After a piss-poor, windy and cold ride on Saturday I was in need of a good ride. I had hoped that would have come on Sunday but waking up to an inch of so of heavy, wet, sloppy snow changed my mind and had me hunkering down to watch football and make a VERY nontraditional Easter supper of meatball sandwiches and oven fries. Thankfully I was able to make up for weekend’s lack of quality enjoyable riding with a semi-good ride today.
Ever since I started this blog I have always erred on the side of miserableness in my writing. There are a few reasons for this.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have had more than our share of sunny days and blue skies here in Michiganderburgh. I have no idea why, but I’ll take it. Granted we’ve yet to see temperatures above 60˚, but bright sun and blue sky at least 95% of the time is pretty sweet for this transplant who was raised on Joe DeNardo predicted Western Pennsylvania “partly cloudy skies with a chance of showers.” However, today was NOT one of those days. It was damp and chilly and everything–and I mean EVERYTHING–was various shades of fecal matter brown, baby vomit, and slate gray.
Sunday brought little in the way of riding, but much in the way of gusting winds and even some blowing snow at times. It also brought me and Wifey to a local furniture store to buy new mattresses and our first set of bedroom furniture that wasn’t a hand-me-down or dug out of a dumpster. It actually felt kind of nice to finally do that and will probably feel even better to sleep on a mattress that doesn’t feel like it’s stuffed with dead pigs.
While we were out and about, I dropped off a roll of film that I recently shot with my Holga 135. It’s sort of fun to shoot pics with the $35 plastic Holga. It’s also a roll of the creative dice pretty much every time you click the shutter as to whether the crap photo will be a GOOD crap photo, or just a crap photo.
In a post earlier this month I mentioned how happy I was to be back on skinny (40c) tires and off of the Farley for a while. That time off of the Farley lasted about two weeks. It’s not that I found myself longing to ride slow, soft, heavy, four-inch tires on dry dirt roads or anything, but with Saturday’s ride time temps hovering around 30˚ I figured I might as well roll fat and slow, work harder and thus stay warmer.
After two three days of poop [literally], gusting winds, falling temperatures and local streets littered with drunk college kids dressed in various shades of dumb ass, green and vomit, I was finally able to pinch off [no poop pun intended] a short, hour and forty minute ride today: the Better Than The Trainer Ride (North Dirt Version)™.
After a lazy Saturday of not much riding, I made the executive, and oh so correct, decision to NOT watch my (adopted) Spurs get their asses handed to them by the dreaded Man U. today. Instead I opted to get out on the Jake (The Snake) with its newly re-mounted WTB Nano 40c tires to get my first true dirt road ride of 2015 in. I gotta tell you, it felt goooood.
I’m no expert on enemas or on heroin usage (thankfully), but I would almost have to think that the first ride on skinny(er) tires after a long winter of riding slow, fat, knobby, studded tires would compare to that of a Mark Renton approved heroin enema. Maybe I should just say that getting out today on skinny 35c tires (hey, that’s like a 23c to me!) felt pretty amazing compared to the past four months of riding tires so fat they make me look skinny? Either way, it felt good to get out.
It was a week and counting Thursday since I had last been out on the snow-covered dirt roads of Michiganderburgh. In that time I rocked a pretty unenjoyable head and chest cold which made spending time out in single digit temperatures a less than desirable option to blowing snot rockets on myself as I rode the trainer in the Stankment™.
Since Tuesday’s 30+ mile per hour wind gusts and -25˚ wind chills moved on, we here in central Michigan have been treated to a few days of brilliant sunshine and blue skies. Of course the lack of cloud cover also means that temperatures are struggling to get out of the single digits until well after lunch. Unfortunately, my time slot to ride is around 10 a.m., when the thermometer is grunting, groaning and moaning to get above zero.
Because of those high winds earlier in the week and the frigid temps that followed, I spent the first three days of this week hunkered down in the Stankment™ putting in miles running on the treadmill and riding the trainer. You would think that after forty-three years of living in the cold winter climates of Pennsylvania and Michigan I would be used to the cold and snow and would have learned to love it. Nope.
Like many of my cycling friends in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota I try my best to be active through it, but unlike many of them, I always fail to embrace or love the winter. For me the result is always the same; I tolerate winter and merely try to survive it with my mind and liver still functioning properly and my pant size unchanged come spring.
But enough of that winter hating hyperbole, lets’ get to the winter riding hyperbole…
