Monday Means Recovery

I guess everybody got in a lot of hard riding last weekend because today it was just Adam and me up on the levee. The rest of the usual group must have stayed in bed this morning, either to recover from the weekend or to get a head start on tapering for the upcoming Tour de Louisiane. To tell the truth, I was feeling pretty sluggish myself, so we did a nice easy spin in sub-20 territory.

By the time I was ready for work the sky was getting pretty grey and there was a light drizzle. I was lucky to make it downtown before the skies really opened up. It rained off-and-on all day with another big storm just as I got home. On the plus side, it kept the temperatures down, so that was nice.

I got a text message from Kenny Bellau saying that he took 7th in the first day's Criterium up at the Tour of Ohio. A couple of weeks ago he was saying that he felt like he was "at about 80%" fitness-wise. Looks like he's about back in racing shape now for the first time, really, since Katrina.

So yesterday morning on my way out to the lake I took a ride around the state championship criterium course in City Park here in New Orleans. The race hasn't been officially announced yet, so I guess there could still be some changes, but probably not to the course. Anyway, it looks like a really fast and non-technical course to me. Although there are a lot of turns, they are almost all easy sweeping curves rather than sharp 90-degree ones. There's also a U-turn. I've never really figured out how to handle a U-turn. All I know is that you always come out of them a lot slower than you went in, and that means a big acceleration every time. Should be interesting.

Hopefully I can finish updating the Tour de La Race Bible tomorrow morning. There's not really much that needs to be changed, and most of it's already done, so I'll basically just need to print out a clean original so we can make copies. A couple of things I'm adding this year: Results from Saturday will be posted to the website that night so riders can see where they stand on GC without trying to find me. Also, I put the latitude and longitude of the Road Race start in the Race Bible from the GPS folks. Online registration is looking pretty good, just a little bit lower than last year for some reason, but I think we'll have a good turnout. Curtis sent me two CDs of photos from the Master's and Cat. 1,2,3 races in Natchez last week. Maybe I can find time to put them into a web album some time tomorrow. All I know for sure is it won't happen tonight because I'm going to be asleep in about ten minutes...