Flats and Flexibility

I was not surprised Monday morning to find my quads a little tired from last weekend.  Although my sprinting proved to be entirely ineffective as far as the finish order was concerned, it was apparently enough to do a little damage.  Clearly, I need to be doing more of this.  Anyway, I had already planned on an easy morning ride for Monday, and headed out toward the lakefront at 6:30.  I decided to take a left at Lakeshore Drive and ride to West End, with plans to then do a short circuit around City Park before returning home.  Somewhere along Filmore I felt the squishiness in my rear tire and contemplated my options.  It seemed like a slow leak, so I decided to see if I could make it over to the Starbucks on Harrison before it went completely flat. The lure of a cup of coffee and a comfortable chair to ease the task of fixing the flat was too much to resist. That all worked out nicely, and I ended up swapping out a few recovery ride miles for a nice recovery coffee break.  It was nice to have that kind of flexibility on this particular Monday morning.

Tuesday morning it was back to the routine as I rushed out to the levee to meet the 6:15 ride.  There was a pretty big turnout that included Luke who was in town from his new residence way out in the Utah territory.  Howard was there, seemingly locked into surge mode, but his pulls were fairly brief so everyone would just string out as he surged from the 24 mph consensus speed to around 27, and then it would slow down to about 22 before settling back to normal until his turn came around again.  At some point we picked up Mike W., and for reasons unknown I think he was having some kind of problem with, I guess, Howard on the ride back down the river where we picked up the two big guys.  Every time someone would pull off in front of him he would soft-pedal, which of course was causing some confusion and havoc for those farther back in the paceline. He said a few things to me as he came alongside that didn't really make sense to me - something about teaching them about teamwork of something.  I dunno, at least it was all pretty much a non-issue as far as the ride went except that it made the pace a bit more erratic than usual. Toward the end Howard and someone else kind of attacked, the rest of the group didn't respond, and Mike took off apparently in pursuit but eventually sat up before drifting back to the pack, only to launch his own sprint for a random sign post somewhere around the bridge.  I was feeling a little sluggish, but otherwise OK, all the while re-playing the weekend's races and coming to the unfortunate conclusion that I need to be doing considerably more intensity and considerably less eating of Easter candy.