Faster and Larger

The weather Saturday morning was practically perfect. A little cool front had come through and brought with it cooler and drier air.  By "cooler" I mean it might have been in the low 70s before sunrise, and by "drier" I mean that I could almost still see through my glasses when I got home.  Anyway, the great weather was apparently not lost on the local ridership because the turnout for the Giro Ride was pretty good.  I'd guess there were about 50 in the group as we crested the Seabrook bridge and started what must have been one of the fastest Giro Rides of the year (so far).  I didn't spend much time near the front -- it was soooo easy sitting in the middle of such a big group.  There was a decent breeze blowing from the northeast that somehow didn't seem to slow things down all that much on the way out.  Once things really got rolling on the way back down Chef, I wasn't seeing much on the computer below 28 mph.  In fact, looking back at the Strava data, we averaged over 30 mph for the 5 miles before the Goodyear sprint, for which, by the way, my 53x12 seemed woefully inadequate. 

So with the Tour de Louisiane looming, I got the 2012 Race Bible finished up and uploaded to the website, go the registration and results spreadsheets updated, and probably would have gotten some of the race supplies sorted out if I hadn't gotten roped into a few hours at the City Park amusement park with the neighbor's kid.  Naturally he had a great time, but I have to admit that I consider being there a mild form of torture  -- except for the Carousel.  I do like the Carousel.

Sunday we had planned a reconnaissance ride at the Tour de Louisiane road course so I could re-mark the turns, we could check for unexpected potholes, and we could shovel and blow gravel away from the turns and other intersections.  As it turned out, we had something like 25 people show up for the ride.  The first lap was supposed to be easy so that I could stop at the intersections, pull my road-marking spray paint can out of my water bottle cage, and freshen up the arrows on the road.  The second lap, however, had no such restriction and in fact it turned out to be pretty fast with a 24.8 mph average speed.  It was good. 

The next lap was not quite as fast, and by the time we were on the fourth lap it was starting to get pretty hot and most of us were getting pretty tired, so the pace finally slowed down a bit.  I ended up with about 69 miles.  One thing about that course is that a couple of hard laps will really kick your arse if you aren't careful.  There just aren't any good places on it to recover.  Very deceptive.

A little while ago Robin dropped off a couple hundred copies of the race bible and picked up the "sign bin" to deliver to Laura to give to Brian so he can set up the road course on Saturday morning.  Online registration is up to about 70, which isn't bad a week out from the race.