Tag: weather

On Average. The Weather Is Lovely

Most people around here have probably already forgotten that this summer was peppered with heat waves that made going outside an exercise in stupidity. (Didn’t stop me though.)

Ah, the joys of summer

Lately, we’ve been dealing with what you might call the polar opposite, frigid air with no end in sight. Temperatures have been running 10 to 15 degrees F – and I mean F – for the last couple of weeks. I should be basking in 50 degree weather, borderline riding-in-shorts weather. Instead, I spend a good ten extra minutes finding layers to layer and sticking toe warmers in my shoes. I have not yet broken out my balaclava and my winter overboots, which I usually use only in January and February, but I can hear them calling from the dresser filled with winter gear in my basement.

So, on average, it’s been a run-of-the-mill year weatherwise. Now if we could just work on the variance we’d have a meteorological hoedown, statistically speaking.

Thinking ahead to decent riding weather in December I took Big Nellie and The Mule in for service. They are ready to rumble. Then snow came. Just an inch but enough to make me wary of a crash, a circumstance that my beat up right shoulder wants nothing to do with. I brought my CrossCheck inside and mounted it on a resistance trainer. I managed one hour before the boredom and intensity of my workout damned near did me in.

The snow, all one inch of it, melted in a day so I’ve been riding outside. I have about 20 miles in me before I start raging at the weather gods and dreaming of spring. (Just four months to go!)

Then it occurred to me that our newly renovated rec center has stationary bikes. I tried the recumbent model our and really liked it. You can mount reading material or plug in your phone for entertainment. It even has a fan to keep me from overheating. I did an intense workout, expecting to ride for an hour before the digital fitness overlords terminated my session with an automatic “cool down” feature after 30 minutes.

Why not?

Today I mixed and matched. I rode The Mule 7 miles from home to the rec center then rode a half-hour session on the rec bent. Next I lifted weights for a half hour before a second session on the rec bent. Then I went back outside to discover that the temperature had dropped during my time inside. Windy 34 degrees is not my cup of tea but The Mule and I managed to do another 10 miles before headed inside for hot soup.

All of this is aimed at my inane goal of riding 10,000 miles this year. Entering December I had 520 miles left to go. Given the weather, holiday festivities, and shopping, I felt the goal was going to be a serious challenge. So far so good. I have 319 miles to go with 23 days to go. In 2017 I finished the year less than 100 miles short of 10,000 because my cardiovascular system gifted me blood clots for Christmas.

The frigid temperatures have brought out the weirdness in our local critters. I have seen more vultures this week than I have all year. This may be because I’ve been riding Big Nellie with it’s panoramic view combined with the lack of leaves on the trees. I saw four vultures along the Mount Vernon Trail at Dyke Marsh the other day. The other day there was the big snake in my backyard. It turned out to be a harmless garter snake but it was very feisty, trying to bite whenever it was approached.

Say hello to my not so little friend

Today, I spotted this sign in New Alexandria about a mile from the rec center.

We’re having fun now.

If the weather don’t get you, the wildlife will.

Well, at least it’s pretty

It finally happened. A significant snowfall came our way. According to the National Weather Service, my neck of the woods received eight inches during the main part of the storm. A few hours later we had another inch that was light and fluffy.

I can’t really use a conventional snow shovel because it would cripple me, being of compromised lower back architecture. Luckily, I have a wovel, a.k.a. a snow wolf. It looks about as weird as a recumbent bike, but like the recumbent bike it works like a charm.

The wovel has a large pan that can holds two or three times as much snow as a regular snow shovel. If you try to lift a full pan of snow you’ll be sorry.

Instead, you push down on the crossbar and use the big wheel to move the snow then thrust with your legs and push down more on the crossbar to cast the snow off to the side. Brilliant.

This series of pictures from the wovel website shows how it is done.

Step 1. Push the wovel to pick up snow.
Step 2. Push down on the crossbar to lift the snow.
Step 3: Step toward the wheel and push down to toss the snow.

