It never fails. I decide to take a rest day, and then a day or two later I'm off the bike anyway because of the weather. It started raining early last night and hasn't stopped. Every now and then the rain pelts my office window. I suppose we're also still under a flood watch. In reality, we're under a flood watch every time it rains, which is just SOP when you live in a city that is mostly below sea level and every drop of rain that falls has to be either absorbed by the soil or pumped uphill into the lake. Anyway, I'm already feeling kind of fat and lazy and wanting to curl up on a couch with a cup of hot coffee. I suppose that if we get a break in the rain this evening, as unlikely as that is, I might be able to go for a quick ride or maybe just a little 3-mi. walk to Audubon Park with The Wife.
This year's racing season has been pretty bleak for me. After missing a bunch of races in the Spring, I kind of lost that momentum that I need. It's not that I wasn't training. I'm sure I'll log somewhere around 11,000 miles this year. But all the training in the world just can't substitute for real racing. Once I get on a roll - traveling to races every week or two - I always improve and start getting good results. The other thing that I missed out on a lot this year were the Tuesday/Thursday training races. Although I made it to a few of them, they were mostly poorly attended and since it's such an effort to get from work at 5:00 out to the training race at 6:00, I started to blow it off pretty regularly. Big mistake, of course. If there is one thing that is virtually guaranteed to give you some fast fitness gains and generally make you a better bike racer, it's having one or two days a week where you do a double workout. Over the past 30 years or so, my best racing years have always, without fail, been the ones where I was doing the evening training races pretty consistently, after having done an easy or medium-paced training ride in the mornings. I'm thinking that the club might try and put together a real (event permit, entry fees, prizes, etc.) training race series next year if we think we can handle it. It would be a great thing and would surely improve the general level of racing around here.
We have our annual Rocktoberfest race scheduled for Sunday morning, and the best the forecasters will give us is a 40% chance of rain, so we'll be really lucky if we stay dry for this one. OTOH, if you had to race in the rain, Lakeshore Drive wouldn't be a bad place for it. We should have a complete road closure for the 3-mile circuit that is mainly out-and-back along Lakeshore Drive with a traffic circle on one end and a nice little loop on the other. The only sketchy part will be traffic circle which is notoriously slippery in the rain because of all the oil that drops off from the busses. I need to remember to get some Turkey bags. You know, those huge plastic bags they make for cooking Turkeys. They are a standard piece of equipment for race officials because they're big enough to put a whole clipboard, complete with the official's hand and pen, into. That way, you can be standing in the pouring rain and still be writing down rider numbers, finish order, whatever. Still, I guess this weather will put a real damper on the turnout considering that this is mainly a "fun race" type of event with minimal prizes and mostly local competition.
We'll see.
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