The northern hemisphere keeps tilting away from the sun, but my ride time remains the same. This is the time of year when we start seeing lots of photos of sunrise from the local cycling community. I had made it out to the 5:45 am meeting spot on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday had headed out around the same time to meet the WeMoRi, but when the alarm went off on Thursday morning I hit the snooze button and promptly fell fast asleep. I finally did get out of the house, around fifteen minutes late. Fortunately, the Thursday group, after meeting at the west end of Lakeshore Drive around 6:10 am, heads east to do an out-and-back lap of Lakeshore Drive before continuing west along the Lake Trail in Jefferson. I knew that if I would be able to find them on Lakeshore Drive. In fact, I was a little surprised that I had to ride a few miles east along the lake into the huge rising sun before I saw them somewhere around Franklin Avenue. Thursday's ride was good, but not particularly fast. On the plus side, however, the group is for this "new" ride is growing as people figure out where and when they can meet it.
This morning I met Ben for the Friday coffee ride, picking up Scott at the end of Nashville and Brian B somewhere out on the lakefront. Ben was out on his Cervelo set up for tomorrow's Team Time Trial. I had promised myself I'd put my aero bars on the bike, but of course I never quite got around to that. I'll be heading down to Vacherie very early tomorrow morning for an hour or so of TTT torture, my only consolation being that I'll be the smallest rider on the 4-man team of 55+ riders. So how hard could that be?
In the 'best-laid plans' department, the Rocky Mount stage race had to find a new road race course at the last minute after a group went to pre-ride the original course and found a big section of the road had been completely washed out. The road stage of that race serves as our skill-based, aka 'category,' championship. Then the upcoming criterium in Baton Rouge had to change their course because the state is tearing up the road in front of the capitol building in order to make it into a pedestrian-only space. The alternate route that goes around and behind the capitol building is fine except that there are two "caution" pylon things bolted to the middle of the road where the crosswalks are. We'll have the whole road so riders should be able to negotiate those as long as they are aware and paying attention. Should be interesting anyway. Then today the fall Track series dates got changed from Fridays to Saturdays, which is probably a good thing except that one of those Saturdays I'll be on the road to Six Gap.
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