Much of a Good Thing

Lake Pontchartrain was calm and pretty in the morning light as I set the cruise control for the dead-straight 24 mile drive across the causeway. Thanks to a southeast breeze I had the company of pelicans and seagulls as they surfed the updraft along the east side of the bridge. Sipping on my coffee, I looked up at the clear blue sky and thought it would be another spectacular riding day. I was right. Still, arriving at the start of the northshore training ride I was a little surprised to see there would be only nine of us on such a great day. One reason for the low turnout was probably the fact that it's also prime time for, well, pretty much everything from soccer to walks in the park.


So the nine of us headed out for the usual circuit, riding north on a sweet tailwind. As we approached the watchtower I looked down at my computer, and then at my watch, and thought, "it's going to be a long ride home." When we turned west a few miles past Enon the tailwind became even stronger and the pace, of course, shot up quickly. There's nothing like an early-season tailwind ride in warm weather to make you forget about saving a little something for the inevitable headwind slog that awaits.


By the time we turned back to the north we'd already gapped off a couple of the guys, so, not without some difficulty, we kept the pace a bit slower out to highway 10, but once we turned right again toward Plainview and entered the traditional killbox, things started getting faster. We went up the first big hill together at a smooth tempo, but soon after that things started getting faster and the next significant hill finally broke the chain in more than one place. A few of us in the front group started taking short pulls into the growing headwind as if we were in breakaway mode, and I started to feel the effects of yesterday's perhaps overly enthusiastic Giro Ride. It seemed I wasn't alone. The previous day's great weather had sucked most of us into hard rides, and now we were finding that back-to-back perfect riding days might be a little too much of a good thing.


When we got to little Sie Jenkins Road, we regrouped, but for some reason Jaro decided, as he had the weekend before, to continue on alone. By the time the rest of us finally got rolling again with everyone in attendance we must have been ten minutes down on him. We never caught sight of Jaro again. In fact, Robert was feeling so bonked when we got back to Enon that he stopped at the store and ordered a hamburger! We took that to mean he was not going to be pushing the pace on the way home, so we left him to refuel and headed out. Once again, of course, we couldn't resist putting the hammer down over the watchtower hill, so things split up again on the way to Tung Road. Jason and I waited there for the last couple of guys to catch up and when we saw them coming we started soft-pedaling down Tung Road only to look back a minute later and see that they had stopped. I couldn't tell if they'd had a flat or what, so Jason went on and I went back to see what the problem was. When I got there I found Jake lying in the grass on the side of the road trying to summon up the strength to make the last seven or eight miles back to the car. So of course I stretched the truth and told him we had only five miles to go, so they clipped in and I rode with them straight into the headwind, which by this time had gotten quite serious, the rest of the way. I was pretty tired by the time we got back, which was right about when Jaro headed out in his car to find Robert, who without hesitation accepted the lift. It looked like most of the group had a pretty hard ride today, although I think the real culprit was our own inability to waste any part of such a glorious weekend by going slow.


Tomorrow, I will be sore...