Below the Storm

I made it out to the Friday ride, but I already knew how I'd feel. The prior day's drip in the back of my throat was none the better and I'd already started taking pseudoephrine, which thanks to the popularity of home-brew Meth, now serves as a poor substitute for the good ol' pseudoephedrine that got me through my worst allergy years of the 80s and 90s. The morning ride was not exactly an easy recovery ride, and I felt sorry for the new rider (Monica, I think) who showed up and politely asked if she could ride with us. Although the pace wasn't what you'd call "fast," it stayed up around 23-24 most of the way, and the first time I looked behind me she was nowhere to be seen. Cycling can be so harsh that way. I'm hoping that she ended up riding with Richard H., who that morning had marked the return of Springtime by showing up for the morning ride. Anyway, it was a pretty nice ride, but I knew something was wrong.

By noon on Friday I was really starting to feel under the weather. My nose had been running like a leaky faucet all morning and I was starting to feel a little achy. Around 3:00 I walked down the street to the drug store and picked up some Zinc lozenges to try and reduce my chances of getting a sore throat. So far it's either working or there was never a sore throat to ward off. Who knows? Since we had to go across the lake to meet one of The Wife's many mildly neurotic sisters for dinner we left work a little early, arriving back home to find the Gas Line Installing Crew hard at work. They've been replacing all of the gas lines in our neighborhood since they were all compromised by the flooding after Katrina (they mostly filled up with muddy water), and the area around our corner house was ground-zero that day. Sadly, they were relying on an old map to guess where our gas meter is (it's inside the basement, so they couldn't see it) and ran about 70 feet of underground gas line down one side of the house, which turns out to have been about 50 feet farther than necessary. Oops. Sadly, I'd given their office my cellphone number a couple of days earlier but they never took the time to call.

By the time we left the northshore, around 10:30 last night, the storms were moving in rapidly. Driving through rainstorms in the middle of a 25-mile wide lake is always exciting. A couple of hours later the really heavy stuff moved through the city jolting me out of bed more than once with shockingly loud claps of thunder and intensely bright lightning that went on for hours. Now, though, it's mostly passed through and I'm sitting here sniffling and sucking on Zinc and listening to the sound backhoes and heavy equipment and hoping against hope that I'll feel good enough to make the road race over in Cuba by 4:30 a.m. tomorrow. To make matters worse, the rain washed away any chance of getting in a ride this morning. Of course that may have been a good thing, at least for me. With the head cold, sore ribs, twisted ankle, and dull headache, the Giro Ride might not have been such a good idea.