Turnabout

After a short and easy "active recovery" ride with Joe on Monday, I was expecting a lively long levee ride this morning. I was also expecting to feel recovered after the recovery ride. I got neither.

The storms ahead of this week's cold front finally rolled through late at night, putting on a big thunder and lightning show, and throwing in lots of strong gusty wind for lagniappe. The nice spring-like weather of the last few days was completely turned around within a couple of hours as the wind shifted to the northwest and the temperature started to fall. Yet the thermometer this morning read something like 51F, so I figured "how bad could it be?"

There was a small group up on the levee, and by the time I got there I was already feeling quite unenthusiastic. My legs still felt kind of stiff and achy, and the prospect of battling the wind was particularly unappealing. I think I'd already decided to turn around early before I even clipped in today. So we headed out, picking up a couple more riders (even Robin!) along the way, and settled into a kind of unsteady rotating paceline with six or seven riders. The problem was that the crosswind sections really had room for only four or five, so after taking a quick turn at the front and then struggling to find a bit of draft from the next guy when he dropped back, you would quickly find yourself at the back where you'd need to switch over to the line moving forward, usually without a draft until a couple more people up front pulled off. Ordinarily I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it, but this morning I was just feeling tired and grumpy and was really, really not enjoying myself at all. Pretty soon we lost Mignon and I think maybe another rider, which just made it worse. I've always found that once a group gets down to just a handful of riders, this circular paceline stuff becomes less and less attractive because you end up spending half of your time either pulling at the front or dropping back or accelerating back onto the paceline. Just ain't worth it no more. But I persevered so as not to upset the flow, but I just couldn't get into it.

When we got out to the St. Charles Parish line, I eased off the back with Robin and we turned around early, riding back down the river with the better part of a quartering tailwind until Robin turned off around the bridge where he'd parked his car. I still felt a little guilty for not having done the long ride, but sometimes you've just got to listen to what your body's telling you. Mine was clearly saying, "go home and have some nice toast and jam." As I rode in the last few miles I could see the two Navy ships being built at the Avondale shipyard across the river, one of which, the USS New York, had been christened last weekend. That's the ship that is built with steel recycled from the World Trade Center. The ship's motto? "Never Forget, Strength Through Sacrifice."

By the time I got home the temperature had actually dropped a bit and my feet were cold. Damn. I was all ready for summer, too. I had a brief workshop uptown on Tulane's new website "content management system" in the morning, so at least I had time to stop by PJ's on campus for an overpriced cup of coffee and a chance to check my email. Looks to me like dealing with this content management system is going to be a rather painful transition for me. I'm really going to miss my straightforward HTML tables, but such is the price of progress.