Wheelspray Weekend

It wasn't raining, but the radar looked ominous at 6 am Sunday morning.  I had just finished loading the car up with race equipment for the NOBC 2-Person Time Trial, and as I started the half-hour drive out to LaPlace I wondered just how much of a wash-out the race would be.  As usual, I was planning on switching from race official mode to rider mode and back during the course of the morning, and might even have been somewhat excited to be teamed up with Mark McMurry for the 40 km race since (a) we were likely to be fairly evenly matched, and (b) he is bigger than I and would provide some much-needed recover shelter between pulls.

Over at the starting location we set up the big pop-up shelter, which only "pops up" with the assistance of about four people, and got things set up to open registration at 7:30.  It wasn't raining and for a while the sky looked fairly good.  Even so, I was careful to position all of the electronics in such a way as to keep them dry in the event of rain because I knew darn good and well it was going to rain.  Registration got off to a slow start, as we were running a little low on experienced volunteers this year.  Meanwhile, Mark was trying to round up other volunteers for things like turnaround duty.  With the first rider scheduled to start at 9:00 am, it wasn't until about 8:55 that we actually started the stopwatches, and I think it was about 9:05 or so by the time we started the first team. My start time was only ten minutes after the first team's, so I jumped into the car, squeezed into my skinsuit, and emerged into a light rain.  The rain had started precisely at the start of the race.  Given the relative darkness I decided to wear my regular progressive glasses underneath the face shield built into my Giro TT helmet.  That actually worked fairly well, even though I was mostly looking right over the tops of them when I wasn't looking at the computer.

Our plan for the TT was to hold back for the first couple of miles since I hadn't had any warmup at all, and so we started out very smoothly.  Mark has been riding for along time and is as steady a wheel as you could ever hope for. A little tailwind made it easy to hold 25-26 for the first mile, and by mile 3 we were cruising along steadily at 27-28 mph.  We were about eight miles out when the wind started to shift.  Up ahead and to the west the sky was getting darker and darker, and then around mile 11 it suddenly got very gusty, the temperature dropped, and the rain picked up a bit. At that point my face shield and glasses both suddenly fogged up.  I could barely make out the numbers on my computer and was a little worried about misjudging Mark's rear wheel. Our speed dropped down to 25-26 mph.  As we started around the long curve in the road at about 12 miles I looked up ahead for the turnaround pylon and was surprised to see nothing at all.  I thought maybe I'd misjudged where we were.  Then, as I was riding behind Mark I saw a flash of green on the road to the right.  I looked back and saw the green "40k Turnaround" marker on the road that I had personally re-painted the day before.  It was deserted. I yelled something to Mark but he didn't hear me (he likes to ride TTs wearing earplugs -- very old-school trick).  I pulled up alongside him and tapped him on the shoulder and yelled that we had passed the turnaround.  I was confused.  I knew Mark had sent a volunteer down to the turnaround.  By then we could see Bob, a traffic cone, and the Manchac bridge (which you can't see if you turn around at the correct spot) up ahead.  I was flabbergasted.  We slowed down a bit as I yelled to Bob that the turnaround was half a mile behind us, but it was too late to do anything about it.  He had gotten down there in the pouring rain and missed the big green paint markings on the road (I would have thought they would be visible from space), and had then seen the police car blocking the road and set the turnaround at some random other paint marking near there (the police always block the road beyond the curve so the cars can see it coming from the bridge).  All I could hope was that everyone would ride all the way to the traffic cone.  As it turned out, some teams saw the green turnaround marker on the road, figured that for some reason the turnaround was not manned, and turned there.  Most others went all the way to the traffic cone.  As a result, some teams did a 40km time trial and most others did more like 41.5 km.  The results would be tainted for sure!

