Long Summer Week

There are usually only a handful of weeks each year during which I log over 300 miles.  Last week was one of those.  They aren't typically a result of extra motivation or some specific training plan, and in fact the extra mileage often comes with a cost, namely a decrease in quality.  Indeed, high-mileage weeks for me are usually simply the result of a run of good weather and one or two extra rides.  Last week started off in typical fashion with an easy Monday ride and moderately fast Tuesday ride up on the levee. 

Tuesday evening was one of Kenny's bandit time trials out at the lakefront, and this one was a 2-man version.  I had not been planning on riding it, but when I got home from work reasonably early I decided to ride out there to lend a hand and get in a few extra miles.  When I arrived I hadn't even put my foot down before Kenny asked me if I needed a partner.  I politely declined, but then a little while later Charlie asked if I'd ride it with him.  Since he was in full aero TT mode, I told him I'd do it but that I would not be much help since I was on a regular road bike and had already put in around 50 miles that day. All I could promise were a few brief pulls to give him a break, but it was still clear that it would essentially amount to an 10.4-mile individual time trial on Charlie's part. 

We started out into a headwind at a fairly conservative pace with an effort level that I think would have yielded 25-26 mph on a calm day, but with the headwind was giving us more like 23.  Fortunately, Charlie is tall and was providing ample shelter.  He pulled steadily for about two miles, then I took a brief pull up and over the Bayou St. John bridge before dropping back onto his wheel.  The return trip was considerably faster, more like 27 mph.  Again, I took only a few brief pulls.  We ended up with an average speed a touch over 25 mph which was respectable, I guess, under the circumstances, but not even in the same ballpark as Ben and Jaden who did a blazing 29 mph average speed to post a better time than even the Frank and Woody combo.  I rode home easy.  Wednesday's lakefront training race was rained out, and then on Friday, as I rode home from work, I hit some glass or something and slashed the sidewall of my front tire.  Fortunately I had a spare tube on hand, but since I was Friday and I was tired I considered for a while the option of just walking the rest of the way or riding the rim.  I really didn't want to have to mess with changing a very dirty tire.  I ended up doing it anyway, after hunting around for a discarded piece of cardboard for a boot.  The old retired Michelin Pro Race that I'd had on there for the past year somehow got me back thanks to the boot and the Mr. Tuffy, but this morning it went in the trash and was replaced by a well-worn Vredstein that I'd been saving for just such an occasion.

So the weekend finally arrived and I headed out to Starbucks to meet the Giro group. It turned out to be a pretty typical mid-summer Giro with some fast sections and some slow sections. After the turnaround the group was going really slowly, as often happens, and so I rolled off the front alone for a while to maybe provide a little motivation.  I was going only around 23 mph and fully expected the group to come streaming past around Highway 11, but apparently they were feeling particularly lazy and the only person who came up to me was Mike W, so we started a little 2-man rotation at a moderate 24 mph, again expecting a 30 mph group to come blasting past us at any moment.  As it turned out we were nearly all the way to the Goodyear sprint sign before Ben and a couple others flew past with the rest of the group still a bit behind.  That afternoon I had to drive over to Baton Rouge to officiate the second race of the summer track series.  I drove through a big thunderstorm around Laplace wondering if it was going to be a wash-out in Baton Rouge, but it turned out to be just a random storm.  Although it slowed things on the interstate down to 50 mph for a while, things in Baton Rouge remained dry and the races went smoothly.  I again brought my track bike with me, and Lance was able to use it for the races.  With no rain delays this time I arrived back home around 11 pm I guess, which made for a rather long day.

John Dias had send out an email about doing a northshore ride, and so I headed across the lake Sunday morning despite the possibility of getting into one of those scattered thunderstorms that were popping up randomly all over south Louisiana that morning.  He and a couple of the S3 guys were starting from Abita Springs in order to put in around 90 miles, so Adrian and I met them at the regular northshore ride start at the Lee Road school at 8:00.  We would be doing only 65 miles of their longer ride.  Surprisingly, there was nobody else to join us, so we had a 5-man group for the day's ride.  John was kind of pushing the pace and Newman was suffering a bit, while Adrian was attacking the hills.  It all made for a very nice training ride, despite a few stops along the way.

After we looped around the top of the course and started heading back south, we could see our future in the black clouds that were building up on the horizon.  I guess we were still about an hour from the school, heading west on 1072 when it started to rain. It never got particularly heavy, and stopped entirely after a while, although we spent a lot of time on wet roads after that.  I had not been particularly aggressive on this ride, and I think I was starting to feel the accumulated fatigue from six consecutive 250+ mile weeks.

This morning I went out to the levee for an easy recovery ride where I ran into Robin.  I did 26 miles at an average speed of about 16 mph.  The forecast for today still holds a good chance of rain, but after that the rest of the week is looking to be fairly dry and hot.  That's good because I will be getting around by bicycle this week a lot.  They are finally putting down new asphalt all up and down Broadway Street, and so a lot of it is going to be closed off this week. Driving a car to work would probably take more time than riding.  I'll have to go back to the optometrist this week and make a decision on the contact lenses.  I think I'll end up going with the single-vision option since they work so well for riding and are cheaper, even though reading a menu is going to be a problem.