It was another hot and fast summer ride on the long black bike path. At first it looked like the turnout would be small, but I think that was a result of the later sunrise more than anything else. People always start showing up later and later this time of year. By the time we started, a few minutes late, many of the usual crew was just showing up. Riding up the river and under the Huey P. Long bridge, Tim and Woody took over the front with a surge, followed by another surge, and another. I was trying to take some pulls, but you know it takes a little longer to warm up old meat and I hadn't really been expecting it to go so fast so soon. Even so, I was thinking that the pace they were setting into the wind wasn't sustainable over the whole 40+ mile ride, even for them. For a while it was just the two of them taking pulls as the rest of the group struggled to close the gaps and settle into this fast morning paceline.
Eventually they dropped back and some of the regular riders filtered up to the front which slowed things down by about three miles per hour. Somewhere way out there I dropped to the back too, where I stayed for quite a few miles contemplating weighty questions like "Do they know how far we're going today?" and "Am I getting too old for this?" I didn't really notice where exactly they turned back, confirming my earlier suspicions about the sustainability of the pace, but I guess it was somewhere around the "dip." By then, though, the group had settled on a more typical consensus speed and so the pace didn't slow down appreciably. As it turned out, I had a pretty hard ride both coming and going, doing a lot of work in the last five or six miles when it was clear that a lot of the group was really starting to fade. As is the usual case this time of year, I got back home soaking wet with sweat, with my glasses stuck into the holes in my helmet because I couldn't see out of them any longer for all the sweat that had dripped onto them. The fronts of my legs, and for that matter all the leading edges of my bike, were covered with a thin film of dirt interrupted here and there where big drops of sweat had fallen. I was pretty well toasted by the time I threw a leg over the commuter for the ride to work, and I could feel my legs protesting as I stood to climb the Broad Street Overpass. When I finally sat down in my office my body was successfully convincing my brain that it was time for a little nap, so I had to go pour myself a cup of caffeine just to keep my head from bobbing up and down on my keyboard.
I've been noticing something lately that's both exciting and disturbing at the same time. They're the kids of old bike racers who keep showing up in the news. First there were the riders like Axel Merckx who is the son of Eddy Merckx who was winning the Tour de France back when I started racing. Axel not only raced in the TDF and turned out to be one of the top professionals, he's already retired! Then there's the rapid rise of Taylor Phinney, currently in Beijing, and son of two of my all-time favorite U.S. cyclists and Olympians, long since retired from racing, Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter. In the recent Tour de France the top U.S. rider was none other than Christian Vande Velde who is also on the current Olympic team and whose father John was one of the top U.S. riders, and an Olympian, back when I started racing. Now I suddenly hear about Peter Stetina winning the U23 Nationals and I think, "That's got to be either Dale's or Wayne's son." Sure enough, he's Dale Stetina's son. Well, at least Dale and Wayne are still racing -- in the 55+ age group.
The Olympic Road Races this weekend will probably be, as always, kind of a lottery. Some of these pro riders always seem genuinely confused when they're thrown into a one-day race like this without the usual teams. At least the course sounds like a pretty hard one, so it should be interesting.
It's great to see this new generation of riders following in their parents' footsteps, of course, but these are things that do tend to make one feel kind of, well, OLD.
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