Having survived the shorter morning ride on Wednesday without analgesics, I decided it was time to put them aside for a while and see how things went. Thursday morning's temperature was up around 60F with a moderate breeze and overcast skies. I planned to do the long (42 mi.) morning ride, even though I was pretty sure the muscles in my upper back would not be too happy about it.
There was a nice group of a dozen or so up on the levee today and the pace heading out was reasonably smooth. Of course "reasonable" is a relative term. To be a little more specific, it was mostly in the vicinity of 24 mph except for a little excursion onto the grass when one of the big tractors came over the little bridge just as we were approaching it. Strava says we still had a 24.6 mph average for most of the outbound leg. When we got to the Luling bridge I sat up to stretch a bit. Although my neck and back seemed to be doing OK, and in fact felt a little better when I was going hard than when I was going easy, I could already feel the muscles tightening up, making it painful to turn my head. I knew the ride back was going to be painful, and not because of the pace.
We were maybe halfway back when, for some reason, there were a number of surges with big slow-down between them. I don't know what was going on, but soon I found myself, more or less accidentally, in a 4 or 5-rider group. The pace settled down a bit thanks to the wind, and there was a nice rotation going at 22-23 mph for a long time. By then my upper back was really starting to hurt, however. When we got close to the country club I sat up and let them go, dropping down to 16 mph for a while. It didn't really help ease the pain much, however. Eventually the rest of the group caught and I tucked in behind. At one point I turned to look back and got a pretty sharp stab of pain under my right shoulder blade (which I've felt a few other times over the past week). That hurt.
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