Better than Advertised

When the alarm went off this morning I stumbled out into the living room and clicked on the TV to check the weather radar. I just barely missed it. The Weather Channel shows it "on the 8s," and by the time I got to the television set it was 5:49. The forecast had been uncertain the night before, with some calling for thunderstorms all night and others saying they would miss the city. Indeed, it had rained, but the streets were almost dry, and when I finally got to see the radar, exactly two minutes before I had to be out the door, all it showed was a band of storms heading away from the city. It turned out that the weather was much better than advertised this morning, but I suppose last night's forecast was enough to scare off a few of the regular riders because there were only about seven of us up there on the levee for the Tuesday long ride. So we mostly rode a nice smooth paceline with Todd pushing the pace up a bit when he'd come to the front, until we got to the grain elevator and Big Richard's rear tire exploded. It took a while to fix that one because the casing had a big slice in the sidewall. I had some pieces of an old Tyvek race number in my bag that I carry for just such an occasion, so Todd put a piece in there as a boot and we sent Richard home while we rode ahead to meet the other riders who didn't stop. On the way back the pace got pretty fast and even though we had a nice little tailwind, I could still feel a little bit of last weekend in my legs. In particular, one of my hamstring tendons has been a little tender since the Road Race. I think it is improving, though, so I guess I won't need to break out the Celebrex.

I ended up spending an inordinate amount of time today putting together last weekend's stage race results in order to upload them to the USCF Results and Rankings database. Because of the format required by the USCF and the fact that I wanted to include not only the overall results but also the results of each stage, the table ended up being well over 500 rows long. Luckily, the system only found a handful of incorrect license numbers and names. Anyway, the results are on the website, the photos are on the website, the LCCS database had been undated, the LCCS website has been updated, and the results have been uploaded to the USCF database, and I can finally wash my hands of the MSGP and start thinking about the upcoming Tour de Louisiane that we haven't really even begun to pull together yet.