Today's brief window of warmer weather brought a lot of riders out of the woodwork for this morning's long levee ride, and a few of them actually wanted to get some exercise. We were less than half-way out before the group split, leaving just a handful of us to deal with The Howard's psycho-masochistic surges up to 29 mph every time he came to the front. The rest of us were pulling at around 24-25 mph. Gina went with the split and stayed in most of the way out. It probably wasn't a coincidence that as soon as she came off the back Howard seemed to ease up for a while and the pace dropped back down to around 23 for a few miles. I was feeling pretty good after my day off yesterday, but still wasn't quite ready to let my ego do the driving, even though I could hear it screaming "counterattack!"
Anyway, the warmer weather was much appreciated, and, for that matter, so was the faster pace. I think everyone was trying to put a little extra training in the bank ahead of the holidays and predicted frigid weather later in the week. The weathermen were talking "snow and sleet" last night, although we all know it's just a tease to keep us watching the news. At any rate, we are pretty sure to get a little dip below freezing on Friday, with a high of only 43 on Christmas. (It's around 70F right now!!) Still, I do remember that year about 15 years ago when, on the last day of work before Christmas break, we were surprised by a rare and extremely heavy snowfall and freezing weather that virtually shut down the city for the better part of a week and left lots of people with frozen and broken water pipes too.
That's about the last time that happened around here, so we're probably about due.
There's a guy up here on the roof (25 floors up) who just climbed over the railing connected to a lot less rope than I'd be comfortable with. Looks like it's window-cleaning time again. I wonder what it feels like to step off the edge of a building like that? I guess you get used to it - sort of like criteriums!
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