After Tuesday's long and fast ride, I was half hoping for an easy one on Wednesday morning. It was not to be, however. Although it wasn't by any means a hammer session, yesterday morning's levee ride was definitely hard enough to get my attention. It was a good training ride, but in the back of my mind I was really thinking about the Wednesday evening training race on the lakefront.
So I'm sitting at work and it's 4:45 and it's just one thing after another. Why does that always seem to happen? Some days things quiet down by 4 pm and if I snuck out a little early nobody would notice. Indeed, sometimes there would be nobody to notice. Somehow, though, I was able to slip out just after 5 pm and by 5:35 I was on my way out to the lakefront. Once again I had a nice little bit of assistance from a brisk South wind. I got to Lakeshore Drive a few minutes before 6 p.m., and when a group of 15 or so came by I got in. Strangely, they were going too slow to be doing a training race. It turned out they were taking an easy warmup lap so that they could pick up a few people who were wandering around on the course.
The six-lap training race was once again a lot of fun. I think we had around 18 riders - maybe 20 or so at the start - and the speeds were fast but manageable. It was still quite windy and after doing some work on the first lap I dropped back and decided to wait until the last two laps before putting my nose into the wind again. Of course, I still had to do some work closing gaps and that sort of thing, bit I was certainly not doing nearly as much as the guys who were consistently at the front. On the second to last lap Woody and Eddie (?) got off together and established a pretty significant gap before the rest of the group started to respond. Somehow the group pulled them back just after the start of the last lap. I spent some time in the wind on the last lap, taking a couple of long pulls in order to keep things from getting bogged down. At one point Mike W and Eddie D bumped pretty hard, but luckily everyone stayed upright. After a little discussion between the two, Eddie jumped pretty hard but it didn't stick for long. I ended up taking a fairly long pull near the end, so when the sprint started I was already too gassed to do much about it. We had a visiting rider from Ft. Worth in the group. He was riding a 'cross bike since he was in town working around one of the oil companies on the Westbank and wanted to do some riding on the unpaved levee. Anyway, he looked pretty strong.
So it was kind of hard to get up early for the Thursday morning ride today. When I awoke it felt like I had just gotten off the bike a few minutes before. It turned out to be a pretty atypical ride today. A couple of guys rolled off the front early. Donald was apparently trying to keep the pace down, so gaps kept opening up. Eventually a few of us went off the front together. It was definitely much smoother that way. As we were approaching the turnaround, we saw the front group, augmented by the Destrehan guys, already coming the other way. Usually everyone waits to regroup at the turnaround, but not today. I guess most of us all got back together after a while, but at any rate we spent a really long time riding easy. In fact, most of the ride back was pretty slow. I wasn't complaining. After three long rides in just over 24 hours, I felt like I could use a little rest.
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