Your neighbors and Facebook friends will laugh at you but ignore them. It works! It clears snow roughly two or three times as fast as a conventional shovel and about half as fast as a snow blower.

I created some long piles of snow along the side of the street and had to cast more snow over the top of the piles. Let’s just say that my tossing technique could use some work. Also, I ran out of places to put the snow so I had to walk around with a full shovel to find fresh landing spots.

I have to say that eight inches of snow is about the limit that my 69-year-old body can handle. Next time, I’ll tackle the wovelling in waves, four inches at a time.

Had I used a conventional shovel, my lower back would have been screaming at me after 20 minutes. Using the wovel, the only thing that hurt was my triceps and my upper back muscles. They both really felt like I had hit the weight room. I took some ibuprofen and rested afterwards.

The next day I was a hurtin’ unit. My upper back muscles and triceps were super sore. (My hands were achy but I have carpal tunnel syndrome so that’s to be expected.) I managed to use a conventional shovel to clear the small amount of snow from the second wave of snowfall. Afterwards I did my normal stretching routine and rode 2 1/2 hours on my recumbent in the basement.

I checked the road near my house and there are significant sheets of ice here and there. So riding outside is not going to happen for a while. I’m headed down to the basement where Big Nellie and me are going to tackle Huckleberry Finn (in advance of reading James).

I blame the sun

The sun has turned the DC area into a desert. Trees are dropping leaves without changing colors. The soil in my yard is rock hard. The crabgrass in my lawn was over a foot tall, the rest of the yard was dust. Mowing the lawn stirred up big clouds of the stuff. During my ride today, there was so much dust in the air that it didn’t smell like the same place. I rode through Nevada in late June and it wasn’t as dry as this. It was 97 degrees today. In October. Dang.

Yesterday,  I spent five or six hours outside doing physical stuff, including digging a trench for a downspout extension, mowing the lawn, and riding 25 miles on Big Nellie.

I was tired and hot so I knew I was going to crash early last night but the Nationals were playing a do-or-die playoff game against the Brewers. I did my best to watch the game on TV. To be honest, it was boring. Sometime around the sixth inning, the sun won and I fell asleep.

I was awakened from my slumber by insane cheering on the TV. The Nationals had pulled out an amazing, improbable, lucky comeback in the eighth inning. I watched the last half inning in a semi-coherent state. They won.

For those of you who know what an avid baseball fan I am, you’re probably thinking, “You idiot! How could you of all people miss the greatest comeback ever!!”

Get a grip, children. Pull up a chair.

I did miss the comeback but, except for the do-or-die aspect, this wasn’t even the biggest comeback of this year. The Nationals scored seven runs in the bottom of the ninth to walk off the Mets a month ago.

As sweet as that was, it didn’t come close to the biggest comeback of my lifetime.

In 1967, as the Red Sox contended for the American League pennant, Tony Conigliaro was beaned. On my birthday. Hello, karma.

I went to college in Boston in the 1970s and, for a semester, lived a five-minute walk from the Green Monster of Fenway Park. Of course, the Sox lost in the World Series to the Reds, but surely they’d win it next year.

Ugh.

Twenty eight years later, I watched from my home in DC as the Sox were walked off by Aaron Boone and the Yankees in the eleventh inning of the seventh game of the American League playoffs in 2003. The next year, the Yankees annihilated the Sox for three games in the playoffs. I was fed up.

Then, the Sox came back. For four nights I sat on my sofa and went totally sportsball insane. The Red Sox eliminated the Yankees in Yankee Stadium and went on, in beautifully anticlimactic fashion, to win the World Series and reverse the curse of the Bambino.

Last night’s game was pretty great but, for me, nothing will top those four games in 2004. In fact, I even stopped watching baseball for a few years because I’d been to the mountain top.

All that said, I have only two words, inspired by the basketball fans of Boston, left to say.

BEAT LA.