Man, for some reason I was just not feeling very strong today. Once the morning group coalesced around Jefferson Playground, Jeff and Ronnie shot past the group on their TT bikes with Ronnie on the front. I started to chase, kinda, but they were flying and when I looked back for help there was just air, so I eased up until the group, which had been caught off-guard, caught up. At first there wasn't a real concerted chase, but after a short while a gap opened and it was just Rob and me. That's when I knew I was in for a hard ride. I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I hate anything that even looks like I'm being dropped, but I wasn't feeling too hot this morning at all. So Rob was doing a lot of the work and I was just pulling through to give him a break; trying not to let the pace slow down too much, which wasn't so easy since my computer was running so low on electrons that the LCD was just a grey blank rectangle. Even so, we were not making up much ground on the aero duo that was a good 40 seconds ahead of us. It wasn't until we were well out of Jefferson Parish that they seemed to ease up a bit and we finally caught. Rob said later that he was pretty impressed with Ronnie's speed on the TT bike. Personally, I was pretty impressed with Rob's speed on the road bike. So I guess people are starting to think seriously about our upcoming 2-person Time Trial.
Although it seemed like there was little wind on the way out this morning, by the time we were half-way back it had picked up considerably, and naturally it was in our faces. The group stayed mostly together, although there were usually just a handful of guys rotating at the front with the rest content to hang on. I would take a few pulls in the rotation and then drop back for a rest every now and then. When the pace would get too fast, the guys in the recovery line would just kind of stay there so eventually the last guy would take his pull and nobody would come through for a while while the riders reshuffled themselves into a revised paceline. Donald seemed to be kind of keeping an eye on the front and whenever it was in danger of splitting he would pull things back together. Eventually I started feeling better, but I just don't know why all cylinders didn't seem to be firing this morning. I think three people asked me if I was doing Rouge-Roubaix this morning. I guess the answer is still "probably." If you want to find the Rouge-Roubaix website, just Google on "stabbing yourself in the forehead with a fork." It's usually the first hit! One of my writeups on the race is on the Baton Rouge Cycling website.
Sounds like fun, huh?
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