Another Good One

I woke up a little bit early this morning, and had plenty of time to hit the ATM machine, gas station, and CC's coffee before meeting up the Morning Call. We ended up waiting about ten minutes extra for Reo and Kevin, but still arrived at the Lee Road school just a tad after 8 a.m. As it turned out, we would more than make up for our late arrival during the course of the ride.

The winter northshore training rides have had quite a streak of good luck. Here we are in January already and except for last week, which I missed, the weather has been fantastic. Today was no exception. Although the temperature on the northshore was in the upper 40s when Charlie D and I arrived, the skies were blue and the wind was out of the south and it already felt warmer. Shorts and two jerseys were more than sufficient as the temperature quickly rose into the 60s. This morning the krewe was a little different than usual. We were missing a couple of the regulars, like Jay and Rick, but had picked up Tim and Realdo in their place. Pushed along by a steadily increasing southeast wind and Tim and Reo's extra horsepower, the group's speed stayed high all day and hardly a yard of the 60-mile ride went to waste. There were a couple of good sprints and some hard efforts up the usual hills. We lost Jaro for the second time shortly after Enon, and knowing that he was familiar with the roads we continued on after that. I think the warmer weather had everyone wanting to go a little harder than usual today and half-way up the hill on Sie Jenkins Road the pressure went up a notch and stayed there all the way to the end of that short but tough little stretch.

I think there were a couple of guys really looking forward to a stop at the Enon store, but when we arrived we found it closed with a sign on the door about not having enough "staff." We stopped briefly anyway and chatted with a couple of other riders who were there before heading up the watchtower climb in what was now a pretty strong head/crosswind. I was sitting at the back of the paceline scrapping for a sliver of draft on the edge of the road when a gust of wind very nearly blew me right into the ditch.

After I got home, I checked the computer and found that my cumulative mileage is just a bit below 50,000 miles now. I spent an hour or so over at my mom's apartment putting in a few more outlets and switches.

You know, it strikes me that all of my pictures show guys riding along at a nice easy pace, talking or looking at the scenery. Well, the reason for that is that when we're going hard, there's just no way I can fish the camera out of my pocket, and even if I could, I'd end up with (a) a blurry picture and (b) dropped. So I guess you'll just have to take my word for it when I say we had a hard ride.