Full Month

I was halfway into this morning's training ride when it finally hit me.  "I'm tired," I thought to myself.  Indeed, it has been a rather full month of riding, with precious few rain days.  I long ago gave up trying to schedule rest days because the weather always seems to provide them at regular, if inconvenient, intervals anyway.  As it turned out, though, May never did put much in-between me and the road, resulting in a 1,295 mile month, which, for me, is a bit on the high side even for May.  Considering the fairly significant general increase in training intensity, along with a couple of races and double-dipping Wednesdays, I shouldn't be surprised that I'm really dragging today.  Not to worry, though.  The next few weeks will probably bring things back into balance.

So yesterday I rode out to the lakefront with a nice 90+ degree tailwind, and all I could think about was how that very same wind was going to make the training race even harder.  The west end of the out-and-back circuit that we use for the Wednesday night worlds training race was already becoming cluttered with movie trucks when I arrived.  They were apparently starting to set up for a nighttime shoot.  Street lamps had been removed, huge lighting trucks were on hand, and by the time the training race ended the place was packed with movie crew people and related vehicles.  Ever fifteen minutes the training race group would come blasting through, weaving around pickup trucks and hoping to avoid distracted pedestrians.  The race itself was good, as they always are.  We were often touching 30 mph on the tailwind section, and in general I thought it was a pretty fast.  I had decided to stay in the bunch for the first half of the 4-lap race, and then move toward the front to push the envelope -- mine, not theirs, apparently. 

So naturally I attacked on the little rise over the levee at the east end of the course, taking Rolan with me.  Apparently he was the only one foolish enough to go off on a breakaway into a headwind with someone who provides notoriously little in the way of draft.  I had hoped to at least elicit a little bit of a chase, but when I looked back after the Seabrook loop I could see the group way back there all spread out across the road.  Rolan took a long, long pull as we waited to be reabsorbed by the pack.  The last lap got really fast when we hit the tailwind section, but then things started to bog down as we got closer to the finish.  I had been thinking about contesting the sprint, which in this case was going to be a very long drag race into a headwind, but when the group slowed down to 20 mph I decided to instead take a long pull and try to keep the pace respectable.  Of course, once I backed off a group attacked on the left, flying past a good 5 mph faster than I'd been going. It was a good workout anyway.  By the time I got home I was hot, hungry and exhausted, and didn't even fire up the computer before hitting the sack at the uncharacteristically early hour of 10:30 pm.

This morning's long levee ride seemed pretty fast, but more than that I was feeling pretty fatigued from the outset.  There were actually a few times when I seriously considered sitting up and soft-pedaling back home, but somehow I stuck it out to the end, stopping at Zotz for an iced coffee that I hoped would provide at least a temporary jolt of energy.  By then my head was feeling like it was stuffed with cotton and all I wanted to do was take a nap.  I kind of still feel that way.  I think tomorrow is going to have to be an easy day.