Scenic Route

I’m going to do my best to just get this one out. I have a dozen half-finished stories kicking around, because I always want to work out the rough spots and find every last typo. (When one is dyslexic, there are plenty of those and I can never see them.) Then I never get back to them.

The past couple of days are illustrative of winter riding here in R-Town. It’s different for everyone and differenter still in other locales. There’s a guy from Alberta on BikeJournal who’s been riding down to not quite -40°, which is the same number on either the F or the C scale.

Anyway, this is what it’s like for my typically.

Yesterday was just below freezing all day. Dense cloud, winds through the day varied from gusts of 35 mph on down to around 15 mph steady. When I rode to Presbytery, (heading southeast) the winds were from the SSE. Riding home hours later, in a northwesterly direction, the winds had shifted to WNW.

In each direction, I sweated through both my layers. My gloves were soaked from the inside. And the bike, well, pushing it, me, and the snow tires into the wind, it had to make itself happy with somewhere around 13 MPH average.

During the time it took for me to go from lounging in front of the PC eating tuna sandwiches (my preferred fuel for the TNUA rides) to fully geared up and carrying the bike out the door, the winds came up and it started to snow. Big, fat, wet, sloppy, lake-effect flakes. Each one like having a snocone smooshed in your face by the town bully. Every half-mile I had to clear the snow off my glasses. Rain, well at least you can see through that. This is not the case with snow.

This, despite breaking roadie protocol and wearing the visor on my helmet, and with the helmet tipped low over my eyes.

Fortunately, TNUA was slow enough that wearing the same (although now dry) clothes I’d worn commuting, I stayed cool.

But simply because it was slow does not mean it wasn’t challenging.

Frozen ground and snow means extensive off-road. I’m getting better at it. The bike’s limitations are only the turning radius and the high gearing. If the speeds are up and the turns wide enough I don’t have to worry about toe-overlap, I enjoy it. When the turns get too tight or things get slow enough I can’t pedal, it turns me off.

Fortunately, there was less of the inchworm-slow, zero-radius stuff last night, and more of the stuff I could handle. In fact, once we got over to Highland Park, I had quite a blast. The Portland’s cyclocross ancestry came shining through. In fact, my high speed for the night was downhill, off-road through the park.

Better still, was its climbing. The Portland and I climbed every hill the top MTBers climbed. Less sturdy riders walked their MTBs up some of the hills.

A first-timer also on the ride last night was a four-season commuter on classic Bridgestone. He kept apologizing for his “old” skinny tired road bike. Huffys get old. Bridgestones become classic. As for the road tires, well, it’s not really advertised that the worse the weather, the more likely TNUA is to go off-road.

In any event, I’d had plenty of miles in already, and had today to look forward to, so when TNUA left Highland Park last night, I came home.

Arriving home, the bike was nearly entirely white with snow. You couldn’t tell it was orange anyway. A hot shower took care of that. I let it drip dry and hung it up for the night.

Today I had to go to a client’s house in horse country in the hills to the southeast of the city. Fresh lube on the chain, fresh charge in the lights, and extra clothes because I know she keeps the thermostat low, and we were off.

It was a clear morning. Around here it’s welcome relief from the heavy, woolen overcast, but it also means cold. The day’s high was 21. And the winds were back. And again with the SE winds heading out (to the goddamned southeast) in the morning, shifting to NW for the return (to the mutherfucking NW) in the afternoon. Between the hills, the snow tires and the winds, I made a sweat-soaked 13.4 MPH average on the way out.

But, I got to wear my sunglasses.

Although the client was interested in my horse, her horse ignored mine completely.

I was frozen-through after four hours in the client’s refrigerated home, but despite hills, headwinds and snow tires, I never warmed up on the ride home. A 75-minute ride where I was freezing cold. I was stiff the whole way and never got a good circular spin going. I think I hurt my right knee.

The bike and I each got a hot shower at home.

Oh, and the bike stands on its rear fender in the shower. It broke tonight. The fender, not the shower.

And yet, I could have taken the bus halfway there or halfway back, and I didn’t. The client offered to drive me both ways. I declined. That’s how much I enjoy cycling. Even when it seems really shitty, it’s great. While everything here is true, the reason this piece sounds like a whine is because if I told you how nice the rides actually were, you’d think I was back to drugging.

Tomorrow is supposed to be colder and snowy, warming through the weekend to just above freezing for the next week. The snow tires may come off tomorrow night or Friday night. I rode the snows on the my usual Saturday long loop to work last week. It’d be nice to ride the road tires for a change of pace this week.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 10:13 pm EST and is filed under Bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.