CR Biker: In Which I’m Closing in on 60

Friday, January 21, 2022

In Which I’m Closing in on 60

Bike on Boyson Trail Jan. 21 on late afternoon ride. Lights came in handy on this ride!

In my previous post, I set a 3,000-mile goal for 2022. Which means I have to be more careful to use my bike computer to record miles.

This was not a great week for biking in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It had snowed from Friday into Saturday of last week, but I wondered if Monday, well over a day after the snow, I wondered if the roads would be clear enough to ride.

It was very cold, but I bundled up and headed out. The answer to the question “are the roads clear enough for a safe ride,” by the way, was clearly “no.” I have trouble judging because the street I live on is busy enough to have some priority, whereas I ride on much quieter residential streets.

Street on the ride to work Monday--a sane man might not have been there to make this image.

With fewer passes by snow plows and less traffic to wear the snow away. Snow gets compressed into an icy, slick layer on those streets—after Monday’s ride, I decided not to ride Tuesday. By Wednesday, an arctic front had moved in, and the wind chill flirted with 20 below as the actual temperature failed to get to zero (reminder, this is Fahrenheit, 0 Celsius is plenty warm enough for a ride). Zero (Fahrenheit) is my biking threshold, if either the temperature or the wind chill is below that, my bikes stay in the garage.

Today, it was 13 in the afternoon. I had been grading all day, but decided late in that afternoon chill to take a short bike ride.

It was, in a word, cold. But I was only planning a short loop on the Lindale and Boyson Trails, which had been cleared fairly well by Cedar Rapids and Marion crews—and the pavement in general was in better shape by now, a week after the snowfall.

With today’s ride, I’ve up to almost 60 miles for the year. Only 2,940 to go for the year’s goal!