Chaos and Droppage

It seemed darker than usual, and as I glanced up at the pre-dawn sky all I saw were fast-moving grey clouds.  Perhaps I should have taken it as an omen.  I was already running a few minutes late for the 6:15 am levee ride, and despite its 59 degree temperature the thick air cut right through my two jerseys as I rushed out to the river.  Up on the levee I could feel the full force of the wind and knew the crosswinds would make the ride a little more difficult than usual. "A little more difficult" turned out to be an understatement.  The ride started out smoothly enough, but for some reason Scott decided to stay on the front for a really long time.  Ordinarily that might not have presented a problem, but on a day full of crosswinds it meant that four people were getting a draft and ten more were strung out along the edge in futile attempts to hide from the gusts.  So after a few miles Luke rode up to the front and told Scott he had to pull off more quickly when there was a crosswind.  It didn't seem like he took it well, but he eased up and I came through, took a short pull, and started to drop back.  By then Rob had come up to the front and the pace started to ramp up.  Almost immediately, riders started letting gaps open since most of them hadn't had any real draft since the start, and the whole thing degenerated into chaos.  Then other rides would surge past.  It was like the whole group had gotten into a big bag of crazy pills.  I looked over at Woody and said, "I think we need to have a workshop on pacelines!"  There was another surge, but with five or six already at the front it was almost pointless to go with it since there wasn't hardly a sliver of draft left to be had anyway. A few riders had already come to their senses and dropped off the back. So we let a little gap open and started a nice second paceline which was rotating smoothly and holding the gap to a manageable distance quite nicely.  Just as we were hitting our stride, somewhere around the Country Club, Woody flatted.  I coasted for a little while, and then turned around, riding back to the little cluster of riders standing there.  As I came up to them Woody asked if I had a wrench.  A wrench?  I looked down at his bike and saw he was riding his track bike.  As it turned out he'd had a flat before the start of the ride, and when he'd fixed it he'd left his peanut-butter wrench in his truck. (There's a Wikipedia listing for peanut butter wrench??) Well, needless to say, none of us happened to be carrying a 15 mm wrench, so Woody ended up riding back on the flat.  Good thing it was his front tire.  

So the rest of us rode out to The Dip, where a couple went ahead, a few turned back, and soon it was just Mignon and I.  Rather than turning around at The Dip, we decided to ride easy and catch the group on the flipside, hoping that by then some of the craziness might have dissipated.  At first it seemed fine, but after The Dip, and another stop for another flat the ride back again started getting a little out of hand.  Mark and Howard stormed off the front, and then Max, who was on his TT bike, started ramping it up and up and up, which naturally resulted in some significant droppage in the rear half of the group due to the aforementioned crosswinds.  Suffice it to say, the last ten miles were pretty fast, at least for the handful of hard-headed survivors.

After a quick stop at Zotz for a cup of dark roast (the temperature hadn't risen a bit since I'd left home), I made my way home and then out to the westbank to renew my driver's license.  Every eight years we have to do this in person, I guess so that they can make sure that (a) we're still actually alive, and (b) we can still see.  Apparently I passed both tests, thanks to my glasses and, I suppose, a sufficiently broad interpretation of the term "alive."  On the plus side, I had taken some good advice and driven an extra couple of miles out to Gretna where the process was somewhat more pleasant and efficient than it had been the last time I did this at the office on Airline Highway.  Every time I go to some state or municipal office like this I always wonder where all the normal people are.  They must go to some special office, the location of which is a closely guarded secret.  The large bra-less woman with the saggy breasts and dirty t-shirt next to me was holding a letter documenting the expungement of some sort of first-offense felony (the word "felony" was printed in boldface).