Need to Get Some Zs

Considering that I was going to be off the bike entirely Saturday and Sunday, I went out this morning with the intention of getting in a decent workout, and although I wasn't disappointed in that regard, it wasn't exactly what I expected either. After an early delay waiting for a flat to be fixed at the playground, the group started out at a fairly decent clip, again with a bit of a crosswind. For some reason, guys were letting gaps open all over the place today, and I had to make a few really hard efforts, especially once Howard showed up. In trying to close one of the gaps Howard came by pretty fast at a point when there were about four riders off the front and generalized chaos in the back. For a moment, I hesitated, hoping that the guys behind me would be able to close the gap, but it wasn't happening. Howard looked back, saw the gap, and eased up until I caught his draft, and then proceeded to ramp the pace up from 24 mph to, eventually, about 31 mph, pulling me up to what was left of the disintegrating lead group. I don't know how he does that. Soon afterward, it was just me and Rob, so we continued a pretty hard pace all the way to the turnaround.

It should have been no surprise that the group turned around early, and we never saw them again except for one of the guys who continued upriver as we were on our way back. Rob and I were both pretty fried at that point, and with no others to share the pace we rode back into the wind side-by-side and not very fast. At any rate, I got in quite a bit of tongue-dragging and pegged my heart rate more than once, which was pretty much my plan. When we went past Howard's house on the way back, he hollered something out the back door, but I didn't catch it.

I realized this morning when the alarm went off that I haven't been getting a whole lot of sleep lately. I was up again last night till around midnight trying to figure out what the Carnegie people had done with their classification system and use of Z scores. Quite a bizarre way to classify research institutions when you end up with two universities in the same category - one with $291M in R&D and the other with $4M. Give me a break! Anyway, perhaps I'll be able to get a couple of nights of good solid "hotel sleep" this weekend up in Iowa City. Not as good as "hotel sex," but I'll take what I can get.