The Long Sunday Giro

Pat threw out the suggestion that we do a long Sunday Giro Ride a few days ago. From home, the regular Giro Ride, like the one I did yesterday, works out to about 62 miles for me. The long Giro adds about 30 to that total. It didn't take me long to sign on to this ride, though. It's looking like I'll be off the bike for a week because of holiday travel, so it wasn't going to matter much if I had sore legs while sitting in the car on Monday. I just noticed that this is my 2,001st blog post, which I guess is some kind of milestone. Speaking of which, it's looking like I won't be making 12,000 miles this year. I've logged 11,665 this year and I guess I will add another hundred or two after I get back to town. Given the missed weekends in the early spring when I was travelling with the Tulane team, I think it will still be a respectable mileage total. I've logged somewhere between 11k and 13k each year for probably the last ten years, at least.

So this morning it was still pretty chilly - somewhere in the upper 40s I think - with a significant wind out of the east.  Knowing I'd be doing the long ride, and that the temperature would probably be near 60 by the time we got back, I dressed a bit less warmly than I might have otherwise.  It made the ride out to Starbucks kind of cold, but really not all that bad. There will be some much colder days to come, I'm sure. The ride out to Slidell seemed very controlled. I guess we had around 15 riders who made the long ride, and for most of the way it was just smooth rotating paceline into the wind. When we got to the gas station in Slidell where we always stop, I lifted the bike over a curb and when I put it down I heard a strange sound. The front wheel had a ton of play in it and I thought that the Mavic hub bearing locknut (I use the term loosely) had come loose. I borrowed a multi-tool and tried to tighten it, but it seemed tight, and when I put the wheel back on everything was normal.  I think that although the quick-release seemed locked down OK, it was somehow hung up on something. I'd taken the front wheel off the night before when I was cleaning the bike, so I must not have put it back on properly.  Kind of scary since that fork doesn't have lawyer tabs on it. It still seems like kind of a mystery, however. Very unusual.

The ride back into town got pretty fast. Faster than I thought it would, in fact. We were still working a paceline, but the closer we got to the city the more people started getting out of the rotation and sitting on the back. I was one of them. My legs had felt sore from the start, and by the time we were about 75 miles in, they were starting to be a problem. That's when I started looking for a little more shelter. Anyway, it was a pretty good ride, and although my legs were a bit achy at the end, I was glad I'd made it.