Thu, Jan 13, 2011 9:26 PM Eastern Time
Not your typical blog post about how to or not how to ride in the winter snappy cold, rather, a few pictures and a brief story about this fun fun ride.
View the
Hines Hellbender Album on Facebook!
Oh where to start... Well, as you all know by now, I absolutely love riding in the fresh snow. That is right folks, I LOVE RIDING IN FRESH FALLING SNOW! It is peaceful, soothing, calming, serene, mystical, fun, healthy, enjoyable to the fullest extent of happiness yeah! I love fresh snow and will ride in it when ever we get it, which seems to only be at night lately. Besides that, I am seldom available in the day during working hours to enjoy this splendid weather when it arrives, therefore nighttime it is.
Riding in the snow has it's unique pleasures, and also it's dangers when a fellow cyclist swerves to avoid a hazard and inadvertently burrows into a snow pile directly in front of you whilst you traverse the slippery terrain. Oh Hi Randy, it seems you have run aground yet again, be sure to watch for rocks RRRRRRRRRRR! Okay, that was lame. In any case, the snow has a fine line of friction that you must mind at all times. This line is a fine one, depending on tyre selection of course, so fine that in identical conditions one can both wipe out and stay stable, it then becomes factors of resultant vector physics and not so much how much traction your bad ass Nokian studded tyres are, in fact, you can crash on ice on anything, period. The key here is to keep that fine line of traction and stability at all time, which add to the excitement of winter cycling.
Our route shall be discussed proper now. We entered Hines Park at the Merriman road entrance pathway and proceeded north towards Livonia. Our mission wasn't clear either, as usual, when we ride, it is just to ride and the destination is really not that important as long as we get our miles in. As we were riding it had became apparent that the weather was cold enough to chill my fingertips and toes just so, that we needed an actual goal to the ride, we needed a stop for coffee to warm up. So we decided to take Stark road to Senate Coney island to grab a cup of coffee and rice.
Ahhh, that was the ticket! and onward back towards our origin, Garden City. The immediate smack with the cold air was cold as expected but nothing to worry about as we generate enough heat cycling to offset the chill, even to our extremities such as toes and fingers. The snow was falling in magnificent quantum patterns all about, illuminated by the street lamps all around. Since we both were getting tired, we made haste on our return trip, averaging about 8.5 mph whoo hoo! This is when my chain was just starting to slip, more on this on our next post. By the time we got back to our origin, we were pretty cold when stopped for
photos and such, (right mouse click and open in new window) that I decided to take a snapshot of our current weather, and it was like 22-23 degrees F out which was borderline too cold for my current clothing setup. Have a look:
There is much discussion on clothing and the cold, and as I already had mentioned, we do not discuss this in this blog post, but rather in part II where it was even colder! The amount of riding effort must be considered though for this ride, if you are interested in the metrics for my heart-rate, have a look at the
Garmin stats and note this was all on a single speed MTB with under inflated tyres for stability.
Ride safe People, and stay warm!
Summary
Overall
Time: 01:29:10
Distance: 7.18 mi
Elevation Gain: 79 ft
Calories: 728 C
Timing
Time: 01:29:10
Moving Time: 00:56:40
Elapsed Time: 02:31:14
Avg Speed: 4.8 mph
Avg Moving Speed: 7.6 mph
Max Speed: 16.8 mph
Avg Pace: 12:25 min/mi
Avg Moving Pace: 07:53 min/mi
Best Pace: 03:34 min/mi
Speed
Pace
Elevation
Elevation Gain: 79 ft
Elevation Loss: 80 ft
Min Elevation: 616 ft
Max Elevation: 749 ft
Heart Rate
Avg HR: 123 bpm
Max HR: 158 bpm
Stay tuned for the next ride, we double our distance and it was colder, AND my bike was breaking!!!
-WCFTW
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