If you're a regular reader, you already know this, but I'm planning on riding along the Pacific coast next summer. I was firmly convinced that I'm a wimp by a friend assuring me that 40 miles per day is easy. I was kind of dreading even that amount of mileage per day. Looking at other people's itineraries for that ride, we'll probably have to average more than that per day.
Since I'm out of shape, lazy, addicted to coffee, and have a low tolerance for bike seats, I'm going to have to get ready for this ride. Since autumn is almost over this means that the only two seasons I have before the ride are winter and spring. This leaves me with only a few options: Train all winter and all spring for the ride, wait till spring to train (risking making the trip much more difficult due to lack of preparation), don't train at all (guaranteeing that the trip will be incredibly difficult or impossible to finish), or give up all together. The wisest option out of those could either be the first or the last. I need someone wiser than me to correct me if I choose the less wise of the two.
Since I am foolish enough to still want to do this ride, I'm going to select the first option of training all winter and all spring. Now this is foolish in a way because this is a ride that will cost hundreds to thousands of dollars more than sitting on my butt, not working, and will be incredibly painful for greater than 50% of the time. I'm glad I'm foolish though because it will give me a good story to tell people, almost as good as walking on the moon. I could also take a bible verse out of context that talks about God using the foolish to put to shame the wise, but I'll have the self-control to not do that.
Training in winter means pain. Exercising when it's cold out is painful and riding a bike in the wind gives you a 50/50 chance of it being a blast or excruciatingly difficult. This assumes the wind is either blowing east or west and you're riding east or west, which, I've noticed, is almost always the case on the front range.
As an Alaskan, everyone thinks I should be able to handle the cold. This is a bad assumption. What they should assume, however, is that since I am an Alaskan, I know how to be prepared for the cold. Consistent with the ideal Alaskan stereotype, I know that I need to get some warm clothes for my winter training. The main piece of clothing I need is warm cycling pants. Believe it or not, jeans are non-ideal pants for riding bicycles. Bad things happen when you wear jeans too much and I'll leave it at that.
So, the purpose of this entire blog post was to tell you that I need some warm cycling pants. REI has plenty, but the cheapest ones are $70 and I'm cheap. So unless I can find a suitable alternative, I might just have to bight the bullet and pay the $70. It's all for the cause of the ride and I'm already realizing that the ride will be expensive. We'll see how it plays out, but I may just end up buying these pants and they would officially be the most expensive pants I've ever bought.
I told The Momma about these $70 dollar pants and she asked me if I thought that was expensive. I was taken aback by this, but only for a few seconds because she informed me that my slurred speech after watching that darn Broncos game made it sound like I said $7.00.
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