After we turned around we got back up to speed just as the rain got really heavy.  The helmet face shield was doing a fantastic job of keeping Mark's wheelspray out of my eyes, nose, ears, etc.  Unfortunately it was also so fogged up that I couldn't see very well at all.  At one point I squeezed my hand under there to clear it a bit.  It was looking like we would be about 1 mph slower for the return trip, but it was also looking like I was starting to hurt.  At around 16 miles the road turns slightly to the west and we picked up a little more headwind component.  That dropped our speed down dramatically for a while (I saw it drop to 24 mph).  Mark was going much better than I by that point, and so our speed would drop when I'd be on the front, then I'd have to dig to get onto Mark's wheel when he would go by about 1 mph faster.  This is the downward spiral of Team Time Trials with which I am quite familiar.  After a couple of rotations like that I started taking shorter pulls and Mark started taking longer ones.  For most of the rest of the ride our speed would fluctuate from 25 to 27 mph.  We finished with a time of 59:04 and a total distance on my computer of 25.8 miles. I guess we would have been just under 57 minutes for 40k.  Anyway, we placed 8th in the 40+ race but at least a couple of the teams ahead of us turned early.  Since there was nobody there, and the official at the (longer) turnaround wasn't recording the teams as they made the u-turn, it was impossible to know who had done which distance.

After finishing I changed into some dry clothes and go to work on the results.  By then it had mostly stopped raining, of course, but as you can see from the "podium" pictures, nobody was waiting around in soaking wet lycra just for the photo opp. It took quite a while to get the results finished.  There had been some strange things.  Adrian had for some reason started a lot of teams at one second past the minute, some of the finish times weren't on the first set of result sheets I got, and one or two teams had been given restarts because of flats that happened as they were lining up.  Anyway, we finally got everything sorted out, and right now there's a lot of wet  banners, tent tops, and miscellaneous other damp equipment draped all over my basement where I have a big fan blowing on them.  This morning I went out for a ride and the fact that my legs felt fine told me I could have gone harder yesterday.  Somehow I think the rain, fogged-up glasses, wheelspray and results duties kind of took their toll on my motivation.  Fortunately Mark pretty much dragged me in to the finish line for the last three miles or I might have just sat up and looked at the scenery.

Uncomfortable Weather

Yesterday a strong line of thunderstorms pushed through right as I was in the middle of a Safety and Risk Summit meeting at Tulane.  I suppose I should have been comforted to know that all of the university's safety officers were "sheltered in place" with me.  The exceptionally strong  winds caused a lot of damage and spawned at least two small tornados, taking down two big trees in my neighborhood and causing some significant, albeit short-lived, street flooding. I had gotten in a nice Wednesday morning training ride, ending with Brian who for the final couple of miles was clearly guilty of violating the Wednesday Protocol by pushing the pace up a few miles per hour.  After the meeting it looked like the rain was ending, so I got on the bike and headed to the office at University Square, standing  up the whole time to keep the seat of my pants dry, only to have it start raining harder a few minutes later and leaving me with wet pants for the next couple of hours.

I have been very busy at work this week and am falling behind a bit on LAMBRA stuff, including our 2-Person Time Trial that our club is putting on this weekend. I was up until midnight working on a budget, so it was hard to drag myself out of bed this morning, especially once I looked outside to see an overcast sky and trees rustling in the wind.  What I didn't realize was that there was a light mist falling over much of the city, which probably explained why there were only a couple of people who showed up this morning. Daniel, Tom, Mark G., and I ended up doing a shorter ride than usual for a Thursday, and by the time we were on the way back there was a steady stream of water droplets falling from the front of my helmet.  Combined with the cooler temperatures and relatively easy pace, it made for a rather uncomfortable ride, and I was more than happy to spend the "extra" half hour I had from the early start and shorter ride at Zotz sipping a cup of hot coffee.

We've got at least three race announcements in the works right now, plus some final negotiations on a joint-BAR race with Texas.  I've been trying to respond to questions as best I can, but time has been short and work is taking priority because of a Friday proposal deadline.  I'm sitting here waiting for a response to my most recent edits and hoping this whole thing doesn't come down to ten minutes before the Friday afternoon submittal deadline.  Can't say I'm particularly optimistic about that, however.

