Keeping Up

So I've been trying to keep up the mileage, if not so much the intensity, over the past week and a half.  It's been going fairly well, actually.  The road rash is pretty much all healed up, and I know that the rib thing will just be lingering for another couple of weeks regardless of what I do or don't do.  Last weekend was full with two Giro Rides and a few track races in-between.  Saturday afternoon's weather was threatening, which scared away a few people, but as it turned out we didn't have a drop of rain at the velodrome in Baton Rouge.  The original plan had been to do two full omniums to make up for the rained-out one the prior weekend, but after the first one took over four hours, everyone agreed to just skipping the second one.  I split my time between officiating and riding, skipping most of the really hard stuff and just doing the scratch race, miss-and-out, and a kind of odd 2-rider team pursuit.  The start of the latter really hurt.  Pulling hard on the bars is one thing that really hurts the ribs, even now.  Anyway, it was fun and I think I was wise to skip the Kilo and Pursuit, under the circumstances. In fact, considering all of the rain we have been having around here, it was amazing that it didn't really interfere with the weekend riding.

I skipped riding on Monday.  Something in the back of my head keeps telling me to give the ribs an occasional chance to heal.  Monday night Jon, who is in town for a few days, came by so we could re-engineer the broken headset on a bike a friend of his from Denmark (I think) had borrowed.  So they were out on the levee for the Tuesday ride, which I thought turned out to be a little harder than I'd expected.  This morning I was worried about a grant proposal that's due on Friday and skipped riding so I could work on it a little bit before going to the office.  I really ended up mostly staring at it and wondering how on earth we were going to pull the thing together in time.  By 5:30 I was more than ready to ride out to the lakefront to see if I was ready to jump back into the training races.  Naturally, the first thing that happened was that I flatted.  Eventually we got started, but every time the pace stayed up above 31 mph or so for any length of time I was having trouble. Granted, I probably had only 50 psi in my rear tire, but regardless, it was a little disappointing.  On the plus side, I made it home before the rain started.