Oh Ate!

Welcome to '08! After a nice, but inadequately long vacation I can't really say I'm too excited about heading back to work tomorrow, but such is life. During yesterday's ride, Chad was recruiting people for an 11:00 am New Years Day ride, and he asked me to send out an email, which, of course, I did. So for a change, I slept until 8:00, tried unsuccessfully to get an old Campi computer mount to work on the Orbea (I knew there must have been some reason I'd replaced it in the first place), I headed out to meet the New Year's Day ride. There was a good sized group up there being buffeted by the cold 25 mph northwest wind, but no Chad! I did get a "happy new year" text message from Reo, while I was waiting, but couldn't send a reply because it was sent as an email. I might have been justified in presuming today's ride would be an easy one, but in fact it turned out to be a bona fide training ride. With such a strong crosswind most of the way out to the turnaround, I was careful to stay near the front and in the rotation so that I'd at least get a little shelter now and then. So I wasn't too surprised when, somewhere out past the dip, I looked back to see, well, nobody. Our group was down to maybe five riders including powerhouses VJ and Max, rouleur Tim, and lightweights Diego and me. In spite of the wind, the weather was otherwise fantastic -- clear blue sky, crisp temperature, perfect pace. The legs felt pretty good, and I hardly even noticed that I didn't have a computer on the bike.

Right after we regrouped and started back, though, I flatted. It was one of those tiny, sharp shards of recycled mystery material that they apparently made the bike path with, but we were back in action pretty quickly. Diego had been riding pretty hard in his junior gears, and toward the end of the ride he and I were alone. The pace was good, so I decided to just go with it. After we reached the playground we eased up to wait for the group, but looking back all we could see was David S. about thirty seconds back. We soft-pedaled for a while, and when we looked back again he wasn't in sight. Hmmmm. So we turned around and found him on the side of the bike path trying to fix his saddle that had slipped out of adjustment. It was not really cooperating, so we decided to ride down to Zotz on Oak Street for a coffee where he could get it straightened out.

The rest of the day was spent in a cloud of paint and wood dust, as usual.....