A Very Long Way Back

I knew the minute I got on the bike Sunday that I was overdressed, and by the time I was halfway to Lakeshore Drive the vest was already stuffed in my jersey pocket. It was looking like it would be a pretty nice day except for one little thing. There was a wind blowing strongly out of the northwest and as the Giro group came together along the lakefront I remarked to someone that everybody was going to feel like Superman on the way out. For some reason, the group was a little sluggish getting started, though, perhaps because of an early stop for a flat tire at Elysian Fields Avenue. I was looking for a little more of a workout, especially since I was already missing out on my usual northshore training ride because of a party I had to attend in Slidell later in the day. Somehow I ended up way off the front with Brady as we climbed the Casino bridge. We even stopped for a moment at the top, thinking that perhaps there had been another flat. It wasn't that we were going particularly fast, just that the group was going particularly slowly. So we rolled along down Hayne waiting for the group to catch up with us, but it didn't go quite as I'd expected. Instead, Woody came up to us and just kind of kept on going. I backed off a bit, and then VJ appeared with Mignon and I think someone else, and pretty soon the rest of the group showed up. I could see Brady and Woody way up the road, and I have to admit I was kind of glad I hadn't stayed with them because I had a feeling they wouldn't be letting up any time soon. Before we got to the end of Hayne Blvd., I think our group was already starting to come apart, though.

It didn't take long for our group's pace to start ramping up even more. There was definitely a bit of a chase going on, and although the speed stayed in the 27-30 mph range all the way down the service road and Chef Highway, Woody and Brady just kept pulling slowly away. I knew that a lot of riders were planning on doing the long ride out to Ft. Pike or Slidell, and I wondered if they realized the kind of headwind they'd be dealing with on the way home. I sure was. When we finally reached Venetian Isles, I was the only one in the front group to turn around, and I remember thinking that some of those guys were going to find it to be a very long way back to Lakeshore Drive that day. Indeed, Brady later said he'd ended up with over 100 miles for th e day by the time he got home.

Eventually the next group arrived and turned around, so Jay and I waited up for them. With a headwind like that, the more wheels the better! As I'd expected, the ride back was long and hard, and we struggled sometimes to hold 17 mph. I definitely got in that workout I'd been looking for. I'd have preferred to have been battling the wind up across the lake in the piney woods, but hey, sometimes you just have to take what you can get.