Missing the Rain

With legs still a bit sore from the weekend's abuse, I rolled out he door Monday morning wondering if I'd be lucky enough to miss the rain. The sky was already cloudy and the forecast was for rain, and lots of it. I was in full "active recovery" mode, which is what OCD people use instead of real recovery, and so I doubt I exceeded 15 mph for most of my ride. There was just the lightest of misty drizzle falling here and there. In fact, the word "drizzle" would be too strong. It was lighter than a drizzle and more sparse than a mist. Something like a light "mizzle." Anyway, I had lots of time to admire the scenery and contemplate drippy semantics since I was practically the only person up on the bike path. At least I arrived back home reasonably dry and satisfied that I hadn't yielded to the bedcovers and forecasters. A few minutes later The Wife called to tell me to drive the car to work because the real rain was on its way. I did. It was. Still, it was over by the time we left work, so I might as well have taken the bike.

So after staying up last night until midnight watching the Olympics and staying on to see the end of the Men's Team Gymnastics (nice teamwork, USA!), I was on my feet again in the dark at 5:45 stealing AAA batteries out of non-essential devices in order to get my little blinky light back in action. Today was the first blinky light day for me this summer. After my little orthopedic siesta this season, it seems like the summer has just flown by. The kids are already back in school, and the universities will be starting up their Fall semesters in a couple of weeks.

We ended up with a good-sized group this morning and despite the dire meteorological prognostications the sky was clear. Of course, it doesn't really matter much if it's raining or not when the relative humidity is pegged at 100% the whole time. Anyway, things got rolling pretty fast and the crosswind was causing a lot of grief beyond mid-pack where there was little draft to be had. Then, maybe halfway out, Brady took a long fast pull at the front that surged the pace up another couple of miles per hour and the rider in front of me started letting a gap open. I couldn't tell if he was going to close it or not until it got pretty big, and he wasn't pulling over, but finally I went past and made a long fruitless effort to close. When I started to fade I pulled off, only to discover there was nobody on my wheel. Sheesh. So I backed off and waited for the now-splintered group to get its act together, watching a little break roll off down the road. Finally we got kind of a loosely organized rotation going and the gap at least stopped growing. There just wasn't sufficient consensus in the group to mount a real chase, though, but at least we were holding our own. Eventually the break disintegrated, leaving Brady out there solo. He hung on almost all the way to the turnaround, but once he was alone the gap started coming down and the motivation in the group started going up, and finally VJ or Max or somebody made one last long effort and it all came back together.

I was still feeling the weekend in my legs the whole time, though, and was glad that the pace stayed conversational for the first few miles of the return leg. Of course, that didn't last all that long and we had a pretty fast ride back. On rides like this, the organization always seems to crumble somewhere around Williams Blvd., and today was no exception. People start to get tired and so if there's a little surge in the speed they stop taking pulls and the group rotating at the front dwindles down to a handful. Anyway, at least we didn't get rained on like I'd feared. In fact it looks like all of the weather is, at least for now, well north of us, so the rain will probably miss us altogether until things really heat up in the late afternoon. At that point, it's anybody's guess as to where the random thunderstorms will pop up. Just normal summer weather around here.....