Insubordination

Turned off the alarm this morning and immediately fell asleep again. When I awoke it was already too late to meet the group for the long Thursday levee ride, and actually I was fine with that. I took my time getting ready, ate a banana, and headed out the door about the time the group would have been passing the playground. Plan "B" was to do 20 miles or so alone, meeting the group on its way back. On the way out I saw Robin riding the wrong way, and he said something about a flat as I went by, later I passed Jay who was apparently the victim of the flat. I had a nice steady ride, crusing along at 20-21 mph in the small ring, and caught the group about 19 miles out. The bike path was quite wet in some areas, and there was an occasional light sprinkle, but nothing sufficient to really get you wet.

I turned around and got into the paceline and after a while we picked up Robin again. Then, as we got to the Country Club area, Robin's front tire started going soft, but he told us to go ahead since we were only a mile or two from the Playground and he'd just nurse it along as far as he could.

The pace coming back wasn't very fast and things were going smoothly until we approached the Huey P. Long bridge. At that point Matt picked up the pace and a couple of us tagged along behind. There was a police car up on the levee, heading in our direction, and some bike traffic coming the other way. The police car came up the levee onto the bike path ahead of us about the time Matt's speed was hitting 28 or so. I started to back off. Passing police cars on the bike path is clearly an act of insubordination. As anyone should know, messing with police cars is just basically asking for it. So what does Matt do? He sprints up into the draft of the police car. As I'm easing off the pedals, I plead with him not to draft a police car, knowing the unavoidable outcome. Not to be deterred, Matt then accelerates past the police car, basically forcing him onto the grass. I'm just coasting now and I see the police car come back onto the bike path and speed up - Matt was doing at least 29 mph at this point - and then, of course, the lights come on.

As the group catches up to me, The Donald is already muttering four-letter words about Matt's lack of common sense (to put it mildly), and we calmly file past Matt and Mr. Policeman, who is by now getting an earfull from the finger-wagging officer. Luckily, that's all he got, because between Dan and myself there's no way we were going to come up with bail money! I figure he undid quite a bit of the group's accumulated public relations work this morning. We need the levee police to be our friends so that when the old ladies and dog-walkers call in to complain about the bikes they'll just blow it off instead charging up their radar guns and printing up a bunch of 10 mph speed limit signs.

Here at the office I've been listening to the rumble of thunder for about two hours, but I don't think a drop of rain has yet fallen. I've been feeling kind of tired and blue and unmotivated and I wish it would rain . . . hard.