Storm Front - Friday the 13th (stage)

When the alarm went off this morning I knew something was not quite right. It was just a little bit too dark. As I rode through the neighborhood on my way to the levee, through the soft saturated morning air, I could feel the low carpet of grey clouds hovering above the treetops. There was a small group today for the Friday ride, and we rode a double paceline with each lead pair taking long pulls and chatting about the usual stuff. "Going to Biloxi this weekend?" For some, the question needn't be asked because they rarely travel to races. Others were still being evasive, not yet committed to doing the whole 2-day omnium or just a single race a la carte. I had already registered for the omnium yesterday evening, just minutes before getting a call from Reo looking to get together on the transportation issue. Biloxi is only about an hour and a half from here and we'll likely drive back to N.O. after Saturday's road race and time trial, only to turn around and drive back over the next morning. Definitely cheaper than staying overnight, anyway. I'm looking forward to it, even though I don't feel like I'm really in race shape lately. I've missed all of the training races the last few weeks because of conflicts with work, and although I've been riding consistently I know that the intensity has been lacking. Still, lack of fitness should never be used as an excuse for missing a local, or even regional, race. The racing itself is much better training than you'd get at the weekend group ride, and in this particular case the $45 entry fee for the weekend is quite reasonable. It looks like the weather on Saturday and Sunday will be good, which around here means a 30-40% chance of afternoon thunderstorms. The only issue for me will be to have a couple of respectable finishes and then to try and make it back to town early enough Sunday afternoon to avoid being too terribly late for my dad's birthday party.

Yesterday after we left work around 6:30, The Wife wanted to drive over to the big Barnes & Noble bookstore to get a book for my dad. As usual, it turned into an hour-long ordeal. Personally, I find big bookstores to be completely overwhelming and unless I know ahead of time what I want, I'd rather not go. Same thing for greeting cards, by the way. The Wife takes a completely opposite approach. If she needs to pick up a birthday card, for example, she will absolutely read each and every card on the rack before making a decision. Same thing goes for bookstores. I suppose it wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been so hungry.

I was reading Martin Dugard's TDF blog a few minutes ago, and thought it was pretty clever of him to refer to today's stage as "Friday the 13th," since it's the 13th stage of this year's Tour. I had been at work for quite a while this morning before I suddenly remembered to check in on how today's race was going. When I pulled up Cyclingnews and the Eurosport live audio, I found that I had timed it just right. There was a 2-man break containing the amazing Chris Horner dangling just ahead of the peleton with only about 5 km to go. Chris and the other guy kind of blew it in the last 500 meters by starting to worry about the stage win and not keeping their momentum going. You just can't do that with the sprinters' teams knocking on your back door. They both got swallowed up within the last 300 meters or so, I think, and the day went to the sprinters as planned. Very gutsy move by Chris, though, and it's pretty cool to see him doing this stuff in his first year as a euro-pro after getting added to the Tour de France lineup at practically the last minute. He ended up 10th for the stage which is none too shabby anyway. Dream-come-true just to be there. A stage win would have been practically unbelievable.

I see that Gina finished pretty far down in the pack in yesterday's Superweek criterium, although she got 5th in one of the sprints, which I presume are like primes??? There's a special sprint points competition in addition to the overall competition. She's still 7th in the overall and 8th in the sprints with three events left, so that's pretty awesome. I'll bet she's the only med student in the top ten.

So I've still got a couple of unhappy Windows98 laptops at home. One will boot up fine and work fine for a while, even an hour, and then just randomly crash to the blue screen of death indicating a hardware or driver problem. I uninstalled a few things last night to see if that would matter, but it didn't. Good thing I usually rely on those old machines only for simple e-mail and web browsing. I'd just go ahead and reinstall Windows on one of them, but I don't know if I can find the original CDs that would make that oh so much less painful, but I'd still need to do the deed at work where I have a high-speed connection because the old version of Win98 would need major online updating at the very least.