Wednesday Races!

We had a nice morning training ride today, although I found that my calves are still rather sore. Better than yesterday, but still sore. I called Gina to get the med student perspective on my brother's UTI, and she surprised me by saying that she had been hit by a car while out training. Luckily, she was basically side-swiped rather than hit from behind. The car was apparently going pretty fast (like 55mph). She said that she kind of bounced along the side of the car before finally losing her front wheel and going down, sliding across the road to the left and ending up in the center lane. Very very lucky not to have broken anything! The street was wet and she was wearing arm and leg-warmers, so the road rash was not as bad as it would have been otherwise. She was out riding the next day.

So the Wednesday training races started today. The weather was good, except for the brutal Northwest wind coming off the lake. You could feel the spray from the waves hitting the seawall, which is always a bad sign. I was struggling a bit, as I usually do when it's windy like that. The race started out with Kenny pushing the pace really hard for the first lap. There was a bit of a tailwind on the way out (we do 4 laps of about 6 mi. each) and the speed was up around 31 much of the way, with most of the pack strung out in the gutter. On the way back into the wind, the speed dropped down into the teens. I spend most of that stretch out in the wind in order to reduce the number of riders escheloned all the way across both lanes. Toward the end of that lap, the pace picked up just as I was dropping back and two riders ahead of me unexpectedly sat up leaving Rick and me with a huge gap. There was no way we were going to chase back on at that point, so we rode steady through the tailwind section, then turned around early and got back into the pack when they were heading back. (Hey, it's just a training race!) On the third lap, Matt launched off the front with Charlie and one other rider around the fountain, I think, and they got a huge gap right away. Eventually, the pack started to respond as I took a couple of pulls. I was pretty wiped out, so around Franklin Ave. I dropped back. Mistake! Huge Mistake. The guys at the front could smell blood as they closed in on the break and the pace ramped up to around 32 mph. Because of the crosswind, there was no place to get a draft when I got to the back, and there was also no way I was going to sustain 32 mph on my own, so I came off the back pretty quickly. Back at the front, the 3-man break was finally caught a couple of miles later, and in the resulting sprint Noel won, followed by Woody and Kenny, so I heard. I had to head out to the airport right away to pick up The Wife on her way back from D.C. She is off to Destin for another meeting tomorrow morning.

So I'm kind of tired tonight and my lungs really took a hit this evening, probably a combination of the dry air, pollen level, and hard effort. I think I'll do the long morning ride tomorrow anyway since the weather will be nice again. Maybe I should be resting up for the Tour Le Fleur omnium this weekend? I dunno. Every time I try to do that I just end up feeling flat for the race.