Wind and Water

Tuesday morning I worked my way out the door and past the mud and the new eight foot deep excavation that the gas people have made about three feet from the house, and headed for the levee in my usual rush because as usual I was running late. All I can say is that it's a good thing I don't live very far from where we meet. My legs were clearly still feeling a little bit of last Sunday, so I figured I'd take it relatively easy since my plan was to turn around at the dip anyway. It was looking like the weather would be fine for Tuesday Night Worlds on the lakefront, so I didn't need the extra mileage. The 45 minutes on the lakefront plus the ride to and from would most likely prove more than sufficient to satisfy the day's masochism quota.

The river level continues to rise noticeably, and after I turned around for the long solo ride back down the bike path I could hear the water lapping loudly up against the concrete levee apron. In most places it's already easy to see that the river water level is quite a bit higher than the ground on the other side. A few more feet and it will go from noticeable to shocking. It looks to me like a number of the businesses that operate on the batture are getting pretty close to having some flooding problems, but of course that's the price you pay if you need to build something on the wrong side of the levee. It's always surprised me that most of these buildings aren't even raised. I guess the cost of cleaning up every ten years or so is lower than that of building something a little more flood-resistant. So anyway, I had an enjoyable enough return trip into the headwind and got to work a little earlier than usual.

Later that afternoon The Wife called looking for an excuse to leave work a few minutes early, so I got a ride back to the house. That was nice because it meant I wouldn't have to rush down Carrollton Avenue in the crazy rush-hour traffic to make the training race.

I guess we had about twenty out there yesterday evening. There was a stiff wind blowing out of the southeast, which translated into a cross-headwind in one direction and a cross-tailwind in the other. It was going to be a hard one, and I was really not feeling up to speed. So we started out and within a mile or so Eddie, Woody and someone else (Diego?) had already opened a big gap. I was still basically fighting for a draft in the gutter most of the time, so there wasn't much I could do about it. The rest of the group seemed to be in considerable disagreement about just how important it was to chase. Even with the rather intermittent chasing, further complicated by the crosswind and the fact that only five or six were willing to stick their noses out in front for any length of time, we weren't losing much ground for the first couple of laps. In fact, I thought we got pretty close on lap 3 of 6 - maybe 20 seconds or so - but it kind of crumbled after that, along with my ability to keep track of which lap we were on. Matt was feeling particularly frustrated with the group's efforts, and his steady stream of verbal abuse wasn't having much of an effect. As a result, he would occasionally launch off the front, only to be slowly and painfully reeled back in. And of course Mike was in there swerving around in the crosswind on his fixed gear TT bike with a rear disk. It looked like he was having some serious difficulty in the headwinds, no doubt due to the Herculean gear he was riding. Anyway, I was getting a pretty intense workout even though I wasn't spending a whole lot of time on the front. With one lap to go Mike goes flying past all the way over in the left lane to take what he *thought* was the finish. The group rolls past him as he sits up.

On the last lap, which I thought was the second-to-last lap, there we were flying along the tailwind stretch toward the fountain traffic circle. I was sitting behind Ben and we were both being guttered by the crosswind coming from the left when **bam** I roll over something big enough to knock one hand off the bars. I'm thinking it must have been a clump of mud or a rock or chuck of concrete from the ongoing levee construction. A moment later **bam, bam88** Ben nails something even bigger, knocking his hands off the bars so he hits the stem with his chest. Right on his wheel I hit it too. Luckily Ben regained control and pulled over without going down. I know it must have hurt that elbow replacement that he just had done. So I close the gap and the pace picks up and I'm still thinking we have another lap to go. There's an attack or two and as I go past someone I hear him say something like "go get 'em Randy" and think "oh, this must be the finish." I guess I'll have to work on my counting skills. In the past, when we were using the longer course, I got pretty good at knowing when the last lap came up just by looking at the clock, but on this course I haven't quite figured it out yet since the laps are so much shorter. It was a lot of fun, though. As I was riding down Lakeshore Drive afterward with Eddie and VJ, VJ looked over at Eddie and said, "Yeah, we would have had a really good race if it hadn't been for you guys!" It's hard being dropped, even if most of the race is with you...