Spring Storms

Having come through the weekend with no apparent long-term damage, no doubt an indication that I could have ridden harder on Sunday, I shuffled into the week ahead as usual, starting with an easy ride on Monday and then the long levee ride on Tuesday.  Tuesday, however, saw a cool front come through in the middle of the night and well into Wednesday morning.  Ahead of the front were some pretty strong storms that put the area under various flood and tornado and hail watches and caused some considerable damage. One casualty for me was a good night's sleep, however.  It seems that Cosmo, our recently inherited dog, is quite afraid of thunder and lightning and responds by doing things like trying to dig holes in the floor, carpet, tile, furniture, etc.  This particular spell of thunder and lightning lasted from around midnight until 5 am, and I spent much of that time on the couch in the living room with the lights on and the music turned up in order to distract him from the meteorological drama enough to save me from having to recarpet the bedroom. Things were still rainy by morning, so I set my sights on the afternoon Tulane Cycling ride.  By then the weather was much better, but there was a pretty strong wind blowing up on the levee, which turned the set of five or six 3-minute intervals into a rather hard workout.

So Thursday morning it was very windy and cool enough for knee-warmers and double jerseys.  I really didn't want to go out in that.  After a couple of weeks of nice comfy spring weather, the return of temperatures in the 50s made for a difficult adjustment.  Nonetheless, I forced myself out the door around 6:05 am and headed for the levee with a complete lack of committment.  As I made my way up to the meeting spot I could see that it was deserted and, feeling rather relieved, immediately began planning on doing a short solo ride. Big Richard showed up out of the dark almost the minute I got there, and we figured that nobody else was going to show up.  We were wrong.  Although everyone was a bit late, by the time we were a few miles down the road the group was up to about a dozen and the pace was already creeping upward.  A nice paceline formed up to deal with the wind and things were going smoothly for a couple of rotations until someone who's name will not be mentioned surged at the front pushing the speed up by three or four MPH.  The result, as usual, was that once he pulled off the pace slacked and Woody, Tim, Mark and one or two others decided they didn't want to play that game for the next forty miles and basically attacked down the left side and rode away from the rest of the group, most of which was not about to take a pull in such a headwind if it was just going to be followed up by another big surge.  As I'd suspected, a few of the guys up in front had to turn back early, but by the time we got out to the dip we'd already lost a number of people.

I thought the ride back might be a little easier since there were a few areas with something of a tailwind, but right off the bat Mark rode off the front.  I don't think there was really any big effort to chase, but at any rate the speed certainly went up and stayed there all the way back.  I got back home feeling tired, hungry and still rather cold despite a stop at Zotz for a quick cup of dark roast and sugar.

This morning I discovered a really good video from the Rouge-Roubaix master's/women's race  that was done by Jason O'Mahoney from the Velobrew team out of Gainesville FL.  You get to see me fall on the 2nd dirt section somewhere around the middle of it and then there's some video of the chase group that we were in together as we chased back onto the lead group between the 2nd and 3rd dirt sections.