Long Winter Shadows

I find myself already anticipating the longer days of Spring, and so this morning was a blunt reminder that we're not quite there yet. Granted, there's a little more light in the sky at 6 a.m., and the temperature was only in the mid-40s, but I'm still riding out to the levee with blinky lights front and rear, and it still takes me a few miles to get warmed up. Interestingly, Daylight Savings Time begins this year on the morning of Rouge-Roubaix, March 9. Although that will mean darker mornings, it does open up the possibility of evening training rides and, dare I suggest it, training races on the lakefront! It sure would be great if we could get those going again, assuming they're finished hauling levee mud up and down Lakeshore Drive by then.

This morning in particular I was feeling sluggish and unfocused, forcing my feet around and just generally uncomfortable. The 12-rider group started out pretty easy today and although I felt like a tub of lard, I figured once I got warmed up everything would be better. And then Howard got on the front. We went from maybe 22 mph to around 26 mph and I was just not up for that game quite yet, so I let a gap open ahead of me and struggled to hold it steady, knowing it would eventually slow down. Finally I made contact again and quickly decided to take myself out of whatever game was being played at the front. It's a long way out to Ormond, and a longer way back, and I had no intention of making the return trip feel like a death march, so I dropped back past the end of the rotation and, for the most part stayed there until the pace eased up and I felt a little more warmed up, which is to say I sucked wheel almost all the way out.

Way up the river around the Luling bridge the sun finally made it over the batture trees, casting long winter shadows on the bike path. Finally, after the turnaround, I started to warm up and feel marginally alive again. Of course by now most of the group (i.e. those who hadn't been sucking wheels like I was) was starting to feel a little tired from the earlier pace and speeds now were decidedly on the slower side. Four or five times, as the group rolled easily at 22 mph, I dropped fifteen seconds off the back, plopped the chain down onto the small cogs, grabbed the bars deep in the bend and did short little catch-up sprints back up to the group. These felt really good and my legs started to loosen up a bit more with each one. So I ended up occasionally pushing the pace a bit over the last miles of the ride, perhaps a touch more than some would have liked, but then that's pretty much the kind of thing we're supposed to be training for anyway, isn't it? After all, we're just about a month from the start of the road racing season, so it's about time to start mixing some brief but intense efforts into the training gumbo.