One Step Forward, Two Back

We had great weather again today, and again today I was not able to ride. After getting in some much-needed saddle time over the weekend, I was beginning to feel like a bike rider again when I awoke Monday morning to more wet streets. I'm wishing I had gone out anyway, but at the time it felt like a day off was in order, and besides, I had a paper that I absolutely had to get finished before noon. So I stayed at home and worked on the laptop, finally finishing up around 11 on our responses to a bunch of questions from a consulting company working with the Board of Regents on a strategic plan to determine how to spend $28M in funding allocated to higher ed in the hurricane affected region. Then I had to tag along on a little walking tour with these folks through parts of the uptown campus in the late afternoon. Wasn't home long before The Wife got a call from Baton Rouge. Her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, fell and possibly broke her hand and hit her head and was not looking good at all. Many phone calls ensued, the last at around 2:30 a.m. informing her that they were finally ready to admit her to hospital to treat the injuries along with the dehydration and UTI that they discovered along the way. Sheesh. So this morning I got up already tired and had to be at an early morning meeting anyway, so all rides were off again. Now The Wife's up in B.R. to sit with her mother overnight and give her brother and sister a little break.

I put the new USCF rule changes up on the LAMBRA website, and now that they've been disseminated, it's interesting that the most controversial one is the new junior gear restriction that requires Juniors to ride their restricted gears in non-junior races too. Good grief, what a pain for everybody. I've never seen a Junior whose knees were hurt by pushing big gears, and given that the limit is a 52x14, most of them aren't likely to be developing any better pedaling technique than they would have otherwise. Developing a smooth spin is an important cycling skill. Practice it. See? You didn't need a gear restriction to learn that, did you?