I’ll never get over the huge quantities of positive attention I get merely by riding a bike in winter.
Ride home tonight was 18f. I shed an entire layer and it was really pleasant after these commute temps this week: 1, -9, -11, -4, -7. Fortunately all the fucked up road conditions are mostly resolved at this point, but I’m probably going to stick to my all-new winter route that maximizes maintained bike lanes and minimizes busy roads, but includes roads just busy enough to be ridable even during major snow events.
My winter bike is starting to feel like a BOTW weapon at this point. It’s about to break down entirely.
I mostly get people telling me I’m crazy which I’m not too fond of. Like, people act impressed but then tell me they think I’m crazy in the next breath. It’s so universal that I feel like maybe I am crazy for riding my bike all the time.
yeah, there’s that too. maybe it’s because I work in a place full of weirdos, most people respect the dedication more than anything. I joke around that my tolerance for pain is broken, haha. Even though I’m in a place full of weirdos, I am the only person out of over 200 at the retail stores that rides every day no matter what the weather is. a couple other people are maybe 75% winter cyclists. surprisingly small number of summer cyclists, however, for a co-op.
I do think there I am seeing way more other people on bikes this year than any year previously. sometimes in past years I would be riding my bike for two weeks and never see another person on a bike. nowadays I am seeing two, three, sometimes four or five other people riding bikes every week.
i have long held (as do many of the rest of us here at tarck) the opinion that if your daily life is too comfortable, shit that shouldn’t bother you suddenly starts to bother you.
whereas if you regularly experience pain/discomfort, all the little stuff becomes easier to ignore
This is so wild to me. There are always people on bikes here. Not necessarily “cyclists” but I never go a day without seeing another person on a bike no matter how wet or wintery it is. People gotta get around.
I spend a lot of time, or used to spend a lot of time, riding around fancy rich person parts of Minneapolis. But now my job has me riding through working class parts of Minneapolis twice a day most days. Maybe that’s what’s new
it’s going down to single digits tomorrow, 0f by midnight. currently the high for the day at 12:09am EST, so it’s just getting colder and windier from here. ’m still gonna ride to the makerspace though.
sunday should hit 40 so i’m hoping to ride real bicycles for a sustained period
39 and light rain is why when people from the Midwest move to Seattle, see snow, assume they can drive, and then hop in their car and promptly pinball down Queen Anne Hill. Slick, and the hills are no shit FAFO steep.
We got a nice little slush storm through the night and then the temp dropped and froze everything solid. The arterials are clear but most side streets are solid ice this morning. No studs, no masters.
I love that bag. My only complaint is that the fabric is a bit stiff, especially in the cold, and sometimes it’s hard to shove my lunch in there without squishing it a little because the bag doesn’t open very wide.
Getting a snow storm this week that could potentially be in the top three recorded snowfalls for Minneapolis during a winter where we had already beat the seasonal average snowfall in early January. It is even possible for it to beat the legendary Halloween storm of 1991 that the locals never shut up about.
