In Town

Haven't left town for a whole week.  Maybe in a month or so I'll be able to do that again.  I decided long ago to skip the Chappell Hill weekend over in Texas.  It's actually part of the LCCS as kind of a "race exchange" thing that the promoter of the Vuelta d' Acadiana worked out.  That race counts toward the Texas Cup points, this one counts toward LCCS points.  The idea is to increase turnout, although I suspect that the Vuelta got the better part of that deal.  Anyway, a number of the local riders did make the trip, which meant that the Saturday and Sunday Giro Rides were relatively civilized.  Of course they both had their fast sections, but with the horsepower level a bit lower than normal they didn't last quite as long as usual and didn't get quite as fast as usual.

The Daughter's U-Box finally arrived on Saturday, a month after it had been picked up in Olympia.  Inside was her scooter, two bikes, and about a hundred shoes as far as I can tell.  We had a Tulane city ride set up for 10:30 on Sunday, so after the Sunday Giro I had just enough time to eat something, change into a fresh jersey, and ride over to Tulane with The Daughter.  This was the "welcome ride" for the fall semester and I was pleased to find that we had around fifteen people show up for it.  It was a nice day - a little breezy and quite warm - but we were planning on riding neither long nor hard.  After all, there was a Saints game starting at noon at the Superdome.  That was one reason we didn't ride down to the Quarter like we usually do for these rides.  Instead we headed out to the lakefront and stopped at the Morning Call in City Park on the way back.

This morning I went out for a recovery ride with The Daughter, meeting up with Ben and David on the levee for an hour of steady 20 mph cruising.  My legs were feeling a little stiff, which I attributed to the prior week's mileage.  Although few of those miles were very hard, I had somehow accumulated over 300 of them.

Next weekend is the Pensacola stage race, for which I have not yet made any arrangements.  Then the next weekend will be a quick trip to Sandestin where The Wife has a conference.  The weekend after that will be Six Gap.  Following that there will be just a couple of weeks before the first cyclocross race.

I have been trying to follow the tweets from Dale Stetina's family, hoping he is able to recover from the terrible crash he suffered. Considering the fact that they had found a brain stem injury and had him in an induced coma for a few days, I guess he's doing OK.  Yesterday they said he had developed "Some fluid build up in lungs & GI infection."  On the plus side I surmise that he knows where he is, responds to commands, and is not paralyzed.  Dale and his brother Wayne are in that same set of USAC license numbers as mine - a block in alphabetical order in the middle of the larger database that resulted from some re-numbering that happened in the 80s.