Rennrad-News Winter Trophy

Riding in winter is hard. You have to find ways to keep all of your body parts fairly warm (and usually fail with at least one of them), it's dark, road conditions vary between "sucky" and "outright dangerous," and your poor bike has to suffer from the constant spray of highly corrosive salts. In order to encourage people to ride in the winter nonetheless (or do at least some other physical activity), the German road bike forum rennrad-news.de has an annual winter trophy. The idea is fairly simple: you log all your cycling and other physical exercise on their website and accumulate points for it. 1 point for 20 minutes of running, for 15 minutes of cycling, and two points for any other sports activity longer than 30 minutes. The trophy began on November 1 and will continue until March 27. I've joined a team with two guys who recruited me on radreise-forum.de (they seem to be much tougher than me...). You can track my progress at the top of this page.

October Summary

With a bit of delay, I present you the summary for the lovely fall month of October. The bad news: not too many long rides, mostly everyday riding. The good news: I'm still en route to fulfilling my 6000 km at the end of the year goal. Details:

453 km with Wolfgang, 46 km with Gunnar, totalling at 499 km for the month. October had 31 days, which means that's only 16.1 km/day, a pretty low value. Total kilometrage for the year is exactly 5000 km! (No, I did not plan this).

The goal for November basically is to stick with the 500 km/month goal. So far I'm doing good and tomorrow I'll go on a longer ride with a friend from the FLCC. Sometime this month, I'll get a pair of winter cycling shoes, hopefully allowing me to ride in the winter without the constant numbness of feet which has started to become a problem again.