Escape from the Giro

During a normal summer, which this has thus far definitely not been, the Giro Ride serves as a convenient training ride on the one or two non-race weekend a month.  Just after 6 am on Saturday I headed out from home for another Giro.  I'd completely lost count of the number of Giro Rides I'd done in a row.  All I knew was that it was a lot. It was a pretty big turnout and things were rolling along as normal as the speed started to ramp up along Hayne Blvd.  Suddenly there was a loud bang up ahead and I saw Mignon coasting over to the curb with a flat front tire.  A number of us stopped, but since the speed had been pretty high when it happened, I didn't really expect everyone to wait.  The tire had blown through the sidewall in a place where the casing had separated from the tire bead.  I had a piece of an old Tyvek race number in my bag and we put in a temporary patch, but there was no telling how long it would hold.  Mignon headed back with a couple of others and the rest of us got going again.  I was surprised to find that pretty much everyone had waited for us.  So it turned out to be an otherwise normal Giro.  As we were on the way back I asked Jay if the northshore guys were planning on doing the regular training ride on Sunday.  For a change, I didn't have anything on my card for Sunday. I was more than ready for a ride on the northshore.

Later that evening, after a few emails, I learned that Jay, Jason and some of the other northshore riders were planning to do the MS Tour training ride route, but that they wanted to start at 7:30, ahead of the official 8:00 start.  It was a little early, but I quickly decided to do it. Jordan had mentioned he was interested in a northshore ride, so I arranged to pick him up on the way.

We arrived at the Tammany Trace trailhead with about half an hour to spare, and by 7:30 we had a nice little group of six or so as we rolled north on the bike path.  The official route was only 45 miles, but we added a little loop on Kenzie and Section Road to add a few miles.  We picked up a few additional riders along the way and in general the pace was what I'd call moderately fast.  It felt good to be riding the little rolling hills, but for some reason my legs were really burning on the climbs.  Perhaps I'd pushed it a little too hard on Saturday.  Anyway, it turned out to be a good training ride and the early start got me back home well before noon.

There's an unofficial 4-person time trial on Wednesday out at the lakefront.  I think I'd like to do that if I can find a team willing to have me., especially since I won't be able to do the TTT championship this weekend because I have to officiate it.  I spent a good three hours today cleaning up the final results of the Oxford races for which we finally got the license numbers that I need for the club and team information.  As usual, there were a number of riders who didn't have valid licenses, had wrong license numbers listed, and even one who was a Cat. 3 but raced in the Cat. 4 race.  I still have to format the results of all three races for the USAC database upload, and then score it all for the LCCS, which I really should get done in the next day or two.  But not tonight.......