Too Hot to Stop

Despite the fact that stepping out the door Tuesday morning felt like walking into an overcrowded sauna, I went out to meet the group with every intention of logging a hard ride. If sweating buckets qualifies as "hard," I definitely achieved my goal. There was a big group on Tuesday, and as we covered the first few miles it continued to grow in size. Pretty soon, the fast overall speed got demoted to around third place in the ride's challenge hierarchy. The top difficulty was responding to repeated attacks, largely by Tim who seemed to be in the midst of a hard interval session. The other issue was that the group was riding particularly dangerously. At one point, as a runner was approaching in the oncoming lane, Brooks decided it would be a good time to attack. Just as he pulled even with the lead rider, right at the time when the runner was maybe 50 feet in front of the 27 mph paceline, the aforementioned lead rider pulled off to the left, and of course Brooks went left, heading straight for the terrified runner who was saved only by her quick reaction and explosive leaping ability. Geez, you'd think it was the last kilo of yesterday's TDF. Anyway, after closing more gaps than I could count in my anoxic state, there was another attack and another big gap opened up. I put my head down and ever so slowly and painfully made the bridge. Just as I got into the draft of the three riders, Tim attacked again. That time I didn't have an answer and dropped back to whatever was left of the group. Eventually they eased up, since a couple of them were turning around at the Little Dip, and after that the pace got a lot smoother.

Out at the turnaround near the Ormond Plantation, I made my U-turn as the rest of the riders re-grouped. As soon as I stopped, the sweat started dripping and I though, "It's too hot to stop," so I got back on the bike and rolled along easy until things got going again. The ride back was considerably easier since I think most riders were pretty well cooked by then. When I got home I felt quite a bit more exhausted than usual.

Fortunately, Wednesday morning's ride was cooler, smaller and slower. Everyone was being especially careful to be nice to the pedestrians in an attempt to make up for yesterday's episode of bike path terrorism.

Hopefully I'll make it out to the lakefront this evening for the Wednesday training race, even though I'm already feeling pretty tired. I was up until after midnight last night updating the LCCS points rankings and getting the results from the last two weekends formatted and uploaded to the USA Cycling Results and Rankings database. We have our criterium championships this weekend right here in City Park, so at least I won't need to travel. I will, however, need to be there at sunrise with the LAMBRA Great White Box, pylons, signs, coolers, flags, clock, etc.