Soaked in Sweat

A warm and damp south wind kept the temperatures up overnight, and as I rode out to the levee around sunrise I could see the big cumulus clouds already beginning to form. The group today turned out to be pretty big and as is typical this time of year, the Tuesday ride was fast. Too fast. Once we got rolling we were up to 28, 29, 30 mph with a little tailwind bolstering the the speed. There was no way this was going to be sustainable, and pretty soon there was just a handful of riders pulling at the front. Eight miles in and things were starting to deteriorate up there. A couple of guys would take hard pulls, gaps would open, and when the last one would pull off, nobody could come around. Finally, the pace backed off a notch, people started to recover, and things came back to something more closely resembling reality.

So basically, it was a typical Tuesday ride. I was trying to avoid eating all my cookies before the turnaround and was therefore dividing my time between the front and the back of the group, although the back sometimes seemed like just as much work because of the relatively unstable pace. By the time I descended back to ground level for my ride home I was completely and totally soaked in sweat, looking through the top of my Oakleys because the rest of the lenses were covered with sweaty splatters. I have to admit, though, that there's something I like about riding in these conditions. Something familiar. It must be the same way a dog feels about a grungy saliva-covered tennis ball. I'll still take the relative freedom of hot weather over the clothing encased cold.

The neighbor is having his house painted and had his Morgan roadster with the Hawaii plates out on the front lawn yesterday evening. I just had to go take a picture of it, even though it's one of those modern Morgans and not one of the "real" ones that had the leather straps to hold down the bonnet and puddle of oil underneath. Anyway, it kind of makes me miss my TR-6 days back in the 70s. Today's Tour de France stage ended in spectacular fashion with a truly noble performance by someone who is looking like a real champion in the most classic sense of the word. I'll leave it at that just in case you want to see what happens for yourself on TV. Since I don't have the expensive version of cable that I'd need to see much of the Tour, I follow it with a combination of live reports, live audio, and live video from CyclingNews, VeloNews, Eurosport and some random Serbian TV station. Naturally the audio feed crapped out at about the 2k to go mark and the video feed disappeared somewhat earlier, but hey, I can read.