Waco Road Trip

Last weekend was the South Central Collegiate Cycling Conference (SC⁴) road championships, hosted by Baylor over in Waco.  In the morning I picked up a big rental SUV from Enterprise that was brand new with only 15 miles on the odometer and enough room in the back, after removing those seats, for six bikes with rear wheels still on.  It also had a hitch receiver so we put the old 4-bike hitch rack onto it for the other two bikes. 

After leaving rather late on Friday afternoon, due to a Tulane van that suddenly decided it wouldn't start, we had a long but uneventful eight-hour drive to a Magnuson hotel on the Interstate.  A few hours of sleep and we were up and on our way to the road race course about half an hour away.  It was pretty chilly as we got ready for the first wave of races that included the Men and Women's Category A races and the Men's Cat. B race.  Kenny and I decided to follow the Women in order to get in a couple of laps on their 28-mile course.  The course turned out to be somewhat more hilly than I expected, and a whole lot more complicated than anyone would have expected.  There were actually two different courses, a long one (35 mi.) and a short one (28 mi.), marked only by painted arrows on the road at intersections.  There was no other signage, and as it turned out the lead vehicles were pretty unsure about the course themselves.  So within a few miles we had already followed the lead car the wrong way once and had to turn back to get onto the correct course. When that happened, a couple of the women took advantage of the confusion and it ended up splitting up the group rather badly leaving our one Tulane rider out on her own with five or six riders ahead of her. This happened a number of times with all of the groups, as we later discovered.  Anyway, there we were happily following the women's B race, when suddenly a lead vehicle comes by followed by a breakaway from the Men's B race.  The problem was that the Men's B race had started ten minutes ahead of the Women.  They had apparently gotten way off course and by the time they got back on the right road they were behind the women.  When the men's pack came past Kenny and I followed it.  A few miles later we came over a rise to see a steep downhill with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  I figured it might be a little sketchy for our Tulane rider who had attacked the hill and was flying down the road pretty fast.  Well, he got most of the way through the turn and suddenly washed out in what turned out to be a couple of inches of loose gravel covering half of the road.  We caught up to him a moment later and although he was scraped up from head to toe, nothing appeared to be broken so we encouraged him to get back on the bike since the pack was still going pretty slowly.  He did and caught back up easily. 

A little while later we came to another similar downhill, also with a 90-degree left turn at the bottom.  Up ahead we saw one of the women who had crashed climbing up out of the ditch. The turn was so sketchy that the entire Men's B race stopped for a few minutes to make sure she was OK before continuing on at an easy pace until the road conditions got better.  At one point both the men and the women who were still very close together took yet another wrong turn.  We saw the mistake and yelled, and the result was that the people who had been off the back were suddenly off the front.  Anyway, we did part of the second lap before turning around so we could be back at the finish for the end of the B race.  Later that morning our other woman, who was racing in the B/C race, crashed in a turn and hurt her wrist badly enough that she couldn't race the rest of the weekend.  In-between I drove to the nearest drug store and picked about $80 worth of Tegaderm, saline, tape and gauze to stock the first-aid kit.

The afternoon's team time trials didn't go as planned for us, or for the organizers. We didn't have enough women left to make a TTT team, and it was only after some begging that I convinced David to ride the men's TTT so we could get a few points.  There were only five teams in that category so they could ride easy and still get some points.  Baylor was nipping at our heels on points and since we were down to only four healthy riders we didn't want to take any chances.  The TTT started late and in a slightly different location because of some local redneck who was threatening the riders.

Sunday morning's criteriums were on a nice course on Baylor's campus and went pretty smoothly.  Although we didn't get any individual podiums, we managed to extend our points lead and won the Conference team title for Division II.  Considering how many of our best riders were unable to make the conference championships because of injury or school, we were pretty happy with that.

The drive home didn't get underway until around 3:30 or so, which meant that we didn't arrive back in town until around 1 am.  It was a long drive but the traffic was light, so it wasn't too bad.  Even so, I was completely worthless at work on Monday and was asleep by 9 pm that night.

Midweek Modicum

It wasn't until well past dinner time when I finally sat down to find hotel rooms and a rental van for the Tulane cycling team's upcoming road trip to Baylor for the SCCCC conference road championship. It seems that my credit card has become an integral member of the team this year.  There has to be a better way!  I ended up reserving three rooms at a EconoLodge (aka Magnuson Hotel) that I think is near campus, and then also reserving a large minivan.  Between the 7-passenger minivan and the Tulane 7-passenger van we hope to get ten people and ten bikes to Waco, Texas some time Friday night.  I decided to tag along to help with driving and logistics, and I am hoping to get in a good 60 mile ride following the Saturday morning "A" race.

So this morning was another breezy and overcast one up on the levee.  The Wednesday morning levee ride has evolved into the week's most civilized group ride.  The unwritten rule for Wednesday is that the pace stays in the 20-23 mph range and everyone takes nice smooth pulls at the front.  It's a little faster than a recovery ride pace, but definitely easier than a hard training ride pace.  The fact that we have the Wednesday evening training races out on the lakefront makes it easy to chill out during this ride without stirring up feelings of training level paranoia.  It also tends to attract a few riders who we don't often see for the faster rides on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Bob Perrin joined us this morning.  Bob was already racing bikes when I started, and I remember standing there next to his typewriter during a club meeting where he filled in my very first racing license, signed it at the bottom, and handed it over to me.  Considering the current controversy about the UCI requiring the USAC to enforce the rule about UCI licensed riders riding in unsanctioned events, you can see on that old license that the ABL of A had a similar rule back in the 70s that was rarely enforced and eventually dropped.  Some things never change.

So now we have OBRA trying to go national by sanctioning races outside of Oregon.  Of course that means that if you want to race both OBRA and USAC races you'd need two licenses.  The expensive one would help support Local Associations, national teams, international rider development, national coaching and officiating programs, affiliations with UCI and the IOC for professional and Olympic racing, etc.  The cheaper one would support the promoters who don't really care about that stuff.  I'd like to see the USAC develop a grassroots program for promoters of smaller events so their event costs would be lower. I'd also like to see them offer a much lower racing license fee for Cat. 5 (and Cat. 4 women) licenses.  The $30 collegiate license has been very successful at bringing new riders into the sport and would make a good model.  The bottom line for the small promoters, clubs and weekend warriors is that we need a cheap way to hold reasonably organized, easy to deal with, and safe local events like weekday training races.  At any rate, the last thing I'd want would be to have the USAC flounder and have to deal with OBRA, which, should such a thing happen, would eventually end up either like the present-day USAC, or some sort of upgraded version of the old Amateur Bicycle League of America.  I almost fear for OBRA as much as USAC because they may be biting off more than they can chew.  Their rulebook still looks like it was written by a 7th grader, IMHO, not to say that the USAC rulebook is a work of fine literature by any means, but at least the grammar has improved over the years.

Mississippi Gran Prix 2013

If there's such a thing as a LAMBRA classic, the annual Mississippi Gran Prix stage race is one.  The event's main promoter, even if he generally refuses to acknowledge the role, was one of the key organizers of its predecessor, the Natchez Classic stage race that started back in the early 80s.  As the DS of the Herring Gas team, Frank always works hard to attract a competitive field for the Cat. 1/2/3 race.  With fairly generous prizes for both stage placings and GC, it is usually one of the best attended events in the area.  Around here, that means something in excess of 200 riders.  For reasons I cannot fathom, the turnout for the Master 40+ race was rather thin this year, attracting only 21 riders.  Granted, most of those 21 were quite capable, but the lack of depth certainly had some effect on the road and circuit races.

