Snow-biking

Lots of bikers like to expound the virtues of snow biking. They look down their noses at those of us who would rather not ride our bikes in the cold, wet, slimiest of months.

For me it is not the discomfort of self, but the love for my trusty steed that I choose not to drive it through the muck. You see bikes, even MTBs, like to be clean. All those mechanical parts work best when they are clean AND not frozen in place by things like mud, or as I experienced today: snud (snow and mud).

It was a nice day here, about 32F when the 11 of us departed on our off road ride this evening. The first hour was great.

Biking on snow is pretty fun although my brain was having trouble believing that I was biking on snow. Snow is for skiing, sledding and so forth, soon my bike would prove my brain correct.


SEE! In the words of Hank Hill: "That ain't right:"


The mud was not completely frozen and is now coating my precious steed (too tired and lazy to attempt cleaning it tonight). An hour into the ride the snud froze in several places on the bike leaving me with two gears, the easiest gears, the gears that would make me pedal like a mad-man for the last 20 minutes of the ride to attempt to keep up, which I did not.

By the time I could no longer shift I also couldn't clip into my pedals and was lucky to not bash my shins repeatedly as my feet slipped off the snud balls that were my pedals.

Lesson: the right equipment makes things much more fun...OK safe if you will (platform pedals and a single speed would have been really fun out there today).

I think my brain was just never into the ride because I had cleaned my steed really well on Saturday and here I was getting it filthy when I could have just as well gone skiing and put the steed away until better days: when the ground is completely frozen, Spring perhaps, or at least days when it was just snow to deal with and not snud.

It was really nice riding with these folks tonight for the fact that I like meeting more people from here and these are a great group of active people. Next time I'm going to skip the ride and just go to the dinner after ; P