Sidelined

River fog for Thursday's levee ride.

"Well, at least I wasn't expecting to be able to ride this weekend anyway." The thought first went through my mind on Thursday afternoon. I could already feel the beginnings of the sore throat that, a few hours later, would be a full-fledged head cold. Thursday night I got basically no sleep at all. The only position that was tolerable was sitting. I sucked on whatever zinc lozenges I could find in the house, took pseudoephedrine and naproxen, and hoped for the best. By sunrise I knew I wouldn't be making it in to work on Friday. You'd think I would have gotten a lot of rest on Friday, but I guess I was so hopped up on caffeine and pseudoephedrine that I wasn't sleepy. Although I tried to rest, I ended up steam-cleaning carpet, sweeping floors, cleaning the kitchen, and generally doing random housework in-between sessions at the computer. By Friday evening the sore throat had abated and I could feel the lung congestion starting, but overall was feeling considerably better. This was a good thing because I was scheduled to get up at 5 am on Saturday and drive up to Ridgeland, Mississippi for two days of cyclocross officiating. Fortunately, the weather forecast wasn't up to the usual cyclocross standards of freezing cold rain. In fact, by the time the races started at 10 am the forecast called for sunny skies and temperatures in the 60s.

I hit the road Saturday a bit after 5:30 am and had a reasonably nice 200 mile drive up through Jackson to the Tri-County Mountain Bike Association's Ridgeland Trails. The only problem was all of the construction along I-55. Arriving at the race site I was surprised that Wes had decided to put the start/finish right at the entrance rather than alongside the nice big shelter where it had been last year. That meant we'd be relying on his truck for power. He also hadn't put up the pop-up shelters, which didn't really matter except that it made it hard to read the computer screen. With three officials on hand for this race, I felt a lot more comfortable about using CrossMgr for scoring. The only problem with CrossMgr is that if I screw up too much and key in bad bib numbers or click on them at the wrong time, the results can get pretty distorted, so you really need to have those backup officials doing manual scoring. As it turned out, everything worked pretty well and we were consistently getting the results out within ten minutes of the race finishes. Sunday's races were basically repeats of Saturday's, so all of that went quite smoothly as well. The whole time I was there I had a little voice in one ear telling me I should be riding and another little voice in the other ear telling me I was sick and definitely shouldn't be riding. Fortunately, I had not brought any riding clothes with me in order to eliminate the temptation. I did have my old mountain bike since I thought it would be useful for running back and forth from the pavillion to the parking area, but since the finish wasn't at the pavillion, it wasn't really needed.

I slept in this morning. I'm feeling a lot better but there's still some lung congestion and there's just no point in pushing it right now. The only problem is that the weather around here is about to take a turn for the worse, so it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'll be logging much mileage at all this week. A cold front will be coming through tomorrow afternoon, which means we'll be going from a high on Tuesday of 77 degrees to 51 by Wednesday morning. Oh, and of course there's rain the forecast through Friday. Once that front comes through we'll be looking at lows in the 40 for the forseeable future, including the cyclocross championships on Sunday.