Muscle Memory

As I rode out to the levee this morning, it was clear that my quads remembered Sunday's ride. Late Saturday night I had decided to get up early and join the club's 7 a.m. Northshore training ride. After a few weeks of exclusively flatland riding, I was in need of some "relief," so I got up at 5 a.m. in order to make it all the way up to Enon where the ride would start. We had about a dozen for this ride, which worked out to be something like 67 miles. The route was rather circuitous, to say the least, with a good twenty turns and numerous country dogs along the way, and most of us were relying on route arrows that had been painted on the roads some time earlier. Despite all of the intersections and turns, this was a fairly brisk training ride on really smooth roads that offered only a few stretches of flat. Early on, the group size dropped down to 9 riders and although a few were yo-yoing off the back we were regrouping at most of the intersections until we stopped at a store in Pine. After that, I think the horses would smell the barn and as the pace picked up we lost a few more riders, not all of whom managed to get back to the cars without riding a few "bonus miles." It was a good training ride with some sections that felt almost race-like, and although I wasn't feeling particularly sharp, I was happy to be finishing with the first group.

So anyway, this morning the levee seemed particularly quiet. There were just Joe and I, and so I spent the whole ride cruising at 19-21 mph with Joe on my wheel. I could definitely still feel Sunday's ride in my legs. We didn't see many other riders at all, though.

Sunday evening I was standing on a 5th floor balcony looking southwest over the Mississippi. Down on the levee someone with a lawn mower was cutting the grass in a big square amidst the usual evening crowd of dogs and people at the de facto dog park. As usual, the city has fallen behind on basic maintenance. Out in the river a big heavily laden ship slipped its way downstream as a tug pushing a string of barges muscled its way in the other direction. Things looked pretty normal from that distance.

Well the roofers pretty much finished up the main roof on Saturday, and a couple of hours later we got to test it out with a big rainstorm. They've still got to replace a small section of shed roof on the back of the house, but everything should be wrapped up by tomorrow, so now we'll move on to painting ceilings and stuff. Meanwhile at work we've got two proposals that will be on serious fast tracks thanks to federal agencies that have waited until the last minute despite knowing that they will need to make the awards before the end of the federal fiscal year, Sept. 30. We just got the deadline of Aug. 11 for one of them, and since I won't know what we will be requesting until after a 4 p.m. meeting today, there will be only three days to pull this one together. Ah well, I guess that's where all that last-minute race organizing experience comes in handy.