Riding outside in February

You have to be ready to seize opportunities to ride outside in the winter around here. Sometimes the circumstances can be just right and you can sneak out. In this case, I probably made it with about 3 hours to spare and surely won't be able to ride outside again for at least a few days due to an approaching snow storm, but that didn't stop me today. The temperatures were in the low 30's, which is just "warm" enough to be tolerable - especially when you are going crazy riding in place every single day. It amazingly hasn't snowed in 3 weeks which has given the roads a chance to really clear of ice, sand and salt. It was a little windy, but not so much that the windchill got unbearable. So I decided to finally hit the road, for the first time since sometime around New Year's.

First, I had to find all of my cold weather riding gear, and of course it takes a whole lot longer to get dressed when you are going to brave the elements and when you haven't needed that stuff in a while. I still can't find my bike sunglasses, but I'm sure they'll turn up. Then I had to walk my bike down the driveway because there is still a large chunk of it that is complete ice, but it is a vast improvement over what it was before. But once I got past that, off I went. It was so nice to actually get somewhere when I pedaled. Today only called for a 2-hour recovery ride, but I may have gone a little bit harder than I should have, merely because I was just so happy to be outside and not in my basement. It seemed windier than I expected it to be, although considering the fact that I have not had to deal with wind in at least 2 months, my tolerance may be a bit low. The other thing was that my ears seemed to be incredibly cold since my hat didn't completely cover them, but other than that, yep, that was much better than the trainer.

Afterward I went off on a little transition run which was also supposed to be nice and easy. Somehow it wound up being about 20 seconds/mile faster than my much higher heart rate run yesterday, but I can never tell what is going on with my running anymore, so I guess I can be happy about that. Now, just have to wait for it to snow tonight for the first time in a long time and it will be back to the basement for the bike ride tomorrow. Oh, well. It was a nice little change of pace.