How Short??

A cool front was just blowing through when I arrived atop the levee this morning. Grey skies and a chilly 20 mph wind gusting out of the Northwest greeted me as I tried unsuccessfully to find some shelter behind the big round metal pump where we meet. Amazingly, most of the regulars arrived on time and the discussion quickly turned from "how far are we riding today" to "how short are we riding today." The compromise turnaround today was the "first dip," a few miles farther out than the usual "short ride" turnaround. There were no dissenters. The long South-Southwest stretch leading between the bridge and the Country Club was easy, but we all knew that once we rounded the bend at the Country Club, the wind would be directly in our faces. We had a 10-rider eschelon on a 5-rider road, leaving those at the back balancing along the downwind edge of the road searching in vain for a bit of draft. There were calls from the back for the lead riders to take shorter pulls so that nobody would be stuck back there long enough to get dropped. Out in Harahan somewhere Howard appeared, riding a Celeste green Bianchi with a 55-tooth chainring and yard-wide upright handlebars. The guy with the tennis shoes was out today too and doing fine. Once we made the turnaround, it got a bit easier and the pace got faster, but in general the whole ride was a battle with the wind.

So the USAC put up their newly revised website yesterday, a little earlier than originally planned, but probably because they had just moved everything to new, faster servers and somebody was smart enough to dump all the old stuff during the transition. It's still a work in progress, and in fact it progressed a bit just last night. When I went to check it out yesterday, I figured I'd see how hard it was to find something that all of the USCF riders should be looking for: the Rulebook. I looked all over the place but couldn't find it. Turned out it was on the "Officials Program" page. Now, if I was a regular USCF rider, that's about the last place I'd look. In fact, it was. So I sent off an email to George H., and then one to the webmaster, and a couple of hours later, he added links to the rulebooks under each of the "Discipline" dropdown menus in the top navigation bar. Nice! Now if everybody would please go read the road racing rules, I won't have to explain how free laps work or which age groups are supposed to have state championships, etc.

The Wife went out for a run the other day and tripped on some branches and fell. Well, yesterday she finally got an appointment with an orthopedist and, no big surprise, she broke a bone in her thumb. A nice clean non-dislocated break, but still very swollen and plenty painful. She'll be in one of those removable splint things that goes all the way up her forearm for a while. Now if she'll just go pick up the pain medicine from the drugstore, it would make my life a bit easier! Dropped about $700 last night to fly The Daughter in for Christmas. Ouch. Oh yeah, be sure to check out the Nov. 6 edition of Sports Illustrated, because my sister's daughter Lizzie Barnes apparently made the "Faces in the Crowd" section. She's currently ranked No. 1 in the nation in goals-against average and also save percentage at 95.3% (soccer).