Discussion: You were heading right into...

You were heading right into it the whole time weren't you.
and you didn't get the return ride payoff...that sucks.

Well, at least I was on the mountain bike where I could shift down. I'm not sure I could have turned the 62 on the Felt.

I did a ride in that wind too. Started to say it was one of the most brutal road rides I've done in recent memory but thought maybe it was just my out-of-shape biking legs. I was in the two lowest gears on the CX bike for 75 minutes and darned glad to be done when I got home.

Riding into the wind isn't satisfying like climbing a mountain. With an incline you can see your opponent. "Of course this is hard, I'm going up." With the wind, it just pisses you off. I never much liked riding in the wind, even when I was on top form. Oddly, my PR for 40K came on a very windy day, albeit at 6000 feet, so there was some offset. It was tailwind going out so I had this 37 mph pace stuck in my head. I was cursing the whole way back thinking surely I should be going faster and absolutely refusing to go into the small ring on a flat time trial. I was so pissed when I finished I didn't even check my time for a while. When I did, I was sure they had got it wrong. Of course, Lance Armstrong was in that race, too, and beat me by about 6 minutes! It was his first National Title as a senior (over 18) rider.

That'll be a good story to tell your grandkids....but they'll say 'who's Lance Armstrong?'

Yeah, I'm glad I got the chance to race with him. Our careers didn't overlap by much, especially since he didn't do a lot of domestic racing in 1992 and almost none in 93, but we were in a couple dozen races together between 90 and 93. There was no question at the time that he was going to be a great 1-day rider. The stage racing thing really only came about because of the cancer because it finally got rid of his excess upper body weight (lean mass from swimming, but still not something you want when cycling through mountains).

Very special to have been in those races. I just read LA wants to go full circle into elite triathlon again, and he's been talking to Alberto about getting his marathon down to 2:30. That would make watching triathlon a bit more interesting.

I think he might be underestimating the difficulty in going from 2:50 to 2:30 in the marathon. I don't know anybody who worked their way down to that time. Most of them (like Gary Thompson) started out under 2:30, coming from a track background where they already had the leg speed. It's not an issue of fitness; cycling puts an awful lot of bulk on your thighs and that's not a good thing for running long distances. My VO2Max on an ergometer predicts a 2:40 marathon, but I'm running 15-20 minutes slower than that. But, more power to him if he wants to try.