How's the Weather

All cyclists are obsessively preoccupied about the weather. I'm certainly no exception. In fact, if I could I'd probably be running my own private weather station. Fortunately, we now have the internet and TWC and the Weather Underground to keep us from doing anything foolish. Yesterday morning was a case in point. The alarm went off as usual and as I started to get out of bed The Wife mumbled "it's raining." Indeed it was raining pretty hard at the time, but of course I now had to know if it was just passing over or if it was going to be an all-day affair. So I lit up the Palm Pilot to check the radar on its little screen and, damn, it was not looking good. I briefly considered going out on the full-fendered Pennine, but that would have also meant riding to work in the rain, so I decided to skip it. It turned out to have been the right decision that day because I pretty much rained nonstop until late afternoon, at which point the clouds parted, a north wind blew in, and it quickly went from miserable to beautiful. Anyway, it reminded me of that joke:

On Saturday morning, a roadie gets up early, as he has for so many Saturday morning rides, and softly slips out of the bedroom. He dresses quietly in the next room, grabs his helmet and water bottles, and goes out to pump the tires. As the garage door opens, he's confronted by an icy, windswept rain. He's ridden before in these conditions. He doesn't like it, but when it's Saturday morning he never misses. He ponders the dismal conditions and then retreats to the kitchen to tune a small TV to the Weather Channel. The forecast only sounds worse. This is one Saturday when he just can't summon the determination. With a sigh, he slips off his shoes, quietly returns to the bedroom, undresses and slips back into bed. There he cuddles up to his wife's back and whispers, "The weather out there is terrible." To which she sleepily replies, "Can you believe my husband went riding in that crap?"

So we left work a few minutes early (since we'd gotten there a good hour earlier than usual) and The Wife and I went for an easy ride on the levee. My only mistake was not taking the Pennine because some of the streets were still pretty wet and I had to go really slowly on the street-level part of the bike path because it was covered in water still draining off of the levee.

Thursday was better. We had a long line of riders this morning and the air felt just a tiny bit cooler than usual, although the humidity was still pegged at 100%. As they say, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." So here we are in a long paceline with Woody and Brady up at the front going hard when there's a little surge and, once again, someone lets a big gap open and then pulls out of the paceline. Same as Tuesday and even the same person. VJ goes flying past us on the left as Donald harasses him for not helping pull the rest of the group across the gap. I go around and start picking up the pace but by then the gap is about fifteen seconds and they're still going hard. I see VJ make contact, but I'm about done and there's nobody on my wheel, so I wait for reinforcements. Donald comes to the front and takes a long pull and after a while the lead group eases up a bit and we finally all come back together. At least my legs were feeling a little better today.

On the way back, though, I was trying to take is just a little bit easier than usual since I'm planning on racing up in Meridian this weekend. There were a few riders at the front pushing the pace, but after a while Donald put on his Gatekeeper hat and just sat there about four riders from the front letting the front guys back in ahead of him while the rest of us had a nice easy ride in his draft.