NCAR, The Hump, The Wall... Oh My!

Last week the call of the foothills directed me towards Golden. This week I headed towards Boulder and specifically the road that leads to NCAR.

NCAR is a road I frequent during the summer. It is a great road to do hill repeats on. It doesn't have the length of Lookout, which I climbed last week, but what it lacks in length it makes up for with a steep initial climb from Boulder towards the NCAR buildings.

When I left my house the sky was gray and the temperature hovered around 40 degrees. However, It didn't feel like 40 degrees. Once the wind chill hit me it felt way colder than that and to be honest; the cold is pretty much all I thought about the entire ride. Seriously, I wish I had some profound thoughts while enjoying my time on the bike, but from the time I started to the time I got back to my house I suffered from an ice cream headache, which filtered out all concious thought and the ride was done purely on auto-pilot.

I thought I was prepared for the cold because I wore a bunch of layers, but it cut right through all of them and chilled me right to the bone.

The only time the body felt like it was getting a bit warmer was on the hills. I had three of them on my ride. The NCAR hill, The Hump, and The Wall. The hills were nice to climb. I didn't take them seriously at all. I downshifted and spun my way to the top.

At the top of NCAR I stopped for a couple minutes to snap a couple pictures and eat a granola bar. If you were reading between the lines you would have read "I stopped to cool off before starting my cold descent..." That was intelligent!

I started the descent and I froze like a popsicle. The blood felt like a Slurpy slowly moving through my veins. Everything felt sluggish the rest of the ride.

It is up in the air if I'm going to ride tomorrow or not. The cold sucked a lot of the motivation out of me today and my body is ready to sleep and recharge. I have a feeling I'll get inspired to ride again tomorrow. I wish it could be outside, but I think if I do ride I'll be hitting the trainer again.


Today's Ride:
Time: 2:21
Distance: 33.8
Elevation: 2,323'

Week Log:
Time: 4:21

2008 Elevation:
7,014'