The weather, the weather!

I used to live in La Jolla, now I live in Washington D.C.  That's the end of the story when we're talking about weather.

Sure, you get spring and fall here, which are great times of the year, but you also get really hot and humid summers and wet winters.  I think the winters would be a little better if D.C. didn't find itself on the freezing rain/sleet/wintry mix side of the house more often than the white fluffy stuff.

This past Friday was the coldest day in D.C. since 1996 or 1997.  I forget which year, but that's obviously over a decade.  You can see from the pic below that the forecast for Friday wasn't too good.  It's tough to see, but the darker number to the right is the low.  It called for 8 degrees on Thursday night/Friday morning.  

When I woke up it was 4 degrees.  I haven't been in weather that cold since SERE school, 8 years ago, the 2nd weekend in January on the Maine/Canada border in 3 feet of snow, no food for at least 3 days...but that's a story for another blog.  I actually got a ride in on Friday.  When I went it was 21 degrees and weather.com was saying that it "feels like" 11 degrees.

And then there is the weather where I USED TO LIVE!  On the iPhone you have the option of flipping through different weather locales with the flick of your finger.  So, I check Washington D.C., then flick to La Jolla.  I guess it may be cruel and unusual punishment.

Below is the pic of the La Jolla weather I flicked to.  Oh man, that hurts.  Is that January weather?

I finally bought a torque wrench for my bike.  Not having a torque wrench meant that I couldn't do simple things on my bike like adjusting or replacing my handlebars and left me wondering if I was tightening my seatpost too tight.  Turns out I was on my Madone and I put a crease in my Easton EC90 zero setback seatpost and now the carbon is compromised, so that nice little piece of >$200 carbon is useless.

I've been wanting to put my Specialized S-Works handlebars back on for a while now, but didn't want my bike to be at the shop for more than a quick visit.  My white FSA handlebars are great, but the 42cm feel like 40cm, so they felt too small for me.  I did like the reach and drop though, but felt like my stem needed to be 10mm longer.  

I'm finding that handlebars, probably like a lot of things are very different depending on the company even though the measurements are roughly the same.  42cm Bontrager feels like 42cm Specialized.  42cm FSA feels like 40cm based on those other bars (not sure about other FSA bars, but mine are wing pro compact).  The reach is 80mm and my Specialized reach is 79mm...However, just by looking at them it looks like the Specialized bars have further reach and I confirmed this by measuring from front of the saddle to the top of the hoods on both handlebar set-ups and the Specialized was 16mm further away from the front of the saddle.

Maybe that's a little anal.

My Monday ride was interesting.

Having encountered the same puddle of water on my Sunday ride, I decided to ride on the bike path and endure deeper water, but for a shorter period of time.  On the road the cars seemed to spread the water out and drag it down the road which makes for more riding in wet conditions that spray up on my white Assos jacket! 

The water froze up a bit which made it a little more of an adventure (pic below).

I think you can see a little snow on my bike computer in the below pic.  I started to get a little nervous and having done the same ride the day before I was "following history" on my Garmin, so I toggled over to the page which gives you turn by turn directions...distance and estimated times to those turns.  Pretty cool.

If you click on and enlarge the below pic you can see some snow on my saddle, on the road and some falling.  This is where I stopped for a little #1 break.  I just kneeled down behind this tree and pretended like I was adjusting my shoes...which had booties over them making them impossible to adjust...

And then the snow really started coming down hard (below pic).  This actually turned out to be a really nice ride.  It was my first ride in the snow, so I just treated it like riding in the rain and taking it easy on the downhills and curves.