Two Wheel Blogs

No doubt about it. This is some cold weather we got going on right now. Not cold enough to not ride, of course. But cold enough to need to keep riding hard enough to stay warm.

Even the sun didn't want to warm me up out there today. I rode for a little over an hour and tried my best to stay both in the sun and out of the wind. That breeze was painfully chilly on bare skin. Riding into the wind was killer.

My snowy patch transformed itself overnight. Some sections had crusted over with a thin layer of ice, making for a ride so noisy I had trouble hearing the music on my ipod. Some sections, particularly low spots, had been leveled over with drifted snow. Plowing through these was a lot of fun. Short sections of deep powder don't slow you down too much and the sideways slipping and sliding is fun and exciting.

The part that was really different was the trail I cut yesterday. I had packed it down fairly well yesterday, but it wasn't really hard packed snow. Every time I rode over it my tires would leave fresh tracks. And because it wasn't packed hard I couldn't trust it to hold a grip in the corners.

Overnight the trail froze hard. All my tire tracks from yesterday are still there tonight despite all the new traffic I put on them today. So the good news is they grip really nicely. The bad news is the edges of the trail got pretty firm too, so getting up against that edge had a tendency to make life interesting.

So let's see... a little over an hour of slogging through the snow alternating between laying down major wattage plowing through deep or crusty snow and tempo spinning on hard packed snow. I wonder what TSS that earns me? I think I'll go with 500 or so. After all, in another month and a half it won't matter.

Training plans this week? It's supposed to warm all the way up into the upper 30's tomorrow. I'll be missing the opportunity to ride in these balmy temps. It will probably be long dark by the time my day at the office/dungeon lets up enough to think about riding so probably no ride tomorrow. After that, more accumulating these comfort miles. Trainer or 29er, or maybe even road, it's all good.