Safe As Milk

It’s one of my favorite Christmastime things.

Throwing star magnets? Yes, please!

Don’t worry, I’ll eventually stop kicking this dead horse. But I wanted to share a couple of other things I learned on today’s rides. The morning ride is becoming a really nice way to start the day. Blood flowing, fresh air, motion; all things I need more of in my life and now I can get them just by going to work.
Anything above 50 makes Mike a sweaty fish. It was almost 60 this afternoon and I was a sweaty mess when I got home. My shirt took the brunt of it (go smart fabric!) but I was definitely pushing out a bunch of water. I hope getting in decent shape by riding over the winter means less sweatiness when the weather breaks in the Spring and the weather gets more normally warm.

I’ll hold off on the manic “hey I rode my bike to work today” posts until I reach some milestones or until events warrant. It’s good so far.

This is what my normal bike commute will be once I break down and make this a new habit. 5.5 miles is completely reasonable. I would almost say it was borderline pleasant.

To answer a couple of questions:

1) I’m not sure what model I have, but my mountain bike (which I am using as my commuter for now) is a Trek. It’s a sturdy hardtail that I will need to get serious about maintaining if this commuting thing sticks.

2) Sweat management hasn’t been bad at all. I wear an UnderArmour long-sleeve shirt under a windbreaker so I stay just warm enough and I am basically dry when I get to work. I take about 10 minutes to cool down once I get here and then I get work-dressed. I change all of my clothes but my socks so I don’t have to worry about wearing sweaty clothes. I get pretty sweaty when I exercise but I haven’t suffered any post-exercise follow through sweat. I assume it’s because of the cold weather. Man, that sounds sexy. Follow through sweat. You’re welcome.

I don’t have any illusions that I will be able to stay dry once it warms up. I’m lucky in that we have a shower here at work. I’ll just need to stock it and be in and out of it before people come into work. It should be easy.

I finally broke down and shamed myself into riding my bike to work. 8 miles, and it took me about 40 minutes.

I think I can shave another couple of minutes off the ride with some route tinkering but I’m not trying to set any records. On a bad traffic day it could take me 40 minutes to get to work in my car and I only had to leave the house 20 minutes earlier than normal. Not too shabby.

It was cold, but I dressed right. I rocked an UnderArmor long sleeve under a $10 WalMart windbreaker and I was fine with the wind and temperature. I have some nice full-finger gloves that kept my hands in good shape, and bike shorts under some Carhatt cotton work pants were fine for my bottom half. I wore my work shoes on the ride so I wouldn’t have to pack them and the leather kept my feet snug like bugs.

I need to find something that will breathe better than that windbreaker, though. My UA layer kept me pretty dry but there was nothing to move the, um, humidity out of the windbreaker.

I’m curious to see how the ride home goes. It will be dark for almost all of it so this will be the first road test of my new headlight.

man, I need to get on my bike

My commute to work experiment hasn’t gotten off the ground (don’t you mean “off the couch”-ed.) yet but the idea of a no-chain, no-grease ride is intriguing. Here’s the story. Agee’s here in RVA gets a mention. I need to get by there and take a look at these things.

This is the Trek District, the first of the models mentioned in the article:

I am definitely pro-orange but I don’t think I’d be able to commute on a single-speed bike. There are too many hills between my points A, B.

I finally dragged my swollen, lazy, foul-smelling rear end out to Poor Farm Park for some cool-weather mountain biking. I am planning on starting to commute to work by bike and I need to shake some of this rust off before I try to ride in work clothes. This was an excellent start.

I hit the trails with Ethan and Ronan and I think a solid time was had by all. The ride was good but the after-ride consumables at Ashland Coffee and Tea might have pushed the ride into “damn good” territory.

Sounds dirty. It isn’t.

chainlove.com is one of the many woot-like sites that offer a single deeply-discounted shopping offer at a time. Chainlove.com is bike-oriented. steepandcheap.com is the same idea only dedicated to camping/outdoors products. You can just check back on the throughout the day because they update a new offer when one sells out.

Any of you guys use either of these before? I don’t know anything about their shipping costs or reliability but I have a sinking suspicion that I will find out soon enough.

from MinnPost.com

Here’s a recent interview with Joel at Mother Earth News (damn, that sounds like some hippie nonsense…).

And this is a brief video from The Virginia Pilot: