A Wet Dreary Giro

"Yeech," I thought as I rode out to the Giro ride this morning in a damp, cold fog on wet and gritty streets. The temperature was in the upper 50s, but it felt colder despite the vest and DeFeet shoe-covers I had on. Of course, by the time I got out there my clear-lens Oakleys were all misted-over. I had to take them off three or four times during the ride to rinse them off so I could (almost) see through them. Toward the end, I finally gave up and stuck them in my helmet for the duration.

The group was a bit smaller than usual this morning, as one would expect, and nobody was really in the mood to inflict much pain, although the pace was fast on the way out, it mostly stayed together. It definitely helps to have a couple of the strong guys riding Power Cranks! I was considering taking a shot at the sprint on Chef Highway today (the one on the return trip), and had just latched onto The Howard's wheel when he stood on it and promptly unclipped his right foot. For a second I thought he was going down for sure, but he kept it upright so all was well. I ended up riding back uptown with Tim and Charlie, taking the long way 'round down Canal St. and then along the river on Tchoupitoulas. Traffic was pretty bad, though; a combination of early Mardi Gras people and the huge NADA convention currently in town. About halfway through the ride today my old but fancy-dancy Campi Egrobrain computer has some sort of neurological event, probably a result of something getting wet, and stopped showing me my speed except when it felt like it. Cadence still worked, though, so I switched to that mode so I wouldn't surge too much when I came to the front. Still, it's amazing how you get to be so dependent on the speedometer, or for that matter the gear indicator. You don't even realize how much you use that information until the thing stops working, and then it's kind of disconcerting to glance down and see a big fat "0" where the "30mph" should be. (Ever notice how you never seem to check your speedo when you're going slow?)

Finally, in the afternoon, the skies cleared and my hopes for tomorrow's long ride out in the country improved tremendously. Gina was nice enough to give me a call to let me know they had made it to Arizona. Just afterward I was reading Jason Sager's blog and discovered that he had recently arrived there as well, having written up a short report of the local group hammer session.