I felt like I was back to my normal dull routine today. I'd skipped riding on Monday because my legs were still quite sore from R-R, but Tuesday morning I was back on the bike for the long levee ride. As Tuesday morning rides go, this one was pretty tame. It had rained during the night and the road was wet when we started out. In fact, we weren't too far up the river when we picked up a light drizzle, so we were wet from rain or wheel-spray for most of the ride. The temperature was warmer, however, so it was more messy than cold. I was still feeling my legs every time I'd try to make a hard effort to close a gap or something, but in general I was feeling fairly well recovered. I guess that since I'd ridden all of the dirt sections essentially alone I never had to make any of those really, really hard efforts that would normally be required to stay with the group. The result is that I seem to be making a nice quick recovery, at least for an old guy. The young guys were probably all back to normal by Monday night.
This morning the temperature was around 60F and although the sky was overcast, the chance of rain had been lowered from earlier predictions. I rolled out toward the levee feeling pretty good, but when I made the turn onto Willow Street and looked way, way down the road toward the river I said to myself, "Damn! It's going to be foggy." It's amazing how often I forget about the possibility of fog, only to be surprised once again when I hit the river. I should have known. The combination of a warm and humid south wind and the icy cold river water pretty much guarantees some fog along the levee. My glasses were fogged up and in my pocket within two miles, but in general the fog was only thick in patches here and there. We did get surprised by an oncoming truck at one point, but otherwise it was manageable. The ride back toward town was a little harder because of the headwind and crosswind, but everyone was taking really long steady pulls so you didn't really notice it much until your rare turn at the front came up.I've been collecting a few photos from Rouge-Roubaix to put on the LAMBRA website. People have sent me everything from cellphone snapshots to really nice photos and I'll have to pick just three or four for the LAMBRA home page that I can crop down to a smaller size without losing too much of the images. Maybe tonight. I'm anxious to get the individual finish times from Ricky so I can update the results. The times really tell the story in this race. The other thing that tells the story is the over placing within each race. For example, where did the 1st place Cat. 3 rider finish in the "A" race? It should be interesting. Although most people posted their photos to Facebook, where only other Facebook users can see them, Allen Richard put up his album on Picasa and his photos are pretty good:
No comments:
Post a Comment