Originally Posted by
squegeeboo
I think if we had a second car I'd give up on biking this winter. To many days of negative (with wind-chill) plus road conditions requiring studs. So I end up 'borrowing' the wife's car way to often, which makes my core suffer, which makes the next ride that much harder. This morning if I hadn't been told not to take the car on pain of death, I would have caved again. Went to put air in my tires, floor pump wasn't working, ended up deflating my tire to under 20 PSI. Turns out the pump was frozen, had to bring it in and hit it with a hair dryer, didn't know that could happen! Then, test the brakes, front brakes are seized, spend 2-3 minutes working on them to loosen them up from the cold. Finally ready to go, even with studs, have to walk the bike out of the neighborhood to the main road due to road conditions.
All in all, commuting time was 2x my regular commute (80 minutes instead of 40), and I got in an hour late from that and the other issues.
This is literally the worst winter I can remember in my 7 years of commuting. Turns out I can do bitter cold, or bad road conditions, but not both.
The receptionist just sent an email to the whole organization saying the temp has reached 23 degrees. In a typical winter 23 degrees would be completely unremarkable. It's a few degrees warmer than average for this time of year. But 23 degrees is 20 degrees warmer than it got yesterday and 30 degrees warmer than the day before.
But TSL is right. To me this seems like a normal winter from my youth (back in the 70's and early 80's). Not that it makes riding any easier but it's a reminder that the years I've spent commuting by bike year round have been warmer than average.
It's been both cold and snowy so like a lot of places around the country we've had to deal with both poor road conditions and extreme cold. I just take it day by day knowing that each day the sun stays out a little longer and within a few weeks it will be high enough to burn some of the ice and snow off the roads even if the temps don't climb all that much.
Winter brings a lot of challenges and though over the years I've acquired the necessary equipment to deal with it, I look forward to the days when getting ready for the ride home means spending 5 minutes changing into shorts.