Winter's a time for learnin'

So I heard from this tall, super tall, bike-riding guy who knows (as far as I can tell) of what he speaks and generally doesn't just make shit up that a mutual friend of ours who also generally knows his winter biking shit from shinola that it might be a good idea to try this. You take a garbage bag and cut holes in it for your arms and your head/neck and wear it like a t-shirt overtop of a thin layer, and then you layer up overtop of that.

Huh, I thought, when I heard that. Maybe I'll try it. I sweat a lot (like, a lot) so maybe that'll help control the moisture. You know, like when you wear latex gloves inside your mitts to keep the mitts dry and your hands warm and which, for the most part, works pretty well. For me anyway. 

And the opportunity arose this past Saturday to ride toward a supper date with friends in Mitchell (100 ish kms from N-town). After a morning of other necessary toil I would gear up, hop on the old steed and see if I couldn't make it to St. Pierre (75 kms from N-town) there to be picked up by my beloved and taxied in to supper. 

By 12:40 pm on Saturday I was out the door and on the bike. It was a chilly one - about -22'C with a 15 - 20 km wind from the NW. If I was going to make it to St. Pierre I would be heading 40 kms north and then 35 kms west. Maybe, I thought.  Dinner was for 5. Maybe I was being optimistic, but it was worth a try. Any excuse for a ride.

I got to St Joseph (13 kms) in less than an hour and stepped inside the COOP to regroup and take a drink (Riding with a full face mask complicates the drinking thing. Another detail to sort out.). This is not speedy I know, but in the cold things slow down, quite a lot. My speedo told me I was averaging 15 km/h into the wind. I felt okay with this. It seemed sustainable to me. Huh. (That's foreshadowing. Do you see the long shadow of the bike?)

The bike stayed outside.

Another 7 kms north down the road I crossed the 14.

Did I mention that it was cold, and the wind was from the north?

After 7 more kms north I could finally turn east toward St. Jean at the double dip (there's a ford crossing going north, and then another one going east).

Looking south at the ford on the north-south road.

The slow dip (ford) heading east toward St. Jean. 

After a km or so of on and off again hike-a-bike I rode gravel in to St. Jean at 3 pm and stopped at the grocery for gatorade and jamjams.

Looking out the front door of the St. Jean grocery. I should have taken a pic of the jamjams
but looking back now I think was not at my sharpest just then. 

I left St. Jean after one large bottle of gatorade, some water, and two large oatmeal jamjams thinking that I'd fueled up right, but not thinking about how useful it might be to stop and take stock of the garbage bag liner experiment. My core was, in fact, feeling good. It must be working. Why unzip the unlayer only to discover what I thought I could feel? So I set out, more intent of keeping the stoppage time down and the riding time up. After all, I had to meet M in St. Pierre. 

Within minutes of riding away my arms felt stiff. Not muscularly stiff, but frozen like ice kind of stiff. I knew what this was about, but I determined that I'd keep riding, heat up again, and all would be well. Things would work out. Sometimes you've just got to grind away at it. That's one of my mantras I think. Like Boxer I keep thinking that if I just work harder, it'll be okay. Huh. 

A mile east of St. Jean I headed north for 7 kms again on the River Rd. 

Looking south along the river, the day was slipping away.

Looking east, the bike looks ready. Me? I'm having doubts.

The agreement between my beloved (the one with the car who was going to try to get us to dinner in Mitchell by 5 and who was assuming I'd be in St. Pierre to meet her at around 4:30. At this point, looking east to Hwy 200, 11 kms away, at 4 pm, I had to admit that St. Pierre was not going to happen. At least not by bike. So thank the lord for cell phones I texted M that I was heading for the intersection of the 200 and the 23, 14.5 kms away. 

Riding more or less with the northwest wind was better, much better. I could manage 20 km/h, but I was running out of gas. Some days you have it, some days you don't, some days it's cold, some days you decide to try something new. Sometimes that new thing you try doesn't work. 

We rendevoused at the 23 at about 4:35. After 56 kms in 3.5 hours (4 hours total time) I was done for the day. In the car I tried to unzip my wind layer, but I couldn't. The zipper stopped at the clump of ice the size of my fist in the middle of my chest. My wool jersey was welded to the wind layer by a ball of ice! What the hell! I broke off a piece of it and tasted it, thinking that it must be spilled Gatorade. Nope. Just water. Not even salty or sweaty. Just water - ice actually. 

I had expected that the garbage bag liner would reduce if not eliminate this sort of thing, but now I see that what happened was that the plastic liner kept my core temperature high which caused condensation to build up between it and the wind layer, which was not breathable enough to let the moisture out. It built up and froze. Huh. Makes sense now. Trap water between to vapour barriers and then let the -33 windchill have at it.

Lesson learned. No more double vapour barrier for me. The garbage bag liner may work for some, but for this sweat drippin' rider, it's no answer. Whatever the problem was in the first place.