Out for a quickie 50min afternoon ride to replace the scheduled Petit. Rain all day yesterday melted most the snow and today’s light snow that fell all day mostly melted away, but not all. I think the not-summer that was not dusty but muddy, nudged by the absence of an autumn, has me less interested in snow rides than anytime in the last three years.
[edits: see italics]
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Our Governor Newsom missed COP26 I think, or did he join virtually? The good news from a carbon footprint POV is that he didn’t fly a private jet to COP26. “The Internet” is approaching 4% of carbon emissions, I’m assuming its more green to video conference than fly but I haven’t done the math 
It was our usual ride down to Oundle by a spurious route. My mate who is an awesome rider (wins a lot of TTs) had 20min threshold blocks to do. Luckily for me he was on a groad bike, with 32mm gravel kings and it was just a Z2 for me on a 25mm pure road bike, with 25mm 5000TLs.
We had planned originally to stop for a coffee and then ride around a bit before lunch in Oundle. But when we got to the cafe one of our members was missing. We found out at the coffee stop, he’d went out on the lash last night and had went straight home.
We then made the strategic decision to stop for a pub lunch closer to Peterborough.
Edit in Flat 3D - Relive 'Festive Birds'
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@Ultrawolf do you clean your bike after each ride? If so, how?
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I do, I do a hose off and wipe the chain every ride. Try to do a deep clean every other week, put it on stand, etc.
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Got it, thanks. Trying to learn for if / when I eventually get a gravel bike.
I’m learning to put together videos from rides. This is a few buddies at Glendo State Park in WY
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@DocSavage good song pic, what band is it?
3 hour out-and-back endurance ride into the foothills, went a little farther this weekend but not quite to the Amador County wine country:
Yeah I’m starting to think about riding from home to South Lake Tahoe in June, zooming out the map for a little perspective.
First lap was 5 minute warmup, 2nd lap was 10 minutes short of 3 hours and almost no decoupling:
solid 73% IF endurance ride, slowly built power and dropped cadence to increase torque and aerobically work more muscles in the legs.
Made it to Forest Home:
before having to turn around to keep this close to 3+ hours. Briefly turned off the highway and snapped a pic looking South:
And another pic a couple minutes from the house as I turned into the neighborhood via the creekside path:
Big rain event coming tomorrow, up to 8 feet of snow at the crest of the Sierras and ski areas! Have a great weekend!
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@WindWarrior Mushroom Funghi. Found them on a free music site
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In a contrast to yesterday’s -1deg today was +13deg 
and our ride took us to what is becoming our normal cafe stop the Fineshade mtb centre but via another mostly new route. We decided to use the more surface tracks as they would be less muddy, it never worked 
Edit it turns out it was 7000th outside miles this year.
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Recently was given permission to ride on a ranch near my home here in Texas. It’s about a 10 mile ride from my house and the ranch is almost all gravel ranch/oil field roads. The gravel is a mixture of some hard packed and some chunky stuff too. Rode for about 3 hours out there today. All I saw was cattle, whitetail deer and coyotes. A lot of the road are lined with pecan trees like in this pic. Really great day on the bike.
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The snow has finally arrived. A storm came through Thursday and Friday and dropped 2 feet of snow 
First fat bike ride of the season so far. A chilly start, but warmed up as the sun came up. Snow conditions were perfect - in part due to snow mobile traffic that was using the trails to get access to a small plane crash from Friday night. Was able to ride up one of our trails which is 16% slope for half a mile.
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Congrats! Whoo - 200 miles is a long day in the saddle.
Morning fog still hanging over the Cistercian monastery in the valley. I clocked up 1000 m altitude in less than 50 km purely because it goes up and down all the time. Definitely getting better at climbing out of the saddle and just generally judging the terrain.
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Does this count as outside?
While in virtual world, waved at the office I spent time at in 1995/1996 (3 people worked for me there). Coincidentally my dad, RIP, earned his masters degree at Leuven’s Catholic University. A lot of personal ties to that town.
Did the workout by looking at my Garmin 530 while RGT controlled the trainer as if I were in Leuven, Belgium.
This workout was, interesting, due to learning how to shift on the Giant Escape. Non-intuitive when one side uses the long lever action to grab gears, and the other side uses it to drop gears. Confusing.
Various technical difficulties. Good news is the indoor trainer is now setup including fit. Loose front wheel on my InsideRide front fork thingy forced me to stop and fix it. Had some dropouts and the cadence seemed to be bouncing around too much. Oh well.
Overall very positive about RGT. Had trainer difficulty set to 100% and despite my shifting difficulties was able to modulate power and cadence to stay on target power, just like outside. Plus I got to ride in Leuven for free, ca ching!, kinda like when my job sent me to Leuven and paid for the hotel, food, and of course consuming mass quantities of BELGIUM BEER with Patrick my technical marketing engineer. First time I remember using a unisex bathroom was right in the center square of Leuven. 
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No pictures on my ride today, it was too Dreich.
The weather must’ve have played havoc with the gps signals, 3 different apps give me top speeds ranging from 33.6 to 40mph. Given when it started heavy again (not that it actually ever stopped), peering through glasses I was half blind I would go with the lower speed
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I headed to Logie Kirk on the outskirts of Stirling today as I had the urge to do a local hill climb before it got icy again (its unseasonably mild this week, its Scotland though it’ll probably be minus temperatures again next week like last week).
The hill climb road itself was pretty mucky and and the pine needles had built up in the middle of the narrow road. It was quite nice but I didn’t stop for pics until I was down on the level again near the Wallace Monument.
Typically it brightened up the moment I had put the phone camera away 
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