More Gloves and Booties

Miles: 42
Gloves: 2 pair

A late decision last night to go out to eat, accompanied by a bottle of Turbo Dog, on top of a couple of small glasses of merlot at home, had its usual effect. Around 2 a.m. I woke up, thirsty, and couldn't get back to sleep for the longest time. So it was with some difficulty that I dragged myself out of bed for the early Tuesday ride. It was still pretty cold, around mid-30s I guess, and windy - much like yesterday in fact - and when I got to the levee meeting spot there was nobody there. I checked my watch and it was 6:15, so I waited around only another minute (hey, it was freezing up there in the wind) and headed out, already figuring on doing a shorter ride. I soon spotted a couple of flashing headlights coming my way and was joined by two of the guys. We were still contemplating shortening the ride if that's all that showed up, but Jeff mentioned that Rob was somewhere down the road. Well, soon we saw Rob coming at us out of the darkness (he never has a light), to which Jeff responded with "uh oh...." Right about that time a couple more riders came up from behind and a few more from ahead, so right away we went from two to about seven. The other thing that happened right away was that Rob went straight to the front and upped the pace by a few mph, which was fine except that we had a tailwind. I was a little cautious about pushing too hard on the way out knowing that we would be jousting with a healthy headwind for much of the return trip. The pace was hard enough, though, that pretty soon there were just three of us off the front. I was pretty tired by the time we hit the turnaround, so it was nice that we rode pretty easy for a while, eventually picking up the group again, which had turned around a mile or two early. Eventually the pace picked up again with four or five of us rotating at the front. My legs were not feeling too good and I was taking shorter than normal pulls. Every time I would pull off to drop back it felt like the headwind would just bring the bike to a standstill and I'd have to keep pedalling, sometimes pretty hard, in order to slot back into the paceline.

We were just about back when my phone rang. Now normally I wouldn't even check to see who had called until I got home, but this morning I had a meeting and I suspected I'd better check it right away so I dropped off the back of the group with Jeff. With a double layer of gloves on and frozen fingers it must have taken me three or four full minutes to get my phone out of my pocket. I probably should have stopped. Indeed it was about the meeting and I ended up making and answering a couple more calls before I got home.