I have a friend in Chicago and another in Boulder who talk about how nice it must be to ride all winter in the south. It kills me. Check the low for each night, because that is the temperature I ride in every day. We ride at 6:00am every Tuesday-Thursday unless it’s raining too hard, it’s too cold or a combination of the two. But what is too cold?

Like a friend said, once you ride in 16 degree weather there aren’t
many of excuses left. I’m not sure many of you know what 16 degrees feels like on a bike ride, a brain freeze when you go down hill. We usually ride mountain bikes when it’s that cold, because the wind chill is too great to ride the road.

This morning was just another training ride, except it had warmed up to 26F.
It was so cold I could feel the wind on my back this morning and figured I had just not tucked in my base layer well enough. It was only when I got home and the back of my jacket was frozen solid that I understood, my bottle had been leaking down my back and the water had frozen my jersey. When it’s in the 20s your bottle freezes shut, but if you put it in your back pocket it usually won’t. Not only had my bottle frozen shut and started to freeze solid, but the water that had leaked out had frozen too.

So to all my friends who still live up north, it’s not all roses in the south either.