Just the Words

I've been carrying around the camera, plus the phone that has an arguably better camera than the actual camera, all week and keep forgetting to pull either out of my pocket. Perhaps some of that has been because the rides were hard, or seemed hard - hard to tell sometimes!

One of the young Juniors
was lapped twice before
finishing his first lap

Last Wednesday's lakefront races went fairly well despite a downpour during registration. Fortunately the summer pop-up thunderstorm drifted away and dissipated before the racing started. Turnout was actually almost normal, which was surprising considering what things looked like at 5:45 pm. As usual the first race, which includes Cat. 5, Women Cat. 4/5, and Juniors, was chaos. When you have riders mixed together with such a wide range of abilities, the race quickly becomes one long unending string of individual riders or small groups, most of which are gradually being lapped by the leaders. Scoring something like that is a nightmare, but I think we got it pretty much right that time, even though there were riders lapped twice in a 20-minute race on a 1+ mile course. We didn't have time to determine most of the placings (lots of lapped riders) before we had to start the next race, so those results weren't ready until after the final race of the night. The other races are considerably easier to score, but by the time the last race, for Cat. 1/2/3/4, finishes it's dark. We pulled Michelle's Jeep up with the headlights aimed at the finish line, which helped a bit. I had the frame rate turned down really low on the camera, and remembered to force the camera rather than rely on the auto-record motion-sensing, since that doesn't seem to trigger reliably when it's dark. The images were still plenty dark, but the numbers were definitely readable.

So last weekend I had no actual obligations, and ended up riding the Giro both Saturday and Sunday. Both days it was super fast on the way out, but not so fast on the way back. We had a new rider, Cliff, who recently moved here with his wife who is on faculty at UNO. The speed on Hayne and subsequent gaps caught him by surprise on Saturday and he was off the back pretty soon, but ended up finding people to ride with anyway. He came back on Sunday, though, and fared well. After Saturday's ride, I had been thinking that Sunday would be a lot easier. It wasn't. Somewhere after Hayne Blvd. a big gap opened up in the middle of the pack and it split. Naturally I was on the wrong side of that split. We were still going pretty fast, but were just holding the gap all the way to Chef Highway. When we turned onto Chef I could see the group ahead of us spread out across the lane and told whoever was nearby. "Here's our chance. We have about one minute to catch them before they start rolling again." Alas, there was some hesitation and thirty seconds later I could see the paceline starting to string out again, which meant that someone had already put the hammer down. I took off and was soon joined by Jaden and then by VJ, both of whom did 99% of the work while I tucked low at the back staring at my computer that was reading over 90% max heart rate despite the substantial draft. After a mile or two at 32 mph we finally pulled into the slipstream of the front group. On the return trip there were some complications with flat tires that kind of took the wind out of everyone's sails. I didn't complain about that.

It's like this project is a hobby and they just work on it in their spare time.

This morning I did a nice easy solo recovery ride on the levee. I stopped for a minute to take a photo (which is on my camera, which is at home) of a bunch of Egrets and even some Roseate Spoonbills taking advantage the food available in what must have been a drying up little pond on the batture. Later, on my way to work, I took this photo of the never-ending 5-year underground plumbing repair work on Pine Street. The locals have resorted to spray-painting messages on the Sewerage and Water Board's barricades and traffic barrels. Can't say as I blame them.