Anticipation

When I finally arrived back home yesterday night there was a box waiting for me. I had ordered a bunch of 9-speed drivetrain parts and, amazingly, they had arrived. On time and under budget. So although I didn't stay up all night rebuilding the bike, I'm already anticipating the smooth feel of fresh chainrings against a fresh chain, cassette and jockey wheels. The balky shifter and cobbled together rear wheel will have to be next, but after shelling out probably $1,200 for the last trip to Iowa it may have to wait a little bit. (Since a balance beam routine is limited to 90 seconds, that works out to about $800 per minute. ) I should probably also be thinking about replacing handlebars and stem, especially after watching Hincapie bite the dust at Paris-Roubaix yesterday. BTW, if, like me, you didn't see it on TV, there's a nice video clip on eurosport.com that shows the crash, the railroad crossing incident, and the finish.

I've already gotten a couple of warnings about the results problems at last weekend's Tour le Fleur, so I'm anticipating that I'll have trouble getting the LCCS points updated for that one. So far, no results have been sent out. Apparently most of the final results were still not done hours after the last race ended and so most people went home without knowing their final omnium placings. My guess is that we won't have all of the necessary 12 places for the Cat. 1,2 and Cat. 3 riders since they all rode together. Likewise the Master 35+ and 45+. Last year at this race I think we never got adequate results for the Cat. 4 or Cat. 5 race and so never awarded any LCCS points for it at all. Luckily (I guess) we don't use the omnium placings, just the individual race placings. Anyway, it will be interesting and there will be some unhappy campers now that the importance of LCCS points seems to be right on par with food and shelter.

Despite an early meeting at work this morning I did get myself out on the bike for about an hour,most of it alone until Dan and ultimately Richard H showed up. I felt like I hadn't been on a bike in a week, which isn't all that far from the truth. Man, when you start taking the weekends away from a weekend athlete, it really sucks. I was surprised by how cool it was, too. I am definitely ready to put the arm-warmers away for the summer at this point. Looks like George Hincapie has nothing to anticipate right now except surgery to fix his broken shoulder. Sunday was certainly a day in hell for Discovery!

So today there is a whole crew of people outside my window at the office putting on a new roof surface. I think one or two of them speak English as a native language. The office smells like melted tar and there's lots of noise. Every now and then it sounds like someone drops a ton of bricks on the roof over my head.