Busy, Busy

Happy Bastille Day!

I added a photo album showing some of the landmarks for the morning Levee training ride, so if you've been wondering what it looks like out on the bike path, you can check it out on the NOBC website.

Last night was kind of rough, computer-wise. I've got two rather old hand-me-down laptops at home that I use and both of them had some serious problems last night. One would crash to a blue screen with some sort of cryptic message about a hardware issue, while the other would hang in the middle of loading Windows every time. I spent a lot of time in "safe mode," running complete disk maintenance utilities, defragging drives, etc. and one of them seems to be mysteriously cured while the other is still unhappy. It seems like I went through a similar situation a couple of months ago. Anyway, I was up until midnight fooling around with the blasted things. I sure wish I could afford to spring for a shiny new computer! Maybe even something that isn't running Windows98.

It's been a busy day today and cycling-related things have really had to take a back seat. Don't you just hate it when work interferes with your cycling?

I had a 9 a.m. meeting this morning, so went out to meet the Thursday long ride group already knowing I'd be turning back early. The pace today, at least while I was there, stayed pretty moderate. Although there was a pretty big group, a few of the usual instigators were absent and so the group stuck to a reasonable facsimile of a paceline all the way out to the St. Charles parish line where I turned back. I enjoyed the mostly solo ride back today, staying at a nice tempo around 22 mph, give-or-take. Along the way I picked up one of the guys who commutes in to Ochner and we chatted a bit after I eased up at Jefferson Playground.

I spent all morning in meetings and most of the early afternoon following up on meetings and didn't finally check the TDF results until well after noon. It looked like a predictable stage - a group of riders who were well down on GC was allowed to go down the road while the big fish kicked back a little bit.

I see that GiVo is still doing well at the Superweek races, finishing 17th and 11th in the last two races. Meanwhile Shannon Koch of Team LaS'port in Shreveport is heading to Austria for the Junior World Championships as part of the U.S. team following her recent victories at nationals. She'll be racing with the Cat. 1,2,3 guys in Biloxi this weekend as a warm-up.