Thanks to a tropical storm approaching from the east, the weather on Saturday was predictably wonderful. It's always great when there's a depression in the panhandle of Florida because we get some nice north winds. The air felt cooler and drier than usual, and it was almost easy to forget about the gusty north wind. Almost, but not quite...
I rode out to the lakefront for the Saturday Giro Ride feeling rather energized, and apparently I wasn't the only one. The group hit Hayne Blvd. and things got fast pretty quickly. With a pretty good crosswind, I knew there would eventually be carnage in the paceline, so I tried, with only moderate success, to stay up near the front. I think most people hung in there until the end of Hayne, at which point we turned south and got the full force of the tailwind. I knew what would happen next and made a little effort to move up a few spots. By the time we got to the short stretch on the Interstate the guys at the front had put the hammer down and the pace shot up to 38 mph. The paceline was getting shorter and shorter. I thought it might ease up a bit on Chef Highway when we were back into crosswind territory, but no such luck. After a very brief regrouping a little break went off the front and so things stayed plenty fast all the way. We got a nice paceline going and started closing the gap. When it was down to about ten seconds, though, a couple of people inexplicably started attacking and trying to make the bridge. It didn't work, of course, and it took us a while to reorganize and get the paceline going again, but we did eventually make the catch. Toward the end riders were dropping off the back of the dwindling paceline with alarming frequency. I was happy to be able to stick it out until the sprint really started, at which point the rider in front of me sat up and there was no way I was going to be able to close the resulting gap so I pretty much shut down at that point.
After the turnaround I rolled off the front at an easy 21 mph just to keep things from slacking off too much. A few minutes later Mike W. came up to me and rode right past. He had made the rather questionable but predictable decision, on this particularly windy group ride, to ride his track bike, complete aero bars, disk rear and deep dish front wheel. I let him go. A few moments later Woody came past, so I latched onto his wheel, and then Mike latched onto us and next thing I knew we were doing a 3-man Time Trial. Naturally, I ended up behind Mike. Well eventually I just couldn't take the combination of minimal draft and weaving back and forth, so I skipped a pull or two and switched to Woody's wheel. By then the pack was hot on our heels, but we made it close enough to the Goodyear sign for the sprint to start, and when it did, I eased up. One of the guys in the pack came past me just before the sign. Anyway, I took a little break after that, but by the time we were halfway back down Hayne I was going hard again with a little group and we arrived back at the parking lot wondering where everybody had gone.
So I was really wanting to do a long ride on Sunday, but by morning the tropical depression had started pulling a lot of rain clouds over the city. The streets were wet when I got up, but after checking the radar I figured I had an hour or two before things got bad. So I headed out on the wet streets around 7 am and didn't get two blocks before it started raining. I made a quick u-turn and raced back to the house. It couldn't' have taken more than a minute, but by the time I got there the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started. I stood there under the crepe myrtle tree weighing my options, and finally said, "to hell with it, I'm riding." I ended up getting in around 35 miles without a drop of rain, but plenty of gusting winds in the 25 mph neighborhood. Half an hour after I got pack it started raining. Eleven hours later it's still raining, so tomorrow morning is kind of up in the air right now. At least I had some time to update the LCCS results on the LAMBRA website and pick up the repaired LAMBRA clock from Bicycle World so I can fashion some sort of Visqueen rain cover for it.
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