Winter Winds, Winter Legs

Once yesterday morning's cold front came through, the temperature started falling and by the time I headed off to the Reily Center for Spin class it was getting rather nippy. I was kind of dreading this class because the instructor is Milo, a rather large and loud guy who would make a nice drill sergent. He does not seem to have much of an appreciation for cycling, per se, and so his class is structured more like weight-lifting. How about fifty repeats of five seconds standing and five seconds sitting? Yeah, right. So I would stand for four of his cycles and sit for four. It probably drove him crazy, but my back still hasn't quite recovered from the last time I fell for that routine, and besides, I need to be able to ride the next morning. The worst part, though, was that someone had repositioned the fan! There are a number of fans on the floor of the Spinning room, and I always try to get one particular bike because it's right in line with one of them. I didn't notice until after we got started that someone had moved it a bit and I wasn't getting any breeze. Within ten minutes I was dripping sweat and the only wind I could feel was my own breath on my forearms. Since I'd missed riding in the morning, though, I was committed to getting a good workout so I just suffered through it. By the time I finished my cotton t-shirt was a couple of pounds heavier and I was sucking the last drops from my water bottle. It's a good thing my ride home from there isn't very long. I had brought a dry shirt, but my shorts, legs, shoes and hair were pretty well soaked for the ten minute ride back. Another ten minutes and I'm sure the residual warmth from the workout would have been blown away and I'd have frozen my ass off.

By this morning the temperature had dropped to around 40 and there was a strong north wind blowing. I tried to think up an excuse to sleep late, but just couldn't come up with anything good, so I piled on some clothes and headed out. The group was pretty small today - Woody, Mignon, Jeff, John, et. al. - and once we got into the headwind we were struggling to stay in the low 20 mph range. Woody was taking long pulls at the front. I wasn't. Soon, he looked over at me and suggested we turn around a little early. By then the relentless crosswind had split the group and Woody was thinking that those behind us would turn around early, leaving four of us with a very long and windy ride home. I didn't argue the point. So we turned around at The Dip and regrouped for the ride back. Even with the extra people, though, it felt like a long hard battle with the winter wind. Thanks to the prior evening's sweatathon, my legs were not feeling too quick and as often happens when they're feeling tired, I found myself riding one cog higher than usual. Anyway, I was glad I'd made it out there today because by the time I got back everything was feeling considerably better.