Craneimal: Motorpacing the Bellingham Winters

Hellllooo World-

FYI, it's cold in the winter time. Roughly September-June it's frigid way up North in Surrey, BC. Here in Bellingham we get about Mid-October through April of brrr. I have a pretty good living setup, as I live with one other serious bike racer (Steve) and one wannabe Chef (Matt). There is one glaring problem with Steve as a roommate, and that is his unexplainable desire to race cyclocross seriously. To be fair, he has dialed the cross-traveling down a bit this season to help ease the fatigue heading into road training, but he is "still tryna go fast" at the local stuff. This is when I come in.

In the beginning of the road season, I do lots of Moto-work to prepare for races like Redlands where I haven't had many race miles in the legs leading up to it. So my moto-work, with Steve driving the scoot, begins to happen in the beautiful sunshiney days of late March and early April. However, with Steve's silly cross ambitions (not cross dressing) he needs to put in the work right about now-November, which you don't need Steve Pool to tell you that time of year is #freezing.

Let me tell you about how the human body works. When you are exercising, your heart pumps blood through your veins and sends it alllll around. When blood runs inside of you, it gets warm because there is not much ventilation inside the human body. When blood gets warm, it touches your skin and your skin starts to get warm, and as a cooling mechanism, you sweat. See! It's like anatomy class all over again, and I'm pretty certain that I just accurately described what happens in the blood stream. Anyways, when you exercise, you get warm. But when you sit on a scooter driving 30mph in a slight mist in 40 degree weather, you literally begin to freeze like the characters in "The Day After Tomorrow". There is no exercise happening, just cramped up digits getting pulverized by the ALWAYS windy Lummi Reservation loop which means you come home from driving and cannot feel anything except deep sadness inside of your body.

But lets be honest, I'm not going to bow my head in the face of adversity. Here is how I combat the arctic-scoot.