The Sunday Ride

I arrived at the Starbucks a little early Sunday morning, allowing me to sit on the comfy couch with a hot cup of coffee and a fresh cranberry scone while I waited to see if anyone else would show up. Nobody did. I've never really been able to identify that special combination of factors that determines turnout for training rides. This morning there was the annual Mardi Gras Marathon in town and I know a number of our guys were volunteering as lead bikes. A couple of the guys were also planning on a scouting trip up to the Rouge-Roubaix course in preparation for the March 9 event. So I wasn't too surprised to be rolling off down the causeway all alone. As it turned out, a couple of the New Orleans guys did make it over there anyway, but even so we had a smallish group of eight. Now the nice thing about a small group is that it's usually easier to keep things together, but the bad thing was that our route started off with some twenty-odd miles into a headwind. We rode for a long time in a double line, and for me that meant having Mike Lew providing steady conversation while spinning along into the wind just a tad faster than my still-cold legs really wanted. With overcast skies it wasn't warming up as quickly as I'd expected.

As usual, the pace didn't really pick up until we turned back to the southeast, although I was surprised that we didn't also pick up more of a tailwind at that point. As it turned out, the wind was shifting during our ride, and rather inconveniently so. So the group split up just a little bit as we raced out to the Sie Jenkins Road turn where most of us took a little break while Mike fixed something on his bike and we regrouped. When we finally all got going again I counted only seven, and Jay said that Jaro had ridden off ahead for reasons unknown. Over the course of the next twenty miles or so we would spot Jaro a minute or so up the road, but every time we started making up ground on him we'd slow down to regroup or something. When we started south on Lee Road we picked up the pace again and started reeling him in but he still made it to the Enon sprint sign about twenty seconds ahead. I thought surely he'd wait with us to regroup at Enon, but when I looked up and saw him crossing the highway I said to Jason, "Looks like he's going for King of the Mountain points too!" We regrouped at Enon but some of the group decided to ride in the rest of the way more slowly, so we went up and over the Watchtower hill, and soon it was just Jason, Jay and me. A few times I took what I thought were normal pulls and when I'd pull off I'd discover there was a gap. We had been slowly closing in on Jaro and when it happened again on Tung Road I decided to go it alone and see if I could finally close the deal, so I time-trialed down Lee Road and closed in on Jaro who by now had eased up considerably and we rode in the last few miles together. That last stretch should have been a tailwind, too, but the wind had shifted and instead we had yet another headwind. At least by then the sun had started to come out and the temperature had risen from the 40s into the 60s.

It was just the kind of ride I'd been hoping for, with a few hard efforts, a couple of long steady efforts, and a lot of smooth paceline.

Meanwhile, Up in Alaska, Jill Horner was in her first day of the Iditarod Train Invitational. Her husband(?) Geoff, who is running was first to the first checkpoint at mile 57, and at this point it looks like she's somewhere between the 90 and 130 mile checkpoints. I cannot even imagine how much farther they will be out there in the freezing Alaskan wilderness. We're talking about at least 5-6 days, I think, to go 350 miles in the snow, on a bike (or pushing it). Theoretically if she keeps up her earlier pace she could set a new record.