Mish-Mash

Lots of things going on today, yet few of them focused on anything in particular. The bike is begging for a major overhaul, but I dare not start taking things apart for fear of what I will find and the cost of putting it right. That right brake lever now works well as a parking brake, as you can see in the picture. It's not supposed to do that, is it? The problem's somewhere in the lever, I think. It's always been kind of stiff and I guess the accumulated grunge of a summer in the South has nearly done it in for good. The little rubber band you see, which is really just a piece cut from an old inner tube, is substituting for the shift lever spring that broke (rusted to death, no doubt) a couple of years ago. The one on the left lever went South a month or so ago. I guess 46,000 miles or so is about all you can expect from these things. I'm hoping everything will continue to be minimally functional until this winter when I will be more comfortable taking everything apart for a week or two and riding one of the really old bikes in the meantime.

My niece the soccer player is apparently enjoying the U.S. Naval Academy, and got her pic on the website the other day. Meanwhile, The Daughter is getting ready to start classes next week up in Iowa City where the new Assistant Coach recently arrived. The Wife drove up to Baton Rouge with her sister to meet another sister to visit their mother. I had to cringe last night when I was filling up the tank with $2.70 premium. Apparently gas prices went up ten cents overnight. This is starting to remind me of the "gas crisis" of the early 70s that turned out to be, basically, a conspiracy by the oil companies to raise prices. It worked, by the way. Still, it's apparently not high enough yet to get people to leave the cars at home and take a bike to work. I have to admit, I grin a little bit when I think of those people who abandoned the city and fled to the distant suburbs and are now paying $60 to fill up their 8-cylinder SUVs twice a week and getting hit with big property tax increases for all the stuff they thought they could do without. About the only thing I really need a car for is to get to bike races.

This morning's long training ride was pretty standard fare, although a few people were intent on pushing the pace. I was impressed when one surge opened a gap and Courtney, all 100 pounds or so of her, towed me and the whole paceline across to Carey at 28 mph. My legs felt a whole lot better today, but there is still some lingering soreness from the weekend bashing and so I was trying to limit my "at the front" time today. Although the district Time Trial championship is still a month away, and the Team TT a couple of weeks after that, some of the local TT specialists and wannabe specialists are out in force lately. The levee is lousy with carbon fiber TT bikes, $3,000 wheelsets and $500 handlebars, sometimes piloted by pudgy guys with sketchy bike handling skills. To me, Time Trials are the things you have to do in order to ride the next stage of the stage race or to get back to the pack after you get a wheel change in a road race. Still, some of these guys - the Real(tm) Time Trialists - are able to sustain speeds that I can barely handle while in the draft, so I guess I'm impressed.

It is also Tour for Cure Season around here. The annual early October charity ride has a huge following and in the last couple of weeks all of the hopeful participants have been showing up in little groups trying to get in shape for it. I think it's around 70 miles a day for two days. A lot of them will disappear over the next couple of weeks and will end up doing the ride quite unprepared, but the organizers expect that and provide copious amounts of food and refreshment along the way. Some people take a good six or seven hours to complete each day's distance, and those who are in over their heads can get rides back in the truck.

The Herring Gas team, along with Realdo J., are heading off to The Tour of French Guyana for a 16-day odyssey. The stage race is something like nine stages, I think. Hopefully they'll be able to send us a few updates now and then. The guys who are going are: Frank Moak, Kenny Bellau, Chris Alexander, Troy Porter, Bain Foote, and Tim Regan. It should be interesting. My guess is that the stage race will suit Chris, Troy and Bain really well. Frank and Kenny will be there for the opportunistic stuff, including pack sprints, and Tim will be mainly trying not to fall on his partially healed collarbone, I hope.

Well, for now it's time to get back to putting together someone else's $990,000 grant proposal that's due at NASA - Glenn on Friday. You would think the Principal Investigator would at least try to sound interested in that, wouldn't you?