Fifteen in Sixteen to Nineteen
I woke up sometime after 4 a.m., one of those mornings when I open an eye and I’m unmistakably fully awake. I made a little coffee, played around with the Internet a bit, then decided that I wanted to take Cledus out for an early spin before the world woke up.
I put some long superhero tights on under the wool shpants, put a few layers of wool on my upper half, put on the cold weather gloves and a balaclava, and headed up the Northeast Branch Trail towards Lake Artemesia in College Park. Immediately I realized that the tights don’t work as well as Capilene when it’s really cold, something about spandex feels like it’s actually conducting heat away from my legs instead of insulating. Around mile five, my toes started getting a little numb, and my legs were pretty cold, but felt good so I kept going by the light of a splinter of moon.
The grass everywhere was covered in frost, every bridge I came to on the trail sparkled like pixie dust as the eastern sky brightened a little, and the puddles had hardened through. Every so often I’d look over at the Anacostia tributary I was following, and the surface would be shiny and still in the low light, frozen solid all the way across. I passed several spots where spillways had frozen into sculptures.
I went a little ways up the Indian Creek Trail, turned around at Berwyn Road, and came around the west side of Lake Artemesia as a glowing Metro cut through the darkness headed north. I skirted the frozen lake and headed back down towards the Northeast Branch Trail right around first light. By the time I returned home, dawn had given way to morning, I was frozen and ready for more coffee. The cyclometer said I’d put in around fifteen and a half miles over the course of a little more than an hour.
Once I’d warmed up a bit and greeted the family, I checked the weather and found that it had warmed up to 19 by 7:30. And there’s a lesson here: if I want to do early morning rides in winter before the family’s up and we’re all busy getting ready for the day, I musn’t ever look at the weather page before going out.
There’s been a couple mornings over the last couple weeks where I was awake and pretty motivated to go for a ride at dawn, but then I’d look at the weather forecast and see “Current Temp: 20″, that good feeling would evaporate, and I’d make coffee and a fire. There’s something about the idea of 20 degrees or less that’s more intimidating to me than the actual experience of it, something that drives me to the hearth wrapped in flannel. If I’d checked the temp this morning, and seen a sixteen, I suspect I would’ve bagged out and missed a really wonderful ride.
Do I lack courage? Well, it’s said that courage isn’t about acting without fear, it’s about facing your fear and following through on your course of action anyway. If that’s true, then when it comes to temps below the mid-30’s, I’m pretty short on courage. But I can often figure out ways to trick myself, to cultivate enough of a blindspot to keep me from determining that I should cleave to warmth, coziness, and caffeine. So what is it called, then, when you are seemingly courageous, but really just deliberately ignorant of the hazards? Delusional? Foolhardy? Pragmatic? Whatever it is, it’ll have to do.
So it’s gonna be like 50 tomorrow, right?
Tags: bicycling
