Today was the first day of the popular MS Tour, which I skipped again this year. It's a lot of fun to do, but I never seem to get started on raising the required $200 in pledges, and certainly can't afford it myself. A few guys I know were planning to sneak in anyway.
So instead, I headed out to Lakeshore Drive for the regular Giro ride. Since a number of the big dogs were up in Hammond getting ready to turn the MS Tour into the MS Race, the group was a little smaller than usual. As we started down Hayne Blvd., a couple of us rolled off the front, and since we were going only about 22 mph, I was fully expecting to the paceline to come flying by at any second. Well, that never happened, and after rounding the bend at Paris Road, we sat up and waited; and waited; and waited; and finally turned around just before the group appeared. I thought maybe they had had a flat, but it was just that everyone was feeling lazy. A few miles later, after we were on Chef Highway, going slow as we regrouped after a little sprint, a car came past the group so close that its side-view mirror hit on rider's hip. Snapped the mirror right off, and the car continued on with the mirror hanging by its cables. It was lucky the mirror hit the rider's hip rather than his handlebars, or he would have gone down for sure. On the way back on Chef Highway, we had a really nice circular paceline going until one guy took off and things got fast for a while. Anyway, it was a nice enough medium-paced day at the Giro.
I'm really looking forward to some cooler weather that's expected in a day or two. I'm not really a big fan of the cold, but I guess I'm ready for a little bit of Fall weather anyway, or maybe it's just the change that I'm looking for.
For most riders, the new year really starts around mid-November when the regular racing season is over and a fresh training plan has been fleshed out. By mid-October, the rides will start getting a bit slower and it will get harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I'll do more solo rides, looking at the scenery more and at the computer less. In November, we'll start our regular winter training rides, although most of them won't feel like "winter" until late December. By January, riders will typically be finishing up a couple of months of LSD rides, and will be trying to add in a bit more intensity. January and February are really the hardest months. It can be pretty cold, even here in New Orleans, and there's always a strong North wind. Add to that some rain, dark mornings, and wet streets, and it's not too hard to convince yourself to skip a day .... or two.
The best part of Winter training is that, once again, anything is possible and you haven't had a chance to really screw up your training program . . . yet.
Meanwhile, there's a Drug War going on in the Pro/Elite cycling world. It's the drug testers against the drug users. I'm not a fan of drug use in sports, but yet I'm a little leary of the drug testers and their "holy war" attitude. I fear innocent people getting caught in their net. I've never seen so may positive drug tests among riders who I know or read about. I mean, Tyler Hamilton? Joey? In the last couple of weeks I've learned a lot about WADA, USADA, EPO testing procedures, and all sorts of related stuff that I never thouht I'd need to know. The LAMBRA e-mail list has a running thread on Joey's suspension, although I think I may have to create a statute of limitations on that soon. There's a lot of bad information going around, spread by people who understand neither the science nor the methodology. For anyone to say that a test is 100% accurate is absurd. The probablity of a false positive may be vanishingly low, but it is not zero, especially if humans are involved. From what I've learned about the EPO testing, I can't really fault the science, but I have some issues with the policies and assumptions that presume to eliminate the chance of a false-positive resulting from sample handling, technician error, population diversity, etc.
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