Perfect Ride and a Perfect Day for Riding.

It was pretty much a perfect autumn day in November here.  The air was nice and brisk and there was a slight breeze.  With it being teachers convention this weekend, it meant that there was no school buses to watch out for.  Generally as a whole, there was not a whole lot of cars on the road today for some reason.  But what ever, I’ll take it.  Felt particularly inspired to get some hilly miles in today.  Legs felt great and pretty much attacked the whole day, and had the people who went with me in some form of difficulty.

November is one of my favorite months to ride, a lot of the people who ride for recreation around here have put their bikes away for the winter and won’t head back out until mid  April when things start to get warmer.  November is also the calm before the storm here in NJ.  The weather will start to deteriorate more rapidly come December and will stay crummy until late feb/early march when things start to improve some.  Sure I still ride December through February/March, it’s just that the nature of the ride changes a little.

I’m generally used to longer road rides from March through November, but December through to the end of February, I tend to cut my road rides down to 30-40 miles a day and more intense.  Which despite the shorter days, the cold temps will make your body work harder to keep warm which will result in more of an equal output when compared to my longer rides when the weather is warmer.

The bike setup does not really change much during this time.  Right now I just threw on a set of cheaper road tires in order to save some tread on my Grand Prix 4 seasons for the 3 cold months.  I expect that the tires I threw on will be used up by time of December 1st.  When things dry some, I’ll probably get something higher up the food chain tire wise.  Not about to use my Vittoria Open Corsa Evo CX’s for road use.  I have those for track use and don’t want to ruin them on the roads around here.

Anyways, back on topic,  my current rear wheel has hit the 20,000 mile mark during today’s ride.  The nice thing is that this wheel is still going very strong, thus having no plans on a replacement wheel just yet.  It was such a great day, that the sunset was even nice.