Riding Alone

With The Daughter and her crew scheduled to leave for Iowa City on Sunday morning, I decided to skip the Giro Ride and make up the difference later in the day. As I heard later, Kurt had quite a scare when he developed some sort of tachycardia after dropping off the back of the group. He wisely stopped and called for help and after some IV saline in the ambulance and a trip to the ER, he seemed to be back to normal, although of course a visit to the cardiologist is forthcoming. By the time I finally got out to ride it was around 11 am and getting warmer by the minute. I was determined to get in some miles, though, so I hopped up on the levee and rode 40 miles or so alone. The bike path is still closed down by Ormond where they're laying a new water line over the levee, but I decided I'd just ride down the levee to the street and then back up on the other side. That seemed to work out just fine, but on the way back I made the mistake of looking down at my rear derailleur which was all clogged up with dry grass. It took me and my Swiss army knife quite a while to remove all of the grass wrapped around the jockey wheels. Oh well. It was worth a try.

So Monday I got to the levee on time but nobody else showed up, which often happens on Mondays, so I did another solo ride, this time at 'active recovery' pace. Tuesday, though, things were back to normal and we had a nice group of maybe a dozen as we headed up the river for the long levee ride. It was a fairly steady ride at a decent pace. I think we lost a few people along the way, but for the most part the pace was manageable.

Around lunchtime I decided to ride back home to get something to eat, but when I started heading back to work there was a thunderstorm approaching. Looking down Lowerline Street toward the river I could see it was raining, and at first I just resigned myself to getting wet. Then I said to myself, "Dumbass, you do have a car sitting there at the house." So I turned around and went back to work dry, but encased in steel and glass. When I got home at the end of the day there were a couple of packages waiting for me. These were items I got for the LAMBRA race kit. One was a replacement flagpole for the big white WindFeather flag that we use for the 200M mark in road races. The old pole was literally falling apart and this one is a new improved model that is much better. We'd already replaced the finish line pole with one of these. The other item is a bit of an experiment. It's always a big problem trying to read the screen of the laptop computer when you're sitting at a table on the side of the road somewhere on a sunny day. Well it turns out this is a problem for photographers who use digital cameras too and someone made an interesting sunscreen gizmo for that. So I ordered one for the LAMBRA kit. I think it will probably help a lot. We'll try it out this weekend at the Team Time Trial. Speaking of which, I think we will be able to field a 45+ team this year. It's always a real problem putting these Team Time Trial teams together. I don't really think we should include TTT results in the individual LCCS rankings. Speaking of the LCCS rankings, I updated them earlier today and uploaded the big detailed workbook to the website, but haven't revised the summary web pages yet. Maybe tomorrow.