Girrrrrrrrro!

It got much cooler last night and as usual the falling thermometer was accompanied by a strong north wind. It wasn't too bad as I rode out to the lakefront but once I hit Lakeshore Drive I knew it would be a difficult Giro Ride today. The plan was to try and stay in the shelter of the pack today, since I didn't want sore legs for Sunday's little time trial up in Baton Rouge. The plan went out the window pretty quickly, though. Since there was a rather small group today, there weren't many places to hide, and even if there had been, the crosswinds would have allowed shelter to only a handful anyway.

On the way out, as we came down the Seabrook bridge, and before the pace started to pick up, I was watching Rick up ahead. Suddenly his bike swerved and his rear wheel locked up in a cloud of smoke. It was amazing that he didn't go down. A long piece of heavy wire had wrapped itself around his casette a few times and then gotten tangled up in his lightweight super-aeordynamic spokes, ripping about half of them out before he came to a stop. It was ugly. Jay ended up riding back into the headwind to retrive his car because Rick wasn't going anywhere on that wheel.

As usual, a little group split off the front at the end of Paris Road while the rest of us were regrouping. Once we got to Chef Highway, the pace ramped up, but there were only a few of us actually taking pulls. It seemed like every time we got a good rotation going, Howard would hit the front and pick it up to 30 mph and blow everything up. Every time he did, a couple more riders stopped taking pulls. Anyway, the bottom line is that I ended up doing a lot more work than I had planned.

The ride back was going along just swell until we hit the service road and Brett said he needed to stop to take a leak. The rest of the group just kept going, so Jason and I eased up to wait for Brett. By the time Brett got back to us, the rest of the group had a pretty good gap and they were going fast, too. We took a few pulls, but eventually Brett came around and we just latched onto his wheel while he pulled for the next five miles or so, finally closing the gap just before the Seabrook bridge. The legs were a little tired by the time I got home.