Out and Back

Sunday was a long day on the road but not on the bike. Somewhere around 950 miles covered, mostly due south from IC to NO. The Daughter's condition was much improved, and although she will be taking antibiotics for a few more days, she is already at work coaching at a gym in Ponchatoula where she will be for the week.

We headed out from IC rather late, around 7:30 a.m., taking the shorter route that doesn't put us on an Interstate highway until St. Louis. I found The Daughter's Jeep Liberty to be fairly comfortable but just a little bit twitchy on the road. She was travelling pretty lightly this time, which surprised me, taking only a small bag and her Cannondale R-400. We pulled in to New Orleans a bit before 10:30, which was pretty good considering the fact that we made a few stops, including dinner at one of the ubiquitous Cracker Barrel places, and didn't push the speed limit very much. The hardest part of the drive was looking at the totals ring up on the gas pumps along the way.

Somewhere around Arkansas, I got a call from Ben S. who was unhappy at having been DQ'ed at the track the night before for coming out of the sprinter's lane at the end of a match sprint. He said that the other rider had already sat up, and if that's the case, the DQ was definitely wrong. If the other rider was still close, then it was justified. You can check out rule 2F8(c) if you're interested.

This was the second weekend in a row that I was forced to be completely off the bike, and by Sunday I was really feeling down about it. It's a fact of life for regular people like me that things come up every year that tend to unravel whatever it is that you call your training program, but that doesn't really make it any easier. So once I finally got home I figured I'd go out a little early this morning and get my legs re-aquainted with the bike. I wasn't home more than half an hour before that plan went down in flames. When I checked my email there was one from a co-worker with a subject line that read "morning pick-up." The gist was that there was a public hearing and meeting this morning up in Baton Rouge concerning a $13 million funding allocation for the health sciences center (via the special social services block grant for the Louisiana Recovery Authority, for those who might be interested) and our senior VP wanted us to drive up there with her in case it got ugly. "Morning" meant 7:15 a.m. It all went well, ultimately, albiet with the usual outcome that I have a bunch of "drop everything else" work to do that I didn't have yesterday. So it looks like I will have to jump right into the deep end for tomorrow morning's levee ride, sleepy legs an all.