Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Freezing My Butt Off, What Fun

Today's Unusually Spotty Tracking Via Various Gimmicks

Well, I admit riding the bike so close to sundown, in the middle of the winter, is not a totally defensible idea.
Today was beautiful, at least from inside the house looking out the picture window in the front....
But it was also WINDY, and cold. Had I exercised any aforethought about how cold it actually was I would have prepared better for it and made sure I had sufficient cold weather gear on board.
It was already cold and breezy so I started out with full fingered gloves, instead of my favorite half-finger gloves.  They normally get too warm after a mile or so but NOT TODAY.  
I rolled out about a mile from the house when I decided it was just too cotton-pickin' cold for my hands, so I stopped to retrieve my good mittens from the  pannier on the rear rack.  Trouble is, I couldn't find them, even after digging through the contents desperately.  I was cold, especially my pinkies, but I didn't want to abort the ride, so I put the full finger gloves back on and decided to tough it out.
It was a decision I regretted almost all the way around the loop.  My hands were painfully numb almost throughout the ride but I didn't lose sensation entirely in the fingers so I assumed I was not getting them frostbitten.  I note my coldest recorded temperature was 35F so with a bit of wind chill.... Gaaack.
Today's thrilling video is just a clip showing the increase in the wind as I rode north on Mountain Valley and turned west on Entranosa Road. 

It was already cold before this, and I stopped at the end of this clip and took off my cold sweaty windbreaker and turned it inside out and let it hang over the bike in the wind while I went into the scrubby trees to pee.  The jacket was still very cold when I put it back on but at least the sleeves were dry again, and it had not gotten so cold I didn't get that sweaty on the way back home.
I've got to come up with a better windbreaker layer solution.  I always get too warm and sweaty in the forearms and even in today's cold the same problem occurred and  it is of course miserable to get all sweaty and then to both sweat more and freeze as the sweat cooled even more in the wind.  Maybe a light jacket with removable sleeves would work.  I used to have one several years ago but am not sure if I still have it nor do I recall if it worked any better.  Better go dig through the  closet.... waitaminute.  I just remembered the story of the lost windbreaker with separatable sleeves.... the zipper failed on it and it was put in Jacque's project pile.  I'm certain she has forgotten about it even more than I have, since it's been at least a couple years now.  If we can find it we'll check it out again and see if it's worth the effort to replace the zipper with a new zipper or Velcro or whatever.  It was quite a pricey bike jacket so maybe some effort should go into it.

Ride Started: 4:23 PM    Ride Ended:  6:08 PM
Beginning Battery Voltage:   13.2   Ending Voltage: 13.0  Lowest:  13.0
Lowest Temp  35 F      Highest Temp:  46 F 
Stats from the GPS:    Total Miles:  10.50
Overall average speed            Moving Avg               Max Speed
  6.9 MPH                                8.1 MPH                 29.6 MPH
Total Trip time                       Moving Time             Stopped Time
1 hour 31 mins                       1 hour 17 mins           14  minutes

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