Afternoon Ride

One of the benefits of working for yourself is having the opportunity to carve out holes in your schedule for your own exercise.  I have always taken advantage of this and I feel it is one of the things I do that helps keep me balanced.  Today was a day I was happy I had the opportunity to get in a ride, but not so happy with the weather that was awaiting us-

For those out there not in the know, the 23 degree temperature is not the big problem with that picture.  The biggest issue is the 11 degree windchill!  That's 11 degrees if you are just standing there. If you factor in the speed we are riding at into the wind, it leads to some real cold body parts.  And to make things worse, I had a 3 hour ride on the schedule for today.  I was really going to be pushing into some discomfort.  Fortunately, I had a couple of friends with me to help pass the time.  We headed out ~12:00 and immediately felt the presence of the wind.  It seemed to be everywhere and more often than not, right in our faces.  I quickly realized that 3 hours might be a bit ambitious in that kind of environment, and I was making mental plans to finish off the ride on the indoor trainer later in the night.  Despite the wind and cold the minutes continued to pass and we eventually found ourselves in a position to either stop riding at ~1:45 or push on.  If we continued it was going to mean another full 1:00 out there in the cold, but we decided to do it to finish the ride off properly.  The funny thing about the last 1:00 was that we essentially rode a big loop and it felt like we were riding into a headwind the entire time!  We did manage to limp our frozen selves back to our cars and ended up with a ride total of 2:45 and ~43 miles.

Please feel free to send me any questions you may have about proper gear selection for cycling in conditions like today or contact me with any question you may have about anything fitness related.

-Jason