Discipline

It took a little more self-discipline than usual to get out the door this morning.  A little cool front had come through during the night, dropping the temperature into the low 50s and kicking up a strong gusty north wind.  I'd been up the night before until around 1:00 am with a 4:30 am wake-up to drive The Wife to the airport for a five day meeting in Austin.  It would have been really easy to crawl back under the covers and call it a recovery day.  Indeed, my legs were still feeling a little bit of last weekend, and the drop in temperature and gusting wind made 54 degrees feel more like 44. On the other hand, there are races looming on the horizon and since this is Mardi Gras week things are likely to get unpredictable.  Various nephews, nieces and others will be flowing through the house from Thursday until next Wednesday, so skipping an otherwise rideable day didn't seem like a good idea.

Although a few of the regulars were missing, we still had a decent group for the long Tuesday morning ride up on the levee. The ride started out with Woody going to the front and pulling for three or four miles.  I was sitting in his draft, which because of the crosswind put my front wheel about even with his rear (wheel).  After he dropped back we started a paceline, but I guess someone about seven riders back started letting us in ahead of him.  That, of course, is essentially suicide in a crosswind like that.  The bike path is wide enough to handle a crosswind eschelon of six or seven at the most.  Everyone else may as well be riding on the front, or alone.  It didn't take long for things to come apart.  I saw a gap open a couple of riders ahead of me and went past thinking it wouldn't be too hard to close.  Once the full force of the wind hit me, though, I knew I was in trouble.  I really had to pull out all the stops to close that little five-second gap.  I think we ended up with six or seven.  The rest of the group just disappeared.  Woody and someone else had to turn back early, so then there were just four or five of us left.  We decided to turn around at The Dip.  It turned out to be a fairly hard workout, and considering how my legs felt going in, I'm glad we didn't go all the way out to Ormond.  My apologies to the Ormond riders who were no doubt wondering why nobody ever showed up on that end this morning.  On the way back we spotted Crazy Guy rushing up the levee so he could get there in time to lean over the centerline as we went past.