High Pressure

I went out to ride Tuesday morning with the best of intentions. It is getting noticeably darker now when I leave the house at 6 am, which is a somewhat depressing sign of things to come, namely Fall. I suppose I'll be able to get by without lights for another week or two, unless its cloudy, but soon enough I will be digging through that pile of stuff on the table down in the basement looking for blinky lights and wondering where those extra AAA batteries are. Yesterday's morning group was about average, and as usual the pace started getting out of hand somewhere out near the country club. There I was, sitting in the paceline somewhere around sixth or seventh wheel, looking at a gap starting to open a couple of bikes ahead of me. The usual alarms were going off in my head, but my legs were having nothing to do with them. It was one of those slowly growing gaps that you hope will close despite ample prior experience to the contrary. Mark G went around and started to bridge, but by then the little gap had expanded into a ten second crevasse. We were going around 30 mph and I could sense that things were coming apart quickly. A couple of minutes later the four or five riders were still riding away from us, our speed slackened, and the entire paceline breathed a collective sigh of relief as things settled down to a more sustainable level. I kicked myself, ever so gently, for not having gone when I knew I should have. The urge to suck wheels is indeed strong. We regrouped at the turnaround and wasted little time in kicking up the pace again, this time into a growing headwind. The group shed a few riders along the way, but that's not really unusual for these Tuesday rides.

After lunch I decided it was time to dig in with the new computer and spent some time crawling around under the desk sorting out the electrical spaghetti so that I could temporarily have both the old and the new running concurrently for a while. By the time I had to leave for a 3 pm meeting I had downloaded and installed Office 2010 and configured Outlook to get my email (well, most of it anyway).

This morning the effects of the high pressure area that's moved in were obvious. It was hot. The sky was clear and blue. We're expecting more of the same, with highs well into the 90s, for the next few days. Not bad riding weather, but the kind of stuff that makes me happy I'm not a runner. The Wednesday ride was nice and smooth today. It has become customary for this ride to stay in the 23-24 mph range with riders taking long smooth pulls. When Mike W got to the front and surged, Scott said, "Mike, what are you doing?" and he immediately eased up. Mo and I stopped off at Zotz for some coffee (we owe them 50 cents - we'd forgotten that they are cash-only) before I headed back home and ultimately to work. Today has more or less been dedicated to getting this computer set up. I've been buying and downloading and installing software, changing preferences, and transferring files via flashdrive pretty much all day. Flashdrives can be painfully slow when you're moving gigabytes at a time! Right now it's nearly 5 pm and I'm looking at the dialog box on my old computer that says "177 minutes remaining." Sheesh. At least I got all of my email archives transferred over this morning because I'm not waiting around this evening. I'm thinking I'll make my way out to the lakefront for the little 6pm 10 km time trial. I'll probably do it retro-style, on my regular road bike without the aero helmet or skinsuit or clip-ons since I'll be riding out there and back anyway.