Category: Getting Outside

I won’t ride my bike through puddles

That’s the rule I try to adhere to when bike commuting.  Basically, if it’s raining enough that there is a chance of puddles on the road it’s not a good day to ride for a couple of reasons.

1. I will get wet and riding in the rain is sometimes miserable.

2. Wet and dark weather makes for poor visibility and slick roads.

Yes, rain will get me wet and the ride can turn a bit miserable, but  I can deal with slightly miserable.  In fact, I think part of me secretly likes miserable.  It makes me feel like I’m doing something a little out of the ordinary.  The bigger issue is the lack of visibility. Reduced visibility for me and other drivers combined with slick roads makes for some potentially dangerous situations.  All of this means the riding opportunities during the fall and winter months will be harder to come by, but very enjoyable when they do come about.

In between rain storms October presented some amazing days to ride.  I stopped and took some documentation pictures near Green Lake on one of the sunny days just to remind myself that the sun does make an appearance from time to time around here.

Alright, so after laying out my excuses for the month, here are the results:

Car miles – 177.2. A big chunk were from a round trip from Anacortes to Alger.

Bike miles –  139. Not quite as high as I would have liked.

Conclusion:

The winter months are going to prove challenging.  Combining September’s total and this month’s has me pretty much even between car and bike miles for the ytd challenge.  In November,  I think I’m going to try mixing in some short bike rides to the train instead of driving.

One of my goals for my 29th year is to ride more miles on my bike than I drive by myself in one of our cars.

I started tracking any car trip I take by myself on a piece of paper and logging my biking miles with dailymile.com.  I hope to build a widget into the HBadventure sidebar to display this race data a little more prominently.  Until that happens, I’ll just have to post periodic updates.  For the month of September I came out ahead on biking miles with a score of 131 miles ridden and 95 miles driven.

I was way out in front of the miles driven until I accidentally left my cell phone in Adam’s car after a day of surfing, and had to drive to Renton to pick it up again.  I guess these are the  challenges I’ll face in the next year, but I’m feeling confident I can pull it off after this first month’s tally.   Of course, the cold, dark, and wet season is starting to approach.  My hope is that my biking gear will keep me cruising right along through it.