My unusual work schedule turns every weekend into a 3-day weekend. I work overnight on Fridays but I’m usually home by 7:30 on Saturday mornings and that leaves me with the best part of the day. I’m completely free on Sundays, and I don’t have to return to work until 11:00 on Monday nights. It really is like living an 8-day week … though sometimes I have to cheat myself out of sleep to make a Saturday everything it can be.
This past Saturday was decent enough: overcast, but with a high temperature of 40° and tolerable winds. Jim Saueressig (Gryphon Velo) and I spent 90 minutes together on the roads between West Bend and Fillmore. On Sunday the high temperature was 40° again. The skies cleared up, but the winds were terrible: 25-30 miles per hour in the afternoon, gusting above 40 miles per hour. In such high winds I don’t like to be on the road. A mountain bike ride would have been a nice alternative but there are no trails open to me. If the ground were frozen but the trails were free of snow and ice, then I could ride them on my 29er. But things are otherwise, and the IMBA chapters in our area have asked us to stay away. I went for a 90-minute walk on a hikers-only section of the Ice Age Trail. It was solid ice.
Today we got to 43° and again the sunshine was brilliant but the winds were a little stronger. I wasn’t feeling super ambitious, but I knocked out 24 miles on my cyclocross bike to bring my year-to-date total to 215 and my February total to 95. My record for February is 205 miles, set last year. Give me another nice 3-day weekend and I’ll make sure that record falls. There’s no precipitation in the forecast this week and right now it looks like we’re climbing into the 50s by Saturday. That would put us more than 20° above normal for this time of year.
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