Personally, I love the cold; it makes you feel that little extra primal urge to stay alive and pushes you that extra mile to generate enough body heat to stay warm.
The cold also gives you a sense of gratitude for all the things that fortune you. In the summer, I don’t normally think twice about homelessness, but when frost starts to accumulate on my nose as a walk between classes, I feel the plight of the less fortunate more so as their needs hit closer to home.
Their woes are persistent while mine are inconveniences. I can put on more layers if I wanted to, but I don’t because I don’t want to have to wash more clothes than absolutely necessary. This leads me to the topic of winter training: What should one wear to stay warm in such conditions?
Lots. It’s always better to be too hot than too cold, but that being said, there are ways to avoid the hassle of cleaning up bodily fluids.
When it really cold out, for me that’s -10C or so, warm-up on a trainer inside. Then bring your trainer just outside your doorstep and crank it. I’ve noticed whenever I do this, I feel like I can breathe a lot easier. It also reduces the sweat accumulation.
The reason why I warm up inside first is so there is blood in my feet; otherwise, they tend to get very cold. And I know a lot of criticism will be in the form “yeah well, Simon Whitfield trains in his shed in like 40C conditions. What you’re doing is not simulating real world conditions” et al. What I can say to that is, in Vancouver, the warmest race (triathlon) I’ve done was 15C. It took me 2km into the run for my feet to regain sensation. But that’s just me.
This is merely a suggestion for people who want to gain a crap load of power and cadence over the winter, where cycling usually becomes minimal, unless you are a purest like Derrick Lee.
So there you go. I managed to link homelessness in winter with outdoor trainer workouts.
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