Springtime Weather!

I am just amazed at how nice the weather has been around here. Yesterday morning we were in arm-warmers for the first half of our Northshore ride. That is not normal for May when I would typically expect the high temperature to be in the 80s. I rode out to The Morning Call to meet Kevin who was giving me a ride across the lake, and stopped off at the Starbucks for my usual small coffee. I don't know what kind of metabolism you would have to have to be able to handle a large coffee, but the small one provides enough caffeine to keep me going for hours. There were eight or nine of us for the ride, and although it was rather windy, we had an awesome day and got in some good training. After a 10-mile warmup and a "nature stop" necessitated by the combination of cold and caffeine, the group started a nice fast paceline that we kept up for the whole day. With no firm route in mind, we ended up doing around 75 miles, going through Folsom. Since we didn't go North of Enon, we missed out on a lot of the hills, but there were still enough to get me out of the saddle a few times. There were also some great tailwind sections where the group was just flying along at 29mph. Of course, we threw in a few town sign sprints along the way, but the final sprint for the Abita Springs sign didn't happen because of some oncoming traffic. The town sign sprint is definitely not worth dying for!

I headed out this morning for the levee, again in arm-warmers, but it was deserted and my mood was - how should I put this? - "reflective," so I just rode slowly, enjoying the scenery and trying not to think too much about all the work I have waiting for me at the office.

I tracked Gina down this morning to see how things went at the Athens Twilight Criterium. She said that the streets were still wet but not too bad. It was fast, fast, fast, though and she ended up getting gapped off about half-way through. It sounded like the DeFeet team had a great trip anyway. She didn't get back to Charlotte until around 2 a.m. this morning and when I talked to her she was on her way to Boone, already running a bit late. Some of the guys went up to Clear Springs for a 24-hour mountain bike race last weekend, and Branden, John, Richard and Rusty ended up coming in first! I think they do this as sort of a relay type event, but still it has got to be hard because that is not an easy course at all. Branded had the fastest lap time of the event, and that was 53 minutes for a 9.5 mile loop!

Realdo is off to France at the end of the week for a long visit, not returning until around the 22nd of the month. Meanwhile, The Wife has started the search for a used car for The Daughter, who will be coming back from school briefly on the 15th. Yesterday she wanted to drive around to various car dealers, but we found most of them to be closed (it was a Sunday afternoon) so I got her on the internet to search through the local classifieds where it seems that all the dealers now have their cars. I hope we can find something that will work and that we can also afford!

So, bad news for Ekimov! Sounds like he must have been chasing back to catch up with Lance on a training ride around Austin last Thursday when he hit a pothole and came down on his stem with his sternum, cracking it and crashing badly enough to also injure a couple of vertebrae. Yeouch! That's gotta hurt. I'll bet he had his head down and never even saw the pothole that he hit. Interestingly, most of the online cycling sites were incorrectly reporting that he had been hit by a car.