Wet & Mild

30 Days of Biking Mileage Counter: 105.6

There are very few times I don't enjoy biking. Today (or at least the first half of it) was one of those days.

Shame on me for not reading the forecast before leaving the house this morning. I looked at my phone and saw "Light Fog" with a temperature of 45 and a high of 61, so I dressed in a sweatshirt, shorts and long socks, thinking that later in the day it would be kinda nice for riding temperature-wise. Well...

I'm still covering my old delivery route for the time being, which includes a hotel in the suburbs about 11 miles away. The first stop was a ZipCar about 3 miles from home. Let's just say, the wind made that 45 degrees feel like about 20 with what I was wearing. Already freezing by the time I got to the car, I turned on the radio to hear that there was a flood watch issued for Philly. Oh really?

It was about this point that I opened my bag to get my coffee and realized that I didn't have my rain gear (that's another story). Not a big deal while you're in a car, but this week, I've been testing a proposed split of my route among two people (yes, I'm essentially testing two jobs at once), one via car, one via bike. I knew the biking portion today could get a bit hairy...

So, I dropped off the car around 10 and headed for North Philly, the weather still misty, windy and downright miserable. I grabbed a spare rain jacket in the back of our facility and headed to the far north on trike at this point. I got about a half mile from my first appointment when it began downpouring:

I waited it out as long as I could. The subsequent stops and ride back weren't much better, and any time I found an underpass, I made sure to stop. All told, the route was only 8 miles, but most of it in pouring rain. Surprisingly, the trike that's electrically assisted did perfectly fine and I experienced no shocks. I, however, felt like I was about to get frostbite. BUT, we (myself and the trike) passed my test, so there's that.

I got back to our Thompson St. facility about an hour later and asked my laundry team leader the most delicate of questions: "Can you put my shoes, socks and shorts in the dryer?" This isn't the first time this has happened. It's most humorous because while waiting for the dryer to finish, I had to cover my lower regions with my sweatshirt, which was still dry thanks to the wonderful rain jacket. Mind you, I found out after the fact that there's a full set of rain gear back there too. Durrrrrrrr...

It didn't matter much, because about 10 minutes later, I was on my way back to our corporate office in Center City, and it started pouring again. I pulled into a parking garage on the way and limited my exposure. At this point, I also saw a couple flashes of lightning. Not what you want to see when you're holding a 35 pound piece of metal in your hands. Again, I waited it out and sped to the office as fast as possible. Obviously I survived, as I'm writing this post.

The worst of the weather actually came while I was in the office, as Philly got pelted with some pretty severe thunderstorms. You couldn't tell by 4:30PM, when this was the view outside our office window:

By this time, I had run out of energy and just wanted to go home. So I did.

I took a brief nap on the couch when I got home, cooked dinner, showered, realized I still had some energy and then decided I could probably take another ride, so of course I went to the grocery store. I mean, where else would you decide to go at 8PM on a Thursday? By the way, the grocery store is 4 miles from my house and it has a bar. So what the heck? After picking up a couple items, I stopped over to watch the end of the Sixers season game:

I deserved it.

If I didn't do crazy things on a bike, I'd do other crazy things. Day 6 was a bit nutty, but I broke 100. How ya doin' #30daysofbiking?