Short Week

It seemed like a particularly long holiday weekend, and I was happy to get back to some semblance of routine this morning. The usual Tuesday long ride eventually accumulated a group of a dozen, but when I hit the meeting spot this morning there was only one bike there. As I rode up, I saw that Rob had his front wheel off, but he was just standing there looking at it. Odd. Turned out that he had slammed into one of our city's new potholes in the dark on his way over and blown both tires. Having only one spare tube, he was close enough to ride the flat front to the levee where he could borrow another tube. His rim had a huge dent it in - huge enough that I was surprised he hadn't gone down. Anyway, I gave him a tube and we were on the road a bit late, but then so was everyone else. The ride was fairly steady today, hovering around 21-23, until we got about half-way back and The Howard decided out of the blue that he needed to up the pace to 30 mph. A few riders split off with him, and the rest, including me, just sped up a little bit. After a while we were mostly all back together, though. Erich M. was in town from Athens, where he's about to start work for a financial investment advisor type of company. As we approached one of the pumping stations in Jefferson he and Rob split off the front a bit and as we went around the pumping station I put a little pressure on the pedals to close the gap. Apparently I was about the only one to do so, and we ended up doing a little 3-man TT the rest of the way. As soon as we eased up around the playground, Mark D caught from behind. He must have been chasing solo for a few miles at least.

Yesterday morning after a short training ride I decided to clean up the neutral ground across from the house and spend a couple of hours with a shovel, rake, etc., eventually filling up five of those huge contractor-type plastic bags with leftover hurricane debris. It looks better, but my hamstrings, back and shoulders are all sore as hell today, which never seems to be much of a problem while riding, although walking isn't all that much fun.

So this will be a short week at work. We were off yesterday and will be off again on Friday. That should leave me completely confused since I already think today should be Monday.