Branching out
This morning, I decided that I would try out the new windbreaker (Showers Pass, bright blue but with an embarrassingly bikey name) and the nice (Ibex) woolen undershirt I picked up when I got the surgically altered free radical back from Clever Cycles) by starting out nice and early in the morning when it was officially Too Cold for me (5°C, with a good strong wind from the northeast) and riding as far as I could before I either (a) froze or (b) had to turn around and return home so I could meet my parents for lunch.
For paranoia’s sake, I rolled up a fleece vest and wedged it into a bag.
I didn’t freeze or need the fleece vest. I barely even got cold (and that only when I stopped to take pictures of streetcars) and when I got home I discovered that not only was I warm, but that the wool undershirt was dripping with sweat. It’s pretty nice to return from a 50km ramble and to feel, except for cold toes, warm as a toastlike object.
It’s too bad that I had to come back; I wasn’t even slightly tired and I think I could have easily ridden another 25k in the wide-open flatlands of east Portland.
~50km @ ~21.5 km/h (31 miles @ 13.4 mph); it will be interesting to see how much this changes when I attach the Free Radical to the trek (the “one last thing” list has grown to include “new rear wheel” because the existing rear wheel is < 120mm wide, and I’d rather have a wider hub to take full advantage of the 135mm spacing of the xtracycle dropouts instead of having 15+ mm of shim on the existing hub , and “new chain” because the existing chain skipped a couple of times when I was climbing up towards the (for lack of a better word) summit of the i205 trail in Maywood Park, and one of the signs of a worn-out chain is apparently skipping under load, so those two things will need to be corrected before I sit down and re-extend the frame.)