Saturday's weather was nearly perfect by most standards, which is to say that it started out a little chilly by mine.  The Masters road race seemed a bit on the slow side to me this year.  We were doing two laps of a long 27-mile loop that was unchallenging for the first ten miles before getting into another ten mile section that was hillier and presented a few opportunities.  I was not really quite in shape for this race, but figured I'd be able to at least stay with the main group.  Early in the first lap a 2-rider break that included one rider from Midsouth Masters and one from Acadiana.  Of the 21-rider field, that took 7 MSM and 3 Acadiana riders out of the picture, chasing-wise.  So despite the fact that the break wasn't going all that fast, the pack seemed uninterested and their gap went out to at least a minute or more.  Donald Davis was riding without teammates and wasn't quite willing to fall for the trap, and a number of other riders were probably keying off of him, so the gap went out disturbingly quickly.  After a while Mark (who had crashed last weekend and was riding with four stitches in his elbow, among other injuries) and I went to the front and started working to keep the gap within reason. Ordinarily I wouldn't have given that break much of a chance, but with such a large percentage of the pack not willing to chase, it might have gotten out of hand.  At one point I rolled off the front pretty much by accident and decided to just keep going in hopes that it would inject a little more urgency into the rest of the group.  I guess I hung out there 30 or 40 seconds off the front for a few miles before one of the riders finally got to the front and pulled them up to me, so I guess it was somewhat successful.  Eventually we caught that break, and a couple of miles later another 2-man break rolled off the front with the same configuration and of course the same result.  I guess their gap was well over a minute as we started the second lap.  All this time I was thinking that we were going so slow we were bound to get caught by the Cat. 3/4 field of 61 riders that had started a mere 5 minutes behind us.  Sure enough, a few miles in their small break went past us and a few minutes later the motorefs neutralized us so the field could pass.  This was a bit of chaos, of course, since the masters weren't too thrilled about putting on the brakes with a breakaway off the front.  Right after we were passed by the 3/4 field, our own pace picked up a lot as Donald and some others caught sight of that 2-man break up the road.  Now we came up on the back of the 3/4 field and had to stream past them on the left. Naturally they weren't willing to slow down too much because they were in the process of chasing down their own breakaway.  Somewhere around the long climb 10 miles into the loop we caught the 2-rider break and then, of course, the 3/4 pack caught back up to us.  This time the masters slowed down to let the 3/4s past, but in the confusion a number of 3/4 riders got stuck behind the masters as they bunched up and weren't able to get back to their own group which was now in full chase mode.  Yeah, they got screwed.

So I guess we were about halfway through the second lap where there are a number of steep little hills when the attacks started.  After one particularly painful one that I just barely survived, I knew the group had split without even having to look back.  This resulted in a 6-rider break that included Donald Davis, Jerry Simon, Bennie Flores, Tim Doiron, Kevin Landry, and myself.  Almost every team in the race was represented.  I was pretty happy to have made the split and hoping that this group would work together smoothly, at least until the last mile or two, to extend the time gap because I knew I'd be giving up 30-40 seconds in the afternoon time trial to pretty much all of them.  Unfortunately, it was anything but smooth paceline.  There were lots of surges where the group would come apart, then we would get a little rotation going again, then a couple of people would skip pulls -- you get the picture.  With a few miles left to go the attacks started, mostly courtesy of Jerry who seemed to be in good form.  Tim and I were struggling a bit with the attacks, and when the sprint started I was all the way at the back and came across in 5th place.  On the plus side, we had put nearly three minutes on the pack, a gap that even my notoriously poor time trialing ability would not be able to completely erase.

The TT that evening went as I'd expected.  From the start I wound it up to about 25 mph and decided to back off and hold it there because I knew there was a significant little climb coming up.  That strategy worked pretty well in that I was able to go over that hill without going completely anaerobic, which is more than I can say about the next hill.  Anyway, I managed to do an even worse time than last year but thanks to having been in the break dropped down to only 6th.

Around 1 am on Sunday I was awakened by the sound of rain and thunder.  The forecast had been looking pretty bad and unfortunately it would prove to have been right on the money.  The first of the Circuit Races that had been scheduled for 7 am were pushed back to 8 am, but even so it was still raining and cold.  I watched the first few shortened races go off in the rain rather dreading the moment when I'd have to pull off the warm clothes and step out into the rain wearing lycra.  Our race was shortened by one lap, from four to three, as the officials tried to make up for the lost hour earlier in the morning, and by the time we started around 10:30 or so the rain had eased up considerably.  Still, I rolled out wearing arm-warmers since I had gotten pretty chilled.  The Circuit Race turned out to be kind of like the Road Race had been.  I knew that Midsouth was planning on sending one of their riders who hadn't made Saturday's break off the front, knowing that the top six riders on GC would probably let him go as long as the gap didn't go over a couple of minutes. The first rider to try it got pulled back, but then around the start of the last lap Jay went without much of a challenge.  With only around six miles left, there wasn't much of a chance he could get enough of a gap to threaten the leaders (although it was entirely possible he could threaten my 6th place).  Things finally started to ramp up along the rough section a few miles from the finish and at one point I was seriously at risk of being dropped in the crosswind.  It all came back together, though, and I started looking forward to the nice uphill sprint to the finish line.  My legs were feeling pretty good and I was in a good spot with about a mile to go when I felt my rear tire go squishy and then almost immediately bottom out. I quietly cursed my bad luck and raised my hand as I dropped back along the right side of the road.  A wheel change at this point could easily erase my time gap on 7th place, but one can only ride on a flat clincher so long before it comes completely off the wheel and locks up, or you crash.  Wes, who was driving the follow car came up and said he didn't have any wheels for me (they had been in a wheel bag because of the rain and so he hadn't put them in the car).  I was still just a few bike lengths off the back of the pack at that point and we were only half a kilo from the finish, so I decided to go ahead and  ride the rim in to the finish and hope for the best.  Fortunately everything stayed in place, and although it was a difficult slog up the finish hill I lost only 40 second or so on the pack, and later the officials gave me pack time anyway since the mishap had happened within the final 3 km.  So I was happy to have salvaged 6th place and done some fun racing, but pretty disappointed to have missed out on that sprint after having been looking forward to it for the whole race!

The Reason

There's a reason why I don't have many photos this time of year -- actually a couple of them.  For one, it's still fairly dark for most of the morning ride and the little pocket camera's automatic exposure setting doesn't handle that very well unless nothing is moving.  The other reason, however, is related more to the racing cycle than the diurnal one.  The average intensity of the training rides increases, sometimes rather erratically, this time of year. This morning was a case in point.  It was cloudy and very windy for the early Tuesday morning levee ride.  If it had been February, I wouldn't have expected more than a handful of riders to show up in the dark.  However, it's not February and there's a whole calendar of races coming up, starting with the Mississippi Gran Prix this weekend.  So naturally there was a fairly big group up there today.  To make matters worse, the ride started out with a nice quartering tailwind for the first ten miles or so. 

Robert started pushing the pace early in the ride.  At one point he opened a big gap and Richard, who had been behind him, eased over to the side and just said, "Really?" as I went past him.  After a mile or two of that I think Woody and Daniel must have started feeling irritated about the pace and that's about when it turned into a little race at the front.  Next thing I know I'm hanging on for dear life going 32 mph behind Robert with Woody and Daniel already five seconds up the road and nothing but silence behind me. We finally settled down a bit and started making up a little ground, but then Robert blew up.  I made one last effort as Woody and Daniel started to ease their pace approaching The Dip where I figured they were planning on turning around.  The rest of the group was at least 30 seconds behind us as we coasted down the dip and looped back around. I was perfectly content to turn back early under the circumstances.  It would have been a very long and windy ride back from Ormond. Robert continued on alone, but the rest of the group, like me, didn't relish the idea of battling that wind all the way back from Ormond, so they turned around and joined us. 

The camaraderie didn't last long, however.  When we got to that long stretch heading east, the south crosswind hit the group full-force.  I happened to be near the back at that point, sitting on Tom's wheel three inches from the edge, thinking, "I am getting zero draft here!"  It was one of those situations where the front five guys were getting a nice draft in their eschelon, the sixth guy was riding the edge of the road getting just enough draft to stay where he was but not enough to recover and get into the rotation.  Everyone behind him was essentially unprotected and stuck in position and already too tired to get out in the crosswind and ride up to the front to join the rotating eschelon. 

