Rollover

Everything hurts, but surprisingly it's not from the two Giro Rides I did this weekend. It's from scraping paint and sanding and painting. I hate painting, especially when it involves twisting myself into unnatural positions while balanced atop a shaky ladder in a cramped bathroom. Fortunately, scraping and painting weren't the only things I did this weekend.

Saturday morning I got out to the Harrison Ave. Starbucks nice an early prior to the Giro Ride. I was looking forward to a good fast training ride and I wasn't the only one. There was a pretty good crowd at Starbucks, but as soon as we got underway Erich flatted. He got that fixed right away and we headed for Robt. E. Lee to meet up with the rest of the group. Then, as we turned onto Lakeshore Drive, we merged with the triathlete group which probably brought the group size up to 50 or 60 riders. Just after crossing Bayou St. John Erich flatted again. I stopped to help, along with Tim and a couple of others, but the group didn't. It seemed like it took forever to get Erich's second flat of the day fixed, and by the time we got back onto the bikes, Tim was chomping at the bit, wanting to catch the group before they started going fast. So pretty soon we were going flat out down Leon C. Simon in TTT mode. When we hit Hayne Blvd. the group was still out of sight, but Tim was keeping the hammer down.

We decided to turn at Bullard and take a little shortcut. We'd been going 27-30 mph, and as we were approaching the Interstate on Lake Forest Blvd, we spotted the group as it was turning onto the service road. I guess the gap was still a bit over a minute. By then I was already skipping pulls as Tim drove relentlessly at the front. There was still a pretty big gap when we hit Chef Highway, and Eddie D. and I were hanging on for dear life and beginning to wonder just how much longer we were going to be able to handle the pace, but somehow we finally made contact with the group. It took me quite a while to recover, and by then it was getting pretty hot.

After the turnaround I was thinking I'd finally be able to get back into the action at the front, but just after we turned onto the service road I felt my rear tire go flat. Game over. So I stopped along with a handful of other guys to fix it and let the group go. Then, as our little group was coming back down Leon C. Simon I spotted Erich sitting under an oak tree. Yep. He'd flatted yet again and was waiting for Roseanne to come pick him up. By the time I got home I was pretty well toasted.

Sunday morning I checked the odometer on the computer and knew that today would be the day. The trusty old Campi Ergobrain was going to roll over to 100,000 miles at some point during the Giro Ride. Since it was father's day, the group was pretty small this morning, which was fine with me because all sorts of infrequently used muscles were sore as hell from all of the paint scraping and sanding I'd done Saturday afternoon. The ride was relatively uneventful until the Goodyear Sign sprint. There was already a little group a bit up the road, so I thought I'd see how close I could get to it before the sign. I tapped on of the guys as I went by and he latched onto my wheel. I had just gotten us up to 34 mph and passed a couple of people when Kenny, who had dropped off of the lead group, suddenly looked back and swerved across the road just as we approached him. Whoa!! That kind of took the wind out of our sails, but it was more of a surprise than anything else. A few miles later I looked down and saw that the computer was within a mile of rolling over to 100,000 miles and everybody eased up for a while so I could take a picture. Of course it never actually rolled over to 100k since there aren't enough digits for that, so I watched as it rolled over from 99,999.9 to 0.0. Oh well. Back to square one.