Ouch, Ouch

The last couple of days have been rather painful, in more ways than one. Wednesday morning, of course, was the usual training ride up on the levee. I wasn't feeling too sharp, but since the Wednesday ride is usually pretty smooth I wasn't too worried. It turned out to be a pretty hard ride, however, and I got back home feeling kind of drained. It was a feeling that would stick with me for the next day or so. The night before, the neighbor had asked me to assemble a bike for her son that she had gotten online. This turned out to be a rather frustrating experience, more so since it was, at least, a "brand name" Schwinn. Basically every bearing on the bike was both overtightened and under-lubricated, and with an anxious 4 year-old hovering over me there wasn't really time to disassemble everything and make it right, so I readjusted what I could. In the end, I think the chain was still too tight and the bottom bracket was still badly in need of adjustment and lube. Perhaps I'll get bike again when I have some time to do a decent job on it. Anyway, that job convinced me to put off for yet another day the filing of the LAMBRA 990 tax return, which I was certain would be a piece of cake anyway.

At the end of the work day I rushed back home and then rode out to the Arena, next to the Superdome, for a highly unofficial criterium on the short course around the building. I was still feeling flat-out exhausted, but just couldn't pass up the opportunity to try out this "course" at training race speed. It is part of a potential future race course and was also serving as our "Plan B" course for the Tour de La crit if we hadn't gotten the OK for the City Park course. We ended up with over a dozen riders, which was nice, but I knew things would come apart quickly because of the gusty winds. The race started out with a couple of warmup laps, but by the time we were ten minutes into the 45 minute race things were coming apart at the seams. I was really hurting, sitting on wheels near the back and hoping I could hang on. When a gap started to open up a couple of riders ahead of me, I hesitated for a while, but finally had to put my head down and bury the pain needle in the red for half a lap to close it. At that point I was hanging on for dear life while Woody, Tim, Mike and Dave traded attacks up front. I could see Tim and Woody taking turns softening us up for the coup de gras, and soon Tim launched himself into breakaway land leaving the rest of us gasping for breath as Woody looked around at us and soft-pedaled. I was slowly starting to feel a little more snap but a few laps later (actually a lot of laps, since they were probably less than a minute long) there was an attack and I again got gapped off the back and essentially blew up. I figured my race was over, but half a lap later I saw the riders ahead bunch up and made one last do-or-die effort. My timing turned out to have been good, and luckily there wasn't a counter attack when I got back into the draft.

When we got down to four laps to go I figured I'd stay on the front and keep the pace fast so that Dave could get set up for the sprint without worrying too much about an attack. I was finally starting to feel better. As we came around the last corner with one more lap to go I saw a Herring jersey come flying around me. Naturally I assumed it was Woody launching a final attack, so I tried to pick up a little of his draft to keep the gap from getting too big and glanced back to make sure Dave was coming. He was, so I backed off a bit so he could get the wheel and right about that time I realized the rider who had passed us was Tim, who had just lapped us. So Tim finished right ahead of me and the rest of us looked at each other wondering, "are we finished?" Everyone did another lap and sprinted anyway! Man, was I tired after that one! Later that night I went to file LAMBRA's first ever Form 990 with the IRS, assuming I could use the really simple e-Postcard thing, only to discover that since they had classified us as a 501(c)3 "Private Foundation," I would have to file the much more complicated 990-PF just like the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Thank goodness for Reggie Bresette! I called him this morning and he said he could take care of it for us and get it filed before the deadline on Saturday so the IRS wouldn't revoke our nonprofit status. Then we can go about getting our status changed to whatever it's really supposed to be.

Thursday morning I got on the bike and, Ouch, my quads were still sore from the prior day's double duty. I was hoping the ride wouldn't be too hard, but, well, it sure didn't feel that way. In fact, it felt really hard and fast. We had a bit of a tailwind going out and that kept the pace way up in the 27-30 mph range for a lot of it. I had to make a few really hard efforts just to stay with the rapidly disintegrating paceline. Once we hit the parish line and a few of the guys turned around, the pace eased up just a tiny bit, but it was by no means easy. I was really struggling but at least I wasn't getting dropped. Then, somewhere near the second grain elevator, about a mile before the turnaround, a big rock got thrown up as we were flying along at maybe 28 mph and whacked me on the shin. Ouch! That one really, really hurt and I had to back off and wince in pain for a little while. I hate it when that happens. For the ride back I decided that my place was at the back today. Someone else was going to have to battle the headwind.