Cold....

[Cyclopathic]

Frozen fog should be brittle not wet. It should be like really really sparsely spun candyfloss but made of ice and we should sort of carve out tunnels as we walk or cycle through it. Otherwise how is it frozen and why does it still make one wet?

 

[Boris Bajic]

I agree. Just because you have gears doesn't mean that you have to use them. Couldn't the purists just stay in one gear but still have the option to change if they want to. I don't understand the current fixation (no pun intended) with sigle speed and fixed wheel bikes.

Yes you could do as you suggest. Or you could only use every other gear, or only gears with an odd number of teeth... You can do what you want. There are no rules other than the ones I make up arbitrarily.

But that's not really the point. If you like old cars, you can get 'close' to the sensation in a modern machine by switching off the a/c and double-declutching when you change gear.... but it isn't really anything like it.

You can chop your own wood for a solid-fuel stove in the sitting room, but it's not the same as life in the Edwardian period.

I was a fixed-gear sceptic until I built one and tried it. It's not a fixation (although I like the pun). It's not a cult or a new religion. It is great fun. Pure, yummy, distilled fun. In spades.

I now have a freewheel sprocket on the other side of my fixed wheel, and that's fun too... Jury's out as it's a new mod, but I like it so far.

Neither gives anything like the sensation of riding a geared bike in only one gear - which I tried when deciding on sprocket sizes for the fixopholous.

There really is a joy to riding fixed-gear that other bicycle types can approach but not replicate. Last year I did a 125-mile charity run with my daughter, who was riding with gears. We clipped along at a nice 16.5 mph average until we hit outer London (Gerrards Cross) and were slowed by Saturday shoppers to our destination (Trafalgar Square). She took the Mickey out of my 'Zenlike communion with the machine' all the way to London, but it really was a hoot. I have a geared bike too (more than one) and I love to click up and down the available ratios... but fixed gear is like the perfect Gin & Tonic on the perfect evening in perfect company - with a Bread & Butter Pudding for afters.

As to Drago's comment about having 30 gears... Is this chap suggesting a granny gear on a roadbike? I do hope not. Some things are just not done, old boy.

If it's on an MTB, I accept it... but only just. Roadbike? No. One of my rules and they are not up for discussion.

 

[cyberknight]

-2 on the way home this morning and foggy, my fingers always start off cold then warm up after about 5 miles so maybe i need to get some thicker gloves.tried the ski gloves last year from aldi but found them too warm and my hands were bathed in sweat.

 

[Iainj837]

It was so cold yesterday, on my way from Walton to Glastonbury by the time I got to my destination the water in my bottle was almost frozen

 

[Buzzinonbikes]

-2 on the way home this morning and foggy, my fingers always start off cold then warm up after about 5 miles so maybe i need to get some thicker gloves.tried the ski gloves last year from aldi but found them too warm and my hands were bathed in sweat.

I think my problem is I get very cautious in the cold and so don't push very hard and then don't use my arms as much, meaning my hands don't get much blood and then very cold.... Or just it was chuffing freezing with frozen fog and no amount of glovage would save my pianist hands.

 

[Trail Child]

The weak link tonite on my commute was my hands. Despite wearing pretty warm gloves, my fingers were painfully cold (-22 c). Everything else was fine. I'll have to look for better wind stopping gloves.

 

[potsy]

The weak link tonite on my commute was my hands. Despite wearing pretty warm gloves, my fingers were painfully cold (-22 c). Everything else was fine. I'll have to look for better wind stopping gloves.

I'm never complaining about the cold ever again

 

[Norm]

-22!!!

 

[lulubel]

The weak link tonite on my commute was my hands. Despite wearing pretty warm gloves, my fingers were painfully cold (-22 c). Everything else was fine. I'll have to look for better wind stopping gloves.

How do you even manage to breathe in those kind of temperatures? I struggle to breathe as soon as it gets below freezing.

 

[Christopher]

The weak link tonite on my commute was my hands. Despite wearing pretty warm gloves, my fingers were painfully cold (-22 c). Everything else was fine. I'll have to look for better wind stopping gloves.

I also suffer from cold hands and sometimes wear gore-tex windstopper mitts over warm gloves, if really cold than inner gloves too. Works well although I have never cycled in weather as cold as that; also the mitts were very expensive - £40 about ten years ago.

 

[fossyant]

-22!!!

Done -15 commutes, but -22

 

[Jimmy Doug]

I had -30 once when I lived in Russia. No way would I cycle in it. -22 - that's pretty hard-core. How long is your commute, Trail Child?

 

[Deleted member 1258]

The weak link tonite on my commute was my hands. Despite wearing pretty warm gloves, my fingers were painfully cold (-22 c). Everything else was fine. I'll have to look for better wind stopping gloves.

Makes the -12 I commuted in a couple of years ago seem warm.
Interesting that so many on here suffer with cold hands, my problem is the opposite, if its above freezing I have to wear thin gloves or my hands start getting clammy, I only need warm gloves when its well below freezing.

 

[Rohloff_Brompton_Rider]

Makes the -12 I commuted in a couple of years ago seem warm.
Interesting that so many on here suffer with cold hands, my problem is the opposite, if its above freezing I have to wear thin gloves or my hands start getting clammy, I only need warm gloves when its well below freezing.

I'm the same when I ride fixed, wind chill not as much of an issue as I'm grafting non stop

 

[Boris Bajic]

I did a nearly 2 years cycle commuting in the Western Balkans, on a series of dreadful Huffy HT MTB look-alikes bought from a US PX for $79 each.

Everything about the bikes was dreadful, but they did what they did. I had a local 'majstor' who was a displaced guy from a Serb town to fix them.

I gave him the last surviving bike when I left to come back to the UK.

Awful as they were, the Huffy bikes were usable on snow down to about -15 C or colder. Crunchy snow or gritted roads were OK.

Ice or re-frozen slush were bad or deadly. I no longer cycle below (or even close to) freezing.