at speeds like 19 mph and catch up on all the gossip. I rode today alongside Billy Widner, who I swam with way back in grammar school and high school days. I think he swam in college. He said that he ran into our old coach, Butch Trellue the other day. Now Butch was a piece of work. He was a great coach and was really the first coach my high school had who really taught us what training was all about. He would show up for meets in outrageous clothes, organize us so we played mind games on the other teams, and got us to shave our legs, which at the time was not generally done at the high school level. I guess that's why shaving my legs for cycling wasn't really such a big deal for me when I started racing after high school. It's still a pain in the arse, however.

So I don't know how long this low humidity will stick around, but I'm glad I got to really enjoy it this morning! The down-side to this great weather, however, is that whenever there's a strong North wind it's really a struggle riding my heavy, upright, single-speed, highly over-geared commuting bike up the Broad St. overpass, which I generally have to do standing up at about 30 strokes per minute dressed for work with a big messenger bag on my back while trucks and busses whiz past at about twice the speed limit. So far, I haven't had to walk, but there was one particularly windy morning last winter when some guy walking down the bridge sidewalk as I was going up actually stopped and cheered me on like Bela Karoli - "You can do it, you can do it!"

I see that the La/Ms points standings have finally been brought up to date. The club is in 2nd place, but there's a pretty big gap now between us and 1st since we had one of our team time trial teams DNF last week after two of them flatted. That probably cost is around 120 points right there, since I'm pretty sure they would have won the masters class. I hope we have a good turnout for the time trial this weekend. I think I'll be able to do it, although I'm not going to be breaking any records! I've been feeling kind of fat and lazy since the Iowa trip. I just can't seem to get excited about time trials. Hopefully that last-minute criterium in Baton Rouge will happen so we have something interesting going on in September. That would at least keep me motivated.