So soon I started to see Tom struggling and a gap ahead of him beginning to stretch.  I was balancing precariously on the edge of the asphalt myself, so I hesitated to go around him on the windward side, hoping that the group might ease up for a moment so we could make contact again.  The group didn't ease up, though, and Tom finally pulled over to the right and said, "Sorry!" as I went past.  For the next thirty seconds or so I was full-gas trying to close what would ordinarily have been a minor gap, but today was better described as a gaping chasm. I was probably going only 23 mph, but the effort level made it feel more like 30.  I finally made contact as the levee curved to the south, slowing the front of the group a bit and making it easier to get a draft.  I spent the next few miles on Judd's wheel.  His legs were bad today and he was just sitting on the back trying to minimize the accelerations, which, considering the effect the wind was having, was none too easy.  So anyway, although it was a shorter than normal Tuesday ride, it felt plenty hard enough to dispell any feelings of disappointment. 

I never once considered trying to take my hands off the bars to take a photo.

Winter to Summer

It was a strange week for riding.  Every day was some combination of cold, wet and windy, and it basically resulted in some shorter than normal rides.  Fortunately the weekend's forecast was looking better.  It was still pretty chilly Saturday morning when I headed out to meet the Giro wearing knee-warmers, arm-warmers, and a vest.  I knew I'd be hot later, but I really didn't want to start the weekend off cold.  A number of riders were absent for the Giro because of the Sunny South criterium over in Mobile.  That kept the pace just a bit slower than usual.  As we headed out along Chef Highway I was pretty far back in the long paceline.  Suddenly I saw a cloud of dust and then a rider go shooting off to the right.  Dave had dropped his wheel in to a crack at the edge of the road and went down hard. He was not springing back up onto his feet, so I knew he must have hit pretty hard.  When I got back to him he was still lying on his back in some significant pain.  His helmet was cracked and he was having a lot of pain in his chest.  I figured he must have hit the stem and cracked a rib or two.  Brian listened to his chest and didn't hear anything to alarming while Jeff called his wife (I think) to come pick him up and get him to the ER.  As it turned out he'd punctured a lung and dislocated his shoulder.  How he didn't break a collarbone I don't know.  Anyway, it was a pretty good Giro Ride otherwise, even though I wasn't feeling all that sharp.

So on Sunday I decided to do the northshore ride.  It was supposed to be warmer and sunny, so really, why would I do another Giro Ride if I had a chance to take a ride in the country.  I headed over there solo this time, arriving a little early.  The temperature was probably around 60F with a clear sky that promised to bring us back to summer after practically a whole week of lousy weather.  By 9 amn we would be back to Summer.  A new rider who I didn't know said he had done one of these rides before and it was nice and easy.  I looked at him, looked around at who was there, and said, "This one won't be easy!"  Rolan and Steve were on hand or their first northshore ride this year, but we also had John D., Steve M., Chuck B., and a couple of the Midsouth guys.  Indeed, it turned out to be a good ride.  My legs were feeling a little sluggish, but I knew I wouldn't be able to ride on Monday so I figured I may as well not hold back very much.  Three of the group turned back around Choctaw Road, and then as usual the group split along the Hwy. 439 section.  By the time we were back to Dummyline Road, a couple more riders were ready to take the shortcut back.

There was an increasing south wind this whole time, which made the last half of the ride all that much more difficult.  As we approached Enon on the way back I started to go for the Enon sign sprint but hit the shifter with a little too much excitement, dumping it all the way down to the 11 and losing the draft entirely.  I think we were down to only three riders by the time we had come over the firetower hill and for some reason we decided to take a different route back, skipping Tung Rd. and instead going all the way to Kenzie Road before turning off of 437.  It was a nice change to the usual 4 mile death march to the cars.  Overall I was feeling OK, but not as good as I'd felt a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow I have to drive up to Baton Rouge for an all-day engineering workshop, so there's no way I'll be able to ride.