Hills, Flats and Gas

I know firsthand what a windchill of 14 degrees Fahrenheit feels like. I learned that yesterday – we went for a nice 2 hour bike ride in 27 degree weather with a wind gusting to 20mph. The airport’s weather reporting system claimed that the windchill was somewhere around 14 degrees. In other words, nice and cold. I also learned that I can pedal for about an hour without feeling my feet before they got really uncomfortable.

So today we decided that we needed to continue the experiment especially since the windchill factor was so much warmer: a whole 18 degrees with a temperature of, oh, 29 degrees. And I also needed to experiment with chemical warmers – those little baggies that supply 7+ hours of warmth.

To keep warmer, Kerry thought it would be fun to throw in some hills. Struggling up the first few hills with my heart rate over 180bpm, I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her assessment of “fun”, but it did at least keep the cold demons at bay.

After about an hour of torturecycling, we found ourselves entering the delightful town of Milford, and that’s approximately when I tried to turn my bicycle at a slower speed and thought that some component had frozen: I could barely turn the handlebars from left to right. Now normally I can apply some reasonable amount of force to achieve things like this, but the combination of the cold and the freshly discovered flat tire got the better of me. It wasn’t completely flat, but it had only about 50psi in it, so I suddenly had a reason why everything felt so hard – I had much more rolling resistance to overcome.

So, heroine to the rescue, Kerry adroitly demonstrated a 5 minute flat change in sub-freezing weather (for all of you out there wondering why I’m such a pussy, she had 2 sets of gloves on and I just had split mitts so I couldn’t do much tire changing with those gloves on. Besides, she’s better at it than me). That’s where the gas comes in: a handy-dandy CO2 cartridge pump and about 450 milliseconds later, we had a nicely inflated front tire once more, and our two brave cyclists could continue on their chilly circuit.