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November 07, 2004
Fall ride, part II
This morning around 11 the sun came out and it must've warmed up to 13-14 degrees Celsius. At the time, I was cleaning up in the yard after having trimmed shrubs and couldn't get away to ride before lunch.
So I went out right after lunch. The wind started picking up soon after the sun appeared, wind blowing out of the north. On the flat, open stretches headed north to the bridge over the autoroute before Montmélian, I slowed to a crawl. The dry corn tassles bent back and flapped. Yesterday in the opposite direction at the same place, I was rolling in top gear at a quick pace.
I'd tried to get Nathalie to ride to La Rochette with me. She declined. I told here it would be more interesting than her exercise bike. She told me I'd ride too fast for her. I promised to ride slowly. She said the real problem was that on her exercise bike, she can always stop after a maximum of 30 minutes. She expected the ride with me to take longer than that.
Colette asked me whether I look at the landscape. I replied that yesterday I saw two turkeys running after a third turkey who'd found what looked like a green apple. I further remarked that today all the turkeys appeared to be hiding from the wind.
Borges once wrote that had an imposter wrote the Koran, he'd have filled it with camels for local color. When you live in the mountains and ride through vineyards every time you go out, you remember the turkeys competing for an apple, more than the peaks and grapes. That said, the country around here is lovely.
Posted by Mark at November 7, 2004 04:46 PM
Comments
Yesterday, I took my first cold weather ride. I have arbitrarily decided to label any ride below 50 degrees as a "cold weather ride." It was 39 degrees when I started around 9 AM and was 47 degrees when I finished 37.7 miles later. I appeared to have guessed almost perfectly how to dress. I wore my gore-tex suit. Underneath, I wore a turlteneck thin thermal pullover and sweat pants over biking shorts on the bottom. I wore leather gloves for my hands, and a very thin polyproplene bacalava (I used to use it for sub-20 degree running years ago) which did a good job of keeping my ears and head warm. I was never overly warm but was rather cool when speed and headwinds combined exceeded 30 MPH (probably about 5% of total ride time.) My clothes under the gore-tex suit were wet when I finish but not really soaked. Only problem area was my feet. I wore a pair of socks cover with plastic supermarket bags inside my shoes -- feet were fine for the first hour and a quarter, quite cool for the next hour, and uncomfortable for the last 30 -40 minutes. It also would be nice to wear something less bulky than sweat pants -- probably should get some kind of tights I could wear for running also.
Posted by: Dana at November 10, 2004 05:07 PM
Have you considered shoe covers for your feet?
I've been glad to have my pair for all rides below about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I spent about 20 euros, but they really keep the feet warmer a lot longer.
If you get tights, you might want to get cycling tights and potentially some sort of underwear. Running tights seem to be inappropriately cut for cycling somehow.
Posted by: Mark at November 10, 2004 08:56 PM