As Good As It Gets

When John Dias sent out an email earlier this week looking for people to do an 80 mile Friday ride with him I thought to myself, "it must be nice!"  I'd completely forgotten that I was off from work this Friday.  Finally, some time Thursday, I realized that I could actually do a long ride on the northshore on a Friday.  So I picked up Ben at 7 am, stopped for some coffee, drove across the causeway and arrived at the Lee Road Middle School, well, a few minutes late.  Fortunately, the other three riders, John, David and Chuck, were still there.  It was cooler than I'd expected, and there was a pretty good north wind blowing, but otherwise the weather was absolutely spectacular.  We set out under a clear blue sky surrounded by the bright green foliage of spring with a nicely matched group.  I looked over at Ben and said, "It doesn't get better than this."

We were planning on doing around 80 miles, starting out along the standard winter ride route.  This group was clearly not interested in slowing down too much to take in the sights, but on the other hand the pace remained pretty steady and well within the sustainable range.  John and especially Ben were taking really, really long pulls with the rest of us coming through with more normal ones.  Way up at the top of the course we turned onto Highway 439 and finally picked up a little tailwind.  Ben was on the front and just stayed there for at least five miles.  He was definitely "in the zone" and I wasn't about to interfere.

Rather than take the usual shortcut at Sie Jenkins Road, we decided to tack on some additional mileage by going all the way in to Bogalusa before returning back to Enon.  At that point we headed back out and did the Tulane road race loop backwards. For some reason I had figured that would bring us back to the start with just about 80 miles, but as it turned out I was about ten miles off.  We ended up with right around 90 miles instead.  Oh well.  Ten bonus miles! I guess it'll be the Giro for me tomorrow.  Way too much stuff piling up right now to make the trip to Mobile for the Sunny South criterium.