November is proving to be a slow month so far.  I’m a couple weeks behind on the next fundraising e-mail I want to send out, and the closest I’ve come to a training ride is the recent Tweed Ride.  (If that prepared me for anything, it’ll be the fueling stations every twenty miles on LifeCycle).

Still, the weather has changed to downright chilly – as cold as 38 degrees on my morning commute to work.  That’s given me plenty of opportunity to see how I ride under less-than-optimal circumstances, play around with how my body regulates its temperature, and see how wind and humidity (and fog) affect how cold I feel.  I’m starting to get a very good feel for how hard I have to pedal to warm up, depending on the combination of clothes, wind, and weak wintry sunlight.

For now, I still wear my lycra cycling shorts and a basic workout tee when I go out on my road bike.  If it’s colder than 65 or so, I’ll put a sweatshirt over that and just suck up being cold for the first mile.  Below 55 degrees, I ditch the hoodie and put on my nylon arm and leg warmers and windproof gloves, and that keeps me toasty for pretty much the entire ride.  Down around 45, I put on both layers.  If it’s any colder than that, I’ll only get warm by working.

The Bike Kitchen LifeCycle team’s standing biweekly training ride coincided perfectly with the Sacramento Tweed Ride this year.  Instead of 30 miles of mediocre hills and more flat tires than we’d care to deal with, we grabbed our finest wool and went on a rousing ten mile ride through midtown and East Sac, from the Bike Kitchen to OneSpeed, then on to the Bonn Lair, Revolution Winery, and ending up at Hot Italian.

Morgan and I were only happy to put on our warm tweed outfits and take to the streets with our fellow tweeded cyclists. My pictures from the event are available in my photo gallery here, and there’s a Flickr pool here.

As a special treat, I grabbed a small video of Ed Cox riding his penny farthing and dropped it on Youtube.

The training continues apace.  I met up with Emjay and Doug at the Bike Kitchen around 10 this morning, along with a few other riders who had turned out for their own midmorning ride.  We were dropped after two miles, but we took off on our own ad hoc sort of ride up the American River Parkway trail to Arden, where we cut inland and went past the nice houses in Carmichael, out to Ancil Hoffman Park, and back.

At 33 miles, it wasn’t a terribly long ride, but once we got off the trail we got to experience some little hills – sort of the preview version of the sort of thing I’ll be doing with far more gusto next year.  It’s very clear that what little riding I’ve done up to now has been on flat land, because I really started to feel those hills, and I’m not sure how well I could have handled many more than that little we did.

All in all, though, it wasn’t too bad, and this is what I need to do now to help me conquer all 545 miles next year, including the infamous Quadbuster and the Evil Twins.  And going downhill made me appreciate cycle computers, though.  It’s a lot more fun to know when you’re about to break 40 mph on torn-up California roads…

One thing I  kind of enjoyed, for not necessarily noble reasons, was Doug getting a flat tire.  All told, we were stuck on the side of the road near the 13 mile mark on the Parkway for about 20 minutes while he fixed it, and after that we took a ten minute detour out to Carmichael Cycles to reinflate it fully (there’s only so much you can do with a hand pump, and 120 psi ain’t it). But it was nice, especially after my last training ride, not to have been the guy holding the other riders up.  And to be honest, the thirty minute cool down period wasn’t exactly unwelcome, especially when I got to look out over this beautiful green park.

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Miles/hours this trip:       33/2
Total training miles/hours:  95/7