Road Season Cometh

The weather was finally warming up a bit for the weekend thanks to the promise of clear sunny skies. I rushed out to the Giro Ride on Saturday dressed for temperatures of around 49F but knowing full well it would be above 55 by the time I got home.

Frank and Kenny

As I turned the corner at Canal and Harrison I met right up with about half of the Palmer guys, including Frank Moak and Kenny Bellau, both of whom are rare sightings at the Giro start. It was a little windy, probably 10-12 mph out of the northwest, so speeds heading out to Venetian Isles were slower and more choppy than usual. We were a couple of miles from the turnaround when some of the guys who had been pushing through the wind at the front rather suddenly eased up and started dropping back. The entire group then kind of splintered as if nobody knew what to do without the power guys on the front.  It was almost comical. The ride back offered a few sections of good tailwind, so we had some nice long stretches where we were going 28-30 consistently. I am just starting to feel like I am at least approaching the riding fitness I should have had about a month ago, so I guess that's progress of a sort, although I'm still a long way from being able to spend more than twenty seconds on the front of the group when its going fast.

Saturday afternoon I dragged out the extension ladder, opened an old can of primer, and slathered some of it onto the window frame at the back of the house. Nothing like standing on a ladder for a couple of hours to do a number on tired legs! I'm not really sure when I am going to find time to paint all of that old peeling woodwork, especially considering that we're talking about six 8-pane windows, all in dire need of paint, especially for the glazing which takes forever.

Anyway, on Sunday the Tulane group was planning an outing to Independence for a 60+ mile training ride, so I decided to do that rather than another Giro Ride. I'd ridden some of those roads in various races, century rides, training rides, etc., but wasn't familiar enough with them to really know where the hell we were going most of the time.  Since it was a very mixed group, the pace was kind of all over the place depending on whether you wanted to stay with the front group or chill with the rear group. Dustin had mapped out a route with about a hundred turns, so none of the stretches was more than a few miles long before everyone stopped or eased up to regroup. The weather started out in the mid-50s and ended in the mid-70s. As usual, I dressed for the first hour and then just started unzipping layers the rest of the day, while others started out in basically summer kits and just suffered through the chill for the first 45 minutes or so. To each his own. It was a nice ride on some good roads. Nothing particularly hilly or steep and lots of low rolling terrain with a few kind of long gradual climbs. This was all followed by bar-b-cue for lunch.

After I got home I met up with local rider Bill Brundige who was donating his old SyCip bike to the team. They're starting to acquire a nice little stable of loaner team bikes with four full road bikes available right now, plus one track bike, a few track frames that need to be built up, and a cyclocross frame that needs to be built up. There are also a couple more very bare road frames that could be built up as well.

Anyway, the start of the road season around here will be a criterium up in Monroe next weekend, then the Tulane race that still has a lot of loose ends to tie up, followed Rouge-Roubaix the second week in March. I'll be officiating the Tulane race and also Rouge-Roubaix, and will likely make the trip up to Arkansas for a collegiate race in-between, so I'm definitely getting a little nervous about missing a lot of weekend mileage over the next month.