Taking it easy again

Today was a pretty simple morning, for riding.  I got up at the normal time, got dressed, and got on the road with the road bike.  It was 40-ish and rainy (not hard, but it was steady throughout the ride), which didn't turn out to be great.

I wore my rain gloves, and didn't put my liners in (I thought it was going to be at least a couple of degrees warmer), which I ended up regretting.  So my hands were chilly pretty much from beginning to end.  So that was a bit of a downer.  Note to future self: put them on, and if it seems too much, take them off midway.

One thing I did have to do midway was reconfigure the power meter.  I gotta say that Stages is borderline on lying when they say it works on bluetooth.  It might be technically true, but they get a ridiculous amount of dropouts connecting that way.  After it dropped out for the better part of several minutes in a row, I stopped under the arch of a building to pull the phone out, turn on ANT+ on the RFLKT+, and attach to the power meter via ANT+ instead of BTLE.  Very annoying.

But that was the only thing that really went wrong this morning.  I'm getting better at keeping my heart-rate within Z2 range, even on the hills.  In fact, I might be getting too good; I think I'd like to get it to settle around 120, but it was mostly in the 105-111 range.  So I probably need to push a little bit more power.

Anyway, I did 28 miles, doing a couple of extensions of my normal route, and felt pretty good afterwards.  We went to church, came home for a while, then went for an excellent brunch at the Del Rey Cafe.  It was our second time there, and it was just as good as the first.

We stopped at a bike store on the way home so my wife could get a helmet (she also got gloves).  I had gotten her a bike for Christmas, so we started on how to ride when we got home.  We didn't get there, but we made a bit of progress.  I think if we can get another similarly-long block of time, we'll probably get her riding.

Unfortunately, a polar vortex is about to hit, for the second year in a row, so we're about to get some serious cold.  Tomorrow's ride shouldn't be bad, right around freezing, but then it's going to drop into the 20s and teens, perhaps for as long as a week.  Not looking forward to that, especially as there's supposed to be two days of snow in there as well.  Definitely not looking forward to snow.  I'll be out there, but definitely not comfortable.

One other note; at the bike shop, I got a pair of lobster gloves, so I might try those tomorrow.  I'm thinking of going with three layers, each by a different company (Assos liners, Pearl Izumi middles, and Bontrager lobsters).  I'm very amused by that idea, but I might just got with my normal ski gloves and the liner.  We'll see.

Regardless, it'll be an easy ride, and shorter (gotta keep it down to an hour and a half).