Good GAWD!

Holy smokes was it freakin cold for the ride in this morning. At 4:30, when I went for a jog with the pooch, it felt cold but nothing out of the ordinary. When I climbed aboard the road rocket at 5:15 though things were a bit different. I could immediately tell that it was a tad bit nippier than usual. My face froze on the short down hills and my fingers were getting a bit cold within the first few minutes. A mile in, the bank clock confirmed what I had suspected. 7 degrees. My official coldest commute this year. Shortly afterwards I was forced to pull over and put on the mitten shells that I now carry for emergencies thanks to THIS POST. Thankfully I had them because my mitts were nice and toasty the rest of the ride in. It looks like I'll need to design some mitts for the poor Garmin though. The extreme cold sapped its battery in about a 1/2 hour. Bummer, I guess when its really cold it'll be living in my coat pocket. Poor little guy.

Here is a tip for everyone who gets tired of flat tires on their road bikes or worries about dying of hypothermia while changing a flat this time of year. I found that if you remove the core of your road tube (assuming you have the type with a removeable core) you can shoot a bit of Stans in there. Put the core back in, air up, giver a couple of spins and you should be flat free for a while. I discovered this the other day when I got yet another slow leak in my front tire from all of the road grit out there these days. Hopefully the Stans will rid me of those for a while. I know a tire change this morning would not have been good.