Yesterday should have been an outdoor ride. Heck, it should have been a lot of things… but work got in the way. I started at 7:30 (yes, on a Saturday) and worked right through till 21:30… what a day.
Sucks, because I looked out of the window early on, about 10:30 and thought: you know what? If I’m going to get an outdoor ride in, I really better do it before the rain comes. But no, I kept on hacking at my problem, sure I’d find a solution soon. Sadly, whenever I found a fix I’d immediately hit upon another problem, then another… and before I knew it, it was raining.
Thoughts passed through my mind to have a smash out on the new Zwift course – Neokyo – but I figured if I was going to be at my computer I might as well be working / trying to solve all my issues. This was the home stretch, after all. Get those issues done and I could finally finish that project and move on, several long months of hard work out and into production. So on I went.
Anyway, enough of that. Today was a new day, a fresh start. And as per, I was up at 07:15, not exactly fresh faced and bright eyed, but awake and determined enough to get in a ~2 hour ride. That meant I needed to be out of the house by 08:45, as I had to be back for 10:45 so I could go into daddy daycare mode. The fun never stops.
In my head I had a variety of routes to try out, but all of them covered ground I’d been over before. However one route popped into my head at the last minute, thinking to go and explore around up near Hoghton. Briefly I mapped out a route on the Garmin Connect website, and then thought ahh heck with it, I’ll just wing it. And so off I went.
Once out I realised just how cold it was today. Wearing my usual long sleeve base layer, long sleeve jersey, coat (hood up to stop the wind), and bib tights I was at the limit really of what passes for comfort in those clothes. Hovering around 4℃ as I left the house, my rubber gloves did well enough to stop the wind, but after about 30 minutes I was starting to go numb on the fingers.
Also today, I’d made an adjustment to my right shoe. I’m still wearing the old shoes at this point for outdoor rides. I know I can wear my booties, but given I was already ~15 minutes late out of the house, getting them on would likely have taken another 5 minutes I didn’t have. Perhaps I should have worn them anyway, as my toes got cold today… not overly so, but enough. Winter is indeed coming.
That right cleat adjustment isn’t great. I was riding at a weird angle for sure. I need to go far more heel in, but I did realise the amount of float in those cleats is much less than in my new ones. I’d misunderstood that when making the adjustment, and really should have tested it more thoroughly before riding outdoors.
For all that, I did enjoy today’s ride. There was new scenary:
And a good amount of climbing, all without having one big climb in there.
Getting more than an hour outdoors felt like a total luxury. Sure, it was cold, but I’d have happily stayed out for another hour or so.
Mostly I felt the need to push myself to at least 1,000 calories. The reasoning here being that I try to do ~500 calories per ride, with 5 rides a week. Not riding yesterday meant I would combine the two. I know, scientifically, this isn’t really true. But whatever, I’m no scientist.
All in all then a good ride today. Fresh air, out from the house, away from the computer. It’s only going to get colder from here on in, and I’m thankful for any outdoor rides I can get at this point.
I just noticed I got my gloved finger in the left hand side of that photo. Ahh well, you can’t win them all.
