Good Clothes and Winter Rides

The recent long weekend turned out to be great for riding, especially considering it is mid-January and much of the country is under about fifteen feet of snow.  We had earlier in the week planned a no-drop club ride on the northshore for Sunday, so when I headed over to Starbucks early Saturday morning for the Giro Ride I was not planning on taking it too easy. I had left home just a bit under-dressed since I was expecting to be burning a few calories over the subsequent few hours.  The ride itself was a fairly typical Giro.  There was a nice big group, the pace was brisk enough for a good workout for those who wanted one, a small contingent went out to Slidell, and I arrived back home feeling like I had been on a three-hour bike ride.

There was a time not that long ago when my winter cycling wardrobe was pretty severely limited.  I had one pair of long tights, one long-sleeved winter jersey, a wind vest, and a pile of summer stuff.  One can certainly still get by without a big collection of winter riding gear, but I have to say that the new stuff really does make life a lot better.  For Christmas I received a few "technical" fabric base layer shirts.  Adding those into the mix that includes my trusty Giordana winter jacket, long-sleeve thermal jersey, thermal bib tights, knickers, etc., I can pretty easily accommodate weather to at least the low 30s, which generally speaking is about as bad as it gets around here.  The new stuff is so, so much better than the old stuff from years gone by.  I do not miss the wool jerseys, cotton shorts, leather chamois, broken shoelaces, cotton-mesh and leather gloves, and especially the unyielding leather saddles.  It's all suitable nostalgic, of course, but please don't make me actually ride with it in anything but a inner-city antique bike ride!  Of course, all that winter stuff is expensive, and it's taken me quite a few years to accumulate it all, but since our winter really lasts only about three months, I get a lot of years out of most of it.  By the time I get to the end of January I'm already reluctant to replace any of it that needs replacement since I'm generally comparing the cost of a clothing item I'll use for only another three or four weeks with those new tires I need or that saddle that is worn through or all those increasingly expensive entry fees.  Anyway, suffice it to say that Over the past five or six days I've been riding in temperatures ranging from around 30 to around 65 and in general have quite comfortable.

So anyway, on Sunday Carly and Miles met Danielle and me to drive across the lake for the NOBC ride.  Although it was chilly at the start (kickers, double jerseys and arm-warmers) the sky was clear and it was supposed to warm up from the 40s to the 60s during our planned 65 mile ride.  We started with a large group of twenty that included a few riders, like Ben and Stephen, who were planning on splitting off after the first ten miles.  I was also expecting the rest of the group to split permanently at some point during the ride. Carly is most comfortable at around 16 mph right now and Miles was riding in sneakers with a borrowed helmet.  I was planning on riding herd at the back once they started to tire.

Passing the Firetower and heading down to Enon

As planned, everyone stayed together over the firetower hill and down past Enon, but by the time we were on Hwy 1072 gaps were starting to open on the hills.  The pace wasn't fast, but I knew a few of the riders in the group didn't have nearly the miles in their legs for a 3.5 hour 20 mph ride in the hills.  It was fine, though, because it turned out as I expected and even before the halfway point I was a minute off the back helping keep Miles and Carly within range.  At Hwy. 10 I debated taking a shortcut with them, but instead decided it would be better for them to finish the full distance, even if that meant doing a lot of it at 10 mph, which it did.  Way up on the north section of the route, where there are a few significant climbs, I found myself in-between Carly and Miles.  Carly was rolling along at maybe 12-15 mph ahead of me, but behind me Miles, who had been riding fairly strongly for the most part, was suddenly riding in slow motion.  I knew what that meant.  At first I eased up hoping he would catch me and I could pull us both up to Carly, but I was down to about 10 mph before he started making up ground. I eased up even more and when he pulled alongside I asked if he'd had anything to eat.  As I'd suspected, he hadn't and was now surely and profoundly bonked.  I pulled a powerbar out of my pocket, took one bite for myself and handed him the rest.  Then, when we to the Sie Jenkins Road to regroup Mignon gave him a piece of a Snickers bar.  That rejuvenated him quite nicely for the next ten or fifteen miles or so.  Things finally came apart again around the firetower hill and so the last seven or eight miles were pretty slow.

Crossing the Spillway heading upriver to LaPlace

The next morning was MLK day and I was off from work.  David had posted a note that he was going to ride up the river levee past the spillway to pick up the six or seven miles of paved bike path upriver from LaPlace.  That would work out to a ride of about 70 miles, and although my legs were actually a little stiff I decided to meet him at the quite civilized hour of 9:30 am by which time the weather was really nice.  I wore knee and arm-warmers with the plan of removing the knee-warmers for the return trip.  We ended up with a bit over 70 miles, including a mile or two of gravel/rock between the upriver end of the spillway and the start of the bike path up there.  It wasn't a hard ride - we averaged under 17 mph - but the weather was great.  By the time we were halfway back my neck and upper back were hurting pretty significantly, which has become the status quo over the past couple of months, especially after three 60+ mile rides in a row.

We're trying to get Danielle's Cannondale more or less race ready and the first thing we wanted to do was to find handlebars with a shorter reach and drop.  That was not an easy task since she's riding 36 cm bars.  We settled on some Bontrager Race VR-S bars that have about the shortest reach and drop I've ever seen, and also picked up a 8cm Zipp Service Course SL stem from eBay.  Next was a second set of wheels, also from eBay - a pair of unused 650c Bontrager Race Lite wheels that were pretty inexpensive.  It would be nice to swap out the triple chainring for a double, but that may be a somewhat thorny problem considering it's 9-speed, 165 crankarm length, would require a new bottom bracket, and possibly a new shifter or shifters.  It would have to be practically free at this point to make it feasible.