Hit or Miss

I've been playing Hit or Miss today with the weather. We got in our morning training ride before the rain started, so that was a good thing. In fact, the skies didn't look all that bad while we were riding. We did just a moderate speed paceline today, which was fine. When I got home, The Wife was walking out the door on her way to work and she said that there was bad weather moving in fast. I rushed around so I could beat the weather and just as I was about to leave, it started raining. The radar was just a complete mess of scattered green, but a few minutes later the rain stopped so I jumped on the commuter and made tracks for downtown, hopefully in-between the rainstorms. The rain didn't really start again until I was only three blocks from the office, so although it took all the starch out of my shirt, I didn't get very wet. As I walked in, the BikeTulane guys were set up in front of the "Bike Room" door with boxes of donuts, and since I had worn my helmet today, I helped myself to a fee one. The bike room was not quite as packed as usual because of the weather, but I suspect they got a fair amount of "business" before the rain started. I had to run out on an errand this afternoon and went through four or five cycles of torrential rain followed by sunshine. Crazy!

The "Wednesday World Championships" training races are supposed to start this evening, but it's not looking too good right now. Most of the really nasty weather is a few miles south of the city, but there's a tornado watch and flash flood watch, etc. posted for that area right now. I doubt there will be much of a turnout on the Lakefront at 6, which is only a couple of hours from now, although I think that most of the bad weather has finally moved through. The question is, should I leave work half an hour early so I can ride home, change clothes, jump on my road bike and ride out to the lakefront? The radar loop right now makes it look like we're in the clear at this point, but there are still thunderstorms in the forecast. I may have to be content with watching the neat streaming video on cycling.tv for the time being. They've been showing a lot of cyclo-cross today. The image quality is remarkably good so I'm hoping they will be able to handle the load when the big stage races start. At any rate, I might be willing to shell out a few bucks for this rather upgrade my cable service just to get a single channel (OLN) that shows mainly log-rolling all winter.