Finally!

This has been a pretty dismal week, training-wise. After Monday's morning damp ride on the levee I was kind of hoping to slip in an early ride Tuesday morning before my flight up to D.C. Well, that didn't happen. Monday turned out to be wet and rainy, a continuation of the long-standing "flash flood watch" that we've been living under for what seems like a week. So I took the $33 plus tip taxi ride to the airport, flew up to DCA, rented a generic economy car at a particularly uneconomical price in the $60 per day range, missed an exit, had to drive across the Potomac twice, got back on track, and arrived at the hotel in Gaithersburg MD in the late afternoon. While the weather up in MD was cold and clear, back at home the streets were flooding - again. I found a nice little restaurant nearby with Dogfish Ale, but it always feels kind of sad to be eating alone at a restaurant.

Wednesday was a tour and presentations at NIST, which was interesting. If you happen to find yourself in need of some time on something like a disk chopper neutron time-of-flight spectrometer, or want to do some some electron beam lithography in a 19,000 sf clean room, I can at least point you in the right direction. One of our physicists is there right now on sabbatical working in the Center for Neutron Research. Anyway, by 2:30 I was back in the road to DCA contemplating what I was going to do with the four hours of dead time at the airport before my flight home. Luckily I got quite lost and tied up in traffic in Crystal City while looking for a gas station, which killed a good forty-five minutes. I'm glad I had GPS on my Blackberry, but next time I may just spring for the $10/gallon rental car agency gas when all I need are a couple of gallons. On the plus side, I was able to have a nice relaxed early dinner at the airport TGI Friday's while watching the long, long line of people trying to get through airport security during DCA's evening rush hour. By the time I'd finished my sandwich and beer the line was back to normal, so I made my way out to the gate, found an outlet for the laptop, and knocked off some of the accumulated email. By the time I got home around 10 pm I was tired and cranky from having missed two days of riding, even though they probably would have been very wet ones.

Thursday morning I was determined to get out on the bike, so I didn't even check the radar. I arrived at the levee to find a fairly large group, but when I noticed the rain jacket stuffed into Woody's jersey pocket, I asked if there was something I didn't know. The answer was a definitive, "Yes. We're going to get rained on." And so we were. It never got really heavy, but by the time we got out to The Dip, there was no debate on the decision to turn around early. When Erich, who was riding his track bike, flatted, most of us waited around until he was rolling again, by which time we were getting pretty cold. Even though I got home quite wet, I was still glad to have gotten in a little exercise under the circumstances. The rest of the day pretty much went downhill, weather-wise. I drove my mother in for a follow-up visit to an MRI taken the prior week and found that she has a compression fracture at L5 which is causing her substantial hip pain, so it was off to the drug store for an assortment of analgesics, then back to work.

By the end of the day it was raining pretty hard again, so I called The Wife for extraction rather than ride home in the cold rain. That would have worked out fine except that everyone else was already gone by then and when I went to lock the office door I discovered I'd picked up the wrong keychain. I was planning on picking up my keys at home and driving back to the office to lock up, but then I thought I'd just call campus police and see if they could lock the door for me. Big mistake. They told me that they didn't have the key, so I'd have to get someone to go out there. I thanked them and after I got home hopped back into the car and drove back to lock the door. Since it was pouring rain, I went in the back door, noticing that the lights were on in the office. I thought someone had come back for some reason. But when I walked into the hallway I found myself face-to-face with an enormous campus police officer with a Glock in one hand asking me who I was. Anyway, I satisfied him that I was indeed the person who had called earlier and that I'd come back to lock up, so I was back on my way home a few minutes later feeling glad that I hadn't walked into the office earlier with a large shiny metal object in my hand.

Finally, after raining all night, a cool front pushed through early Friday morning and the skies started to clear. At 6 am the streets were very wet, it was fairly chilly, and it was very, very windy, but I probably would have ridden anyway if I hadn't been up until 1:30 am commenting on a paper for The Daughter. So let's see. I missed last Saturday, rode on Sunday and Monday, missed Tuesday and Wednesday, rode on Thursday, and missed Friday. This definitely does not constitute a training program. Tomorrow I'm going to ease back in with a nice 50-mile coffee shop ride in town, and then hopefully a long training ride on the northshore on Sunday. I think I may have reached my peak un-fitness level a bit early this year.