Warm, Wet and Wheelspray

Finally a few warm days in a row! After Thursday's hard ride I headed out Friday morning at the relatively late hour of 7 am to meet the Good Friday levee ride, fully expecting a nice conversational pace. Yeah, well that didn't last very long. A bit of tailwind, a big group, and warmer weather made a fast pace almost inevitable. This time, though, when someone attacked I hesitated. Bit of a mistake there. It probably would have been easier to have gone with it, though, because I soon found myself in a small group that included Howard on his TT bike. So rather than a nice steady paceline it was a series of surges interspersed with slowdowns - basically a study on how to maintain a not quite fast enough average speed while using the largest possible amount of energy. Anyway, the weather was really nice and many of us were off work for the day, so a few of us wandered over to Starbucks afterward. That was nice.

Somewhere along the way Jon and I decided to do the Saturday northshore ride up at Enon rather than the usual Giro Ride.

The Saturday morning weather radar could definitely have looked better and as we got closer to the northshore the sky started looking darker and darker. By the time we pulled into the school parking lot at Enon the question wasn't whether or not we'd get wet, it was just how wet we'd get and how long it would last. Ten miles down the road we knew the answers - very wet and very long. The Saturday ride had a good group of eight or so, of which two were planning on doing an extra loop after the rest of us finished the 65 miles.

The ride itself was both fun and miserable. After the first couple of downpours we were all soaked to the skin, but luckily it was warm enough that we weren't too cold. Jon, however, was having some major problems with his brakes. It was bad enough that we were riding in the pouring rain with constant wheelspray in our eyes, but Jon was also dealing with a slipping front brake cable and basically nonfunctional brakes. After a few stops to try to tighten the cable clamp, most of which were of limited success, we came to a stop sign and a major highway. We heard Jon coming by on the right yelling, "I can't stop, I sure hope there's nothing coming!" In fact, there was a big red Coca-Cola truck coming, so he made a sharp right turn and luckily that lane was clear. Meanwhile, I was having my own problems. The night before I had replaced my headset and chain. The headset was fine, but unfortunately my old chain had worn the cassette badly enough that it was skipping whenever I was on the 13, 14 or 15 cogs. Every time the pace got fast, I had two options: Junior gear limit or 53x12. Luckily the pace never got too much out of hand. The course up north of Enon has some great rolling winding sections and a route with so many turns that we always miss a couple. The rain, along with the fact that Jon couldn't really stop, kept our pace down a little bit, so that minimized my cassette problem. Considering the fact that we rode for a good three hours on wet roads, it was amazing that we had only one flat.

When we got back to the cars I was excited to find a pair of dry socks in my bag. Just as I was pulling them on and enjoying the feel of warm dry feet, we discovered that the car had a flat tire. I put the spare on and headed home, rushed over to meet The Wife for a late lunch, and then went straight to Sears for a new set of Michelins and the unwelcome news that some of the front end bushings are so worn out that they couldn't check the alignment. I think it was around 7:30 pm by the time I finally got a shower and could wash the grit out of my hair.