The Ride Back

It's so nice to have a little light at 6 am. The sun may not be up yet, but at least it's no longer pitch dark when I head out to meet the 6:15 am group for the long Tuesday training ride. I left the bulky headlight at home and, with an abundance of caution, turned on my little red blinky light for the short ride to the levee. There were a few riders notable by their absence this morning, including Tim, Woody and Rob. As a result, the ride started out at a relatively steady and smooth pace. I remember thinking how different it was compared with the last few weeks. The morning temperature was just a bit below 60F, so I was wearing two jerseys with arm-warmers. I had briefly considered wearing my knee-warmers too, but I knew it would warm up pretty quickly so I didn't. There was a pretty good breeze blowing today and so the pace tended to wander up and down a bit depending on which direction we were going. Brady pushed the pace up a few times, but not too severely.

The ride back, though, turned out to be a different story. We picked up Colin, who is a med student in town from NY for a conference, shortly after the turn-around. He was riding a nice old 80's vintage Bike Friday, and it wasn't slowing him down either. Most of the way back the pace was pretty fast. Every now and then Sam or Brady or VJ would ramp it up a few mph. I quickly discovered that my legs were apparently still feeling the effects of Sunday's criterium. That kept my pulls on the short side, but otherwise I was feeling pretty decent. After the ride Colin and I stopped at the Starbucks on Maple St. for a while, but I had to get to work eventually so I pointed him in the general direction of downtown and headed home.