Steve in a Speedo?! Gross!: March 2024

(Well, the 2022 Fat Bike Loppet was around these temps as well.)

Last week, the temp dropped after a few great weeks of above normal temps where I got in some nice actual training rides. I biked to work one day last week with 18 degree air temp and 2 degree windchill. And I was biking north the majority of the time, and the wind was out of the north, so effectively, *my* windchill was below 0. It was the coldest my nose had ever been on a ride into work.

Normally, my ride into work on my mountain bike is around 14-15 mins (16 mins would be a slow day). Being this ride was so cold AND into a strong wind, it took me 18:13 which was 11.0 mph. (And then being pushed by the wind on the way home, I did that with an over 15 mph average.)

And a ride this week was just after a gross March snowstorm. Monday we got some snow. Tuesday before sunrise it was pouring, and that changed to slush, and then it snowed the rest of the day (really - it snowed from 7 a.m. through about 7 p.m.). Then I thought I’d still TRY to bike the following morning.

We got more snow over a few days in March than we had all winter!

After cleaning up the driveway and alley Tues night.
(We had NO VISIBLE SNOW before those last few days.)

My class was meeting in Minneapolis that morning, so I'd have a lot of paved trails along the river to get me there. But they were in pretty rough shape. (Still better than being along traffic on rough roads where you could slip under a car!). I ended up getting there across the rumbly trail with an 11.7 mph average.

I only took one photo on the way there, and it was after a car had backed out of the bike lanes near the U of M campus (after I got off the trail along River Pkwy):

Not the first time I've been face-to-face with a car on a bike path! How does this happen?!?

If you notice its wheels in that photo above, it was farther in the bike lanes and
had already backed out a bit by the time I stopped and got my phone out.

I took some photos of the trails on the way home after class. Just 2 more hours of late-March sun had actually done a lot to improve things by the time I headed home:

In MPLS just south of Franklin: plowed but packed snow for 1+ mile.

Entering St. Paul on River Pkwy: NOT plowed at all. Nasty for a half mile.

Near Pelham. Still gross. But at Pelham...

... the St. Paul plow obviously pulled off to clear the
Pelham bike lanes without coming back to finish River Pkwy...

... and the rest of my ride into St. Paul was BEAUTIFUL.

I've always said that MPLS has better paved trails (newer, and patched better/more often when needed), but St. Paul does a better job of plowing in the winter. But ONLY WHERE THEY ACTUALLY PLOW! The good news is that with the heat of the sun, those paths were pretty much cleared off over the next 48 hours when I ran down there yesterday. That's partly why the late-March snowstorms don't feel so bad.

So 10 days ago, I had a 11.0 mph ride to work with a 0 degree windchill (16 degree air temp), and earlier this week it was 11.7 mph to work with a single-digit windchill (19 degree air temp). Still making this bike commuting thing work!