cold weather ride; first of the season

 The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I went out to celebrate her birthday yesterday, so I didn't get a weekend ride in then, thus today's was my first cold-weather ride of the season.

Weekend ride? I'm retired; why am I so concerned with weekend rides? Shouldn't I have all this during-the-week free time?

Well, maybe... but:

• A few days each week, I attend some daytime self-help commitments (we'll not go into more specifics right now: ahem);
• I'm teaching a basic bike maintenance class at the Princeton Adult School one night a week, which gets in the way of a number of things, but most notably...
• the class conflicts with my position as co-manager and mechanic at the New Brunswick Bike Exchange, where I used to volunteer six hours a week, but I've had to cut it back to two;
• I've started back to work seven hours per week, for an old boss who was a member of the Plain Jim Fan Club, and provided support (and a promotion, near the time I retired). She ran into a jam, and asked me to come back, and I feel I owe her. I say seven hours per week, but in December, there will be at least two weeks where I'm working six hours per day, four days per week;
• TEW counts on me to take care of chores and commitments for her while she's at work;
  
• My mother's funeral is upcoming, and puts a wrench into the machinery of many plans I had, and
• The usual unpredictable chaos comes up from time to time.

And my friends who are still working ride on weekends. So I like to ride with them, too.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Cold-weather ride. 

The club only had five rides listed for today, and two were fast-paced; another was a towpath ride, not the first choice of a number of members of our primarily-road-riding-club. And yesterday's weather apparently kept a number of riders out of the saddle. I limit my rides to twenty (which is a large limit; some limit to as few as seven or eight), and my ride was full.

We picked up a couple along the way, too. I'd heard that Canal Road on the way to Blackwells Mills was closed, so I chose a route that went down to Princeton, and came back across the Griggstown Causeway. Then I heard that the Princeton Half-Marathon was today... but it appeared they would be cleared by the time we'd be going through town. (The runners were gone, but there were some enthusiastic fans, cheering us on, just as if we were part of the event. That was gratifying.)

This route goes on Pretty Brook Road, which I remember as having hills that are not so much tall, as steep and demanding. But we all got over Pretty Brook in good order, including very truly yours, Plain Jim. And the subsequent climb on Carter to Mount Rose, then Crusher, and to the high point in Hopewell also didn't feel so demanding.

Now, I've posted a few times recently about my spotty performance: sometimes I'm more than able to keep up (like today), and other times I feel like I can barely finish. I've asked for feedback on why that might be, and gotten suggestions like the amount and quality of sleep the night before (which checks out) and my use of flat pedals rather than cleats (which doesn't). But I think I've got another piece of the puzzle. 

I've been trying to keep my weight to a level I was able to hit a couple-three years ago, and maintain for a while, but about a year ago, I found I was up from that. At the first of the year, I was up a lot, and managed to get down some, but I haven't been able to get to the level I referred to, and I'm not at that level now; I'm six or seven pounds above that. But this is a weight I can maintain without feeling deprived, or obsessing about what I eat. And I think I ride better at this weight than I did when I was lighter. In fact, I think the excellent lunch I had with TEW (remember that at the top of the post?) might have been a factor in my good performance today.

More research is obviously needed.

In any case, we stopped at the Boro Bean.

And back. I had GPS weirdness today; the device wasn't giving me the turn-by-turn directions, and I was unnecessarily cranky due to that; while we did make it back, we didn't track the route I intended (and that doesn't make any difference at all, except that I'm sometimes hopelessly lost, and need the device). I've since found the setting, and I THINK I could fix the problem if it recurs.

Maybe.