The Thursday after Wednesday Night Worlds

It's thus far been a good week for training -- good weather, no big complications or time constraints, etc.  Of course, good weather and adequate training time come with a price. I'm a little tired.  Yesterday, being Wednesday, included both the usual morning training ride and the 6 pm Wednesday Night Worlds (WNW).  WNW is a generic term used across the country for local training races.  These are typically, shall we say, unsupervised.  It's up to the riders themselves to enforce some measure of order and safety using whatever means necessary.  Yesterday that meant Tim riding up alongside a strong, enthusiastic, but somewhat unpredictable clip-on aero-bar equipped rider and politely asking him to drop back because he was scaring the bejesus out of the riders behind him.  If this happens to you, don't take it personally.  We're out there suffering in anaerobic conditions, sharing the road with often unaware drivers rushing to get home from work, and the added complication of occasional erratic bike handling near the front of the group is best reserved for more sedate outings.  There were also a few riders on TT bikes, which frankly makes me a little nervous when things bunch up and I see them reaching for the brakes with 80% of their weight hovering over the front wheel.  There's a reason they seem to keep falling on their heads.  But I digress.....

So I arrived at the training race just a minute late, rounding the curve on Lakeshore Drive in time to see the group rolling out over the levee at UNO heading east.  No problem, though.  I just continued on and made a U-turn a couple of miles later when I saw them heading back my way.  I knew they'd be going fast, but I'm afraid I underestimated the speed differential this time.  Suddenly I heard wheels coming up on me really fast and had to jump with everything I had, going from 15 mph to 30 in about fifteen pedal strokes, merging into the middle of the group before the effort had really caught up with me.  I think the group had already temporarily split, but I was more focused on sucking in enough O₂ to catch up with the sudden ATP backlog before the next attack.

On the next lap a gap opened up and the group split with a few riders, maybe six or so?, forming a break.  The rest of the group was in complete disarray for the rest of the lap as the gap expanded to what must have been about a minute.  I, however, was in no mood to turn the training race into a social ride just because of such a small gap.  I was also in no mood to bridge up to the break at 30 mph, alone, even it that had been possible.  So I spent much of the next lap trying to keep the pace up and get our group more organized, which eventually paid off as a number of us finally got a reasonable paceline going.  The gap to the lead group seemed to be holding steady, and then somewhere on the third of four laps it started coming down.  That was probably because they were slowing down because we'd been holding a fairly steady pace that Strava showed as about a 25.5 mph average.  So with a bit under one lap to go it came back together, except that one or two ended up off the front, and stayed there. We had a nice but typically long sprint to the top of the levee, only about half of which I contested.

This morning I was feeling pretty dragged-out for the Thursday long levee ride, but fortunately the pace was mostly within reason.  If the weather holds out I'll probably try to make it out to the LaPlace time trial course this evening so I can ride the course with a paint can in my pocket and re-mark the course for 10, 20 and 40km time trials.  We're having our annual 2-person Time Trial on Sunday.