At the Back of the Pack

I had slept poorly, to say the least. The postnasal drip and scratchy throat were bothersome all night, but fortunately I didn't notice any further escalation of either. I'd set the alarm for 5:10 am, and when it went off I lay there for a while wondering what to do. I didn't feel all that terrible, but of course you never feel all that terrible when you first wake up. I finally decided that I'd go for it. After all, I knew the roads up on the northshore, so if I started to feel too bad I could always bail out and take a shortcut back. There were still a couple of things that worried me, though. My legs were still a bit sore from Saturday's Giro Ride, and the wind this morning was really strong. I figured I'd be spending most of my time at the back of the pack today.

When I arrived at the Abita Brew Pub, where the ride was starting, I was surprised to see about fifteen people there. This wasn't the usual northshore ride group. With guys like Woody, VJ, Diego, etc., etc., I wasn't holding out much hope for a nice easy ride. Also, I soon came to discover that the day's ride would be on the order of 80 miles or so. As I pulled on my knee and arm-warmers, I wondered if the chill I felt was coming from the outside or the inside. It was hard to know for sure. What I did know was that I wasn't feeling too good.

Within a few miles of starting the pace began to ramp up quickly and, following my game plan, I retreated to the relative comfort of the back of the paceline. We spent a lot of our time today at speeds in the 24-27 mph range. It's been a long time since I've spent extended periods of time hanging onto the tail end of a paceline like that. It's not quite as easy as you'd think, but when the speeds are high I still think it is easier than being in the rotation. When the speed would drop down into the 22-24 mph range I'd take a few short pulls, but in general I was trying to avoid pushing myself too hard. The last thing I wanted was to end up even more sick than I already was.

We were around 50 miles into the ride when the earlier pace began to take its toll on a few of the guys, and the result was that the pace gradually began to drop. I had been feeling rather chilled since the start, despite the not insignificant effort I was making, and was a little worried about that since it probably indicated that I was running a fever. Even so, I was being careful to save my energy for the bigger climbs and to make those my big efforts so that I wouldn't lose contact with the group. It was working out pretty well, actually, and finally, somewhere on the back side of the course, I started to feel a little better. In fact, except for sore legs, I felt pretty good for the last 25 miles or so.

It's about 9:30 at night right now and the scratchiness at the back of my mouth has been moving lower and lower all day. I have a bit of a headache, but otherwise things don't seem to have deteriorated too much. I'm hoping it doesn't turn into a full-fledged sore throat by morning. At any rate, I've already decided to skip riding tomorrow, just to be on the safe side. The weekend was around 150 miles for me, so a rest day is certainly in order.