Sunday Night

Well the cold and snow keep hitting Denver, sure makes getting in bike rides almost impossible. This weekend has been bitter cold, lows in the below zero range. The cool thing about the snow is winter activities are highly accessible, not that I usually do anything in the snow. I did go snowmobiling on Wednesday this week. The group of people I work with had a management team building session at Winter Park. It was pretty cool to be out on the snowmobiles cruising around in four feet of snow at 50+ miles per hour. A lot of the trails we rode were the same ones as the mountain bike races in Winter Park during the summer. It was pretty strange to be climbing up D2 at 25 mph, instead of struggling up it on the bike at 7 mph.

The Famed D2 Climb:

For the first time ever I actually had a chance to stop and enjoy the view on the trails around Winter Park. When you’re racing you don’t really have a chance to see all the beauty around you in a place like Winter Park. Since we were on a guided tour we stopped frequently and had a chance to look around and enjoy. I may have to go up to Winter Park this summer just to train/ride so I can have time to enjoy the views.

I was reading in Velo News this week about a new chain lube that Pedro’s has out; it is vegetable based (as opposed to petroleum) and therefore is environmentally friendly. I’m going to try and track some down or order some and see how it works. The concept is pretty cool and if it keeps the chain lubed in tough conditions I’ll switch.

A note on one of my new freaky habits to reduce global warming, recycling/reusing plastic grocery bags and how wasteful they are. First off is the pure volume of them every week at the grocery store, nine plus bags a week easy. Plus a couple more here and there every week for the mid-week grocery runs. There is no possible way to reuse that many no matter what you do. Over the years I’ve used them to carry lunches and as trash bags but still I always have more than I need. Then this week I read about how much energy it takes to produce the dreaded grocery bag. According to Laurie David (author of, and facts from, The Solution is You, and producer of An Inconvenient Truth) Americans throw away 100 billion (100,000,000,000) plastic bags a year. The petroleum needed to make 14 plastic bags is the same as the amount needed to drive a car 1 mile. Not sure about you, but from a convenience factor I’d rather recycle 14 plastic bags and drive a mile than the other way around. So anyway for the past few months I’ve been reusing the plastic grocery store bags a lot. I’ve used the same bag to carry my lunch for four weeks (versus in the past one a day) and have been bringing bags on all my shopping trips. Now I’m not completely off the plastic bags yet or only going to use the same ones forever, they rip break etc. but for every two weeks I use the same bags I figure I can drive one more mile, or just save the energy some. The added benefit and one Ade really likes, is that now we don’t have a cabinet full of plastic bags.