Solstice 200: In Winter’s Teeth
It’s Monday morning, and I’m a wee bit hobbled. Yesterday was HARD; I’m wondering whether it was my hardest ride of 2021. I’ll go with yes, and feel tempted to say it was ‘epic,’ because I wasn’t sure I was going to make it without calling a life-line until I was within walking distance of home.
From the reactions my ride received on Strava, it’s fair to say it came across as something between inspiring and insane. I’m sort of torn about how to write the story.
I know I’m not ‘normal’ when it comes to riding in harsh conditions. At the same time, I learn a lot from pushing the limits of reason in the winter riding I do, and my intention is always to share insights that might help you, dear reader, enjoy riding in cold and wet conditions however you want to. The last thing I want to do is give the impression this stuff is easy, and anyone reading ought to jump into taking on long winter rides, especially when cars are involved. There’s nothing ‘safe’ about a ride like this; it’s a matter of calculated risk management. My risk calculations are specific to my experience and skill level; I have 30 years of winter riding under my belt, some of which has been racing. This ride could have gone really wrong in a number of ways, and almost did; I had to leverage every bit of my experience and ability to pull it off.
My Solstice 200 story for 2021 has a dual purpose: entertain, inform. Let’s see how this goes….
07:46 - Danielle cringes as she takes my ‘before’ photo outside. It’s -9C and about 80% humidity. Real winter.
Verging on stupid
In 2020, on the heels of my first ever 300km ride, then my second, I felt inspired to set a final challenge to round out the year: 200km outside on the shortest day of the year, Winter Solstice. While riding fast is often fun because it feels good, sometimes it’s more of a means to other ends. My first Solstice 200 was a challenge I was pretty confident I could pull off, but I needed a well-prepared plan. The weather was almost ideal on the day I went for it, and I had no issues over the day. I knew I was lucky with the weather and conditions, and questioned whether it would be realistic to make this thing a tradition. Only time would tell….
Through early winter of 2021 my riding hours came way down, but I was still pulling off at least one 4+ hour ride outside each week. Fitness for an effort that would likely be around 8 hours wasn’t my concern, weather was. Our early winter had been all over the place, well below freezing often, then +12C on the 17th. My solstice concept was more about spirit than science; I had no intention of putting myself in a dangerous situation for the sake of fidelity to an idea. Officially, solstice would be on the 21st, with sunrise at 07:39, sunset at 16:22.; 8:42:52 of daylight. The 19th, Sunday, would see daylight from 07:38 to 16:21, for a total of 8:43:01. That’s nine seconds difference; close enough. My primary rationale for going with a weekend day was concern that car traffic on my route’s first 60ish KM of paved highway would be worse on a weekday. Risk management was my priority.
We received something like 15cm of dry snow over Saturday. From a safety perspective, riding while snow falls is fine while one’s own visibility is the primary concern. However, on roads with cars, snow that seems ok from the perspective of a rider can be pretty hard to see through for drivers. So I wouldn’t put myself out there if it was snowing more than a little. In my snirt riding experience, fresh snow on a Saturday tends to be plowed and well-packed on Sunday. The dangerous phase is right after snow, when only car tracks run over the snow. These tracks often shear under a bike’s tires, and lead to crashes. Pavement would be my main safety concern, because partially plowed snow forces a decision between riding where it’s clear versus where the snow surface’s stability and grip is uncertain. Sliding from the right of the lane toward the centre as a car passes could be fatal.
I was apprehensive about the cold as Saturday unfolded. Yes, some of the pavement could be iffy, but certainly the cold would be persistent challenge. It’s not that the cold would kill me, directly, but if I got my set-up wrong enough to render my hands useless, that could be dangerous in terms of bike handling or solving a technical issue. In the latter case, I could get into the issue of compounding calamity. If my hands couldn’t allow me to fix my bike, could I then operate my phone? If I was hurt and couldn’t move, I’d have to stay warm somehow.
Getting home by dark drove my decision-making concerning kit, balancing the need to travel as fast as I could against the need to stay warm, dry, and not get hit by a car days before Christmas. I needed to carry compact food, spare kit, tools, and water. I also needed to navigate my route, because it’s not one I often ride. I’ll list out all the technical bits and bobs at the bottom of the page.
Chapter 1: F-off, Wind. Don’t die.
A couple things are going well, a couple things are going not-well. I departed home at 07:46, following a couple portions of cooked oats - one with vegan sausage, mustard and ketchup, the other with banana, coconut yogurt, and granola - and not enough coffee. I’m riding into what feels like a direct head-wind, and it sucks real bad. I’ve surpassed the 15-20 minutes I expected it would take for my forehead to stop hurting; it just keeps hurting. I don’t really want my neck-tube to freeze into one mass of ice, so it’s not over my mouth and nose. My cheeks are cold, but will it matter? Not sure. It’s -9C, humidity is 80%, and the wind is in fact coming from the North-West. I’m headed North-West. For like 4+ hours.
My upper arms are part of a mixed-results situation at the moment. With the fresh snow down, I need to reduce wind drag as much as I can for the first half of my route, a lot of which is on pavement. My Castelli Alpha RoS 2 jacket is definitely warm enough for today, but I’ve gone with my Perfetto jacket instead. It’s a gamble, but I’m not stupid. Their Flanders Warm base layer lies under my trusty Ibex merino base-layer, which is about a 220g weight. In my frame bag lurks Castelli’s new Unlimited Puffy jacket. If I get into trouble, it’ll go on, and it’s insulation will do its thing. The issue at the moment is that my upper arms are getting blasted with wind, and they are cold. The cold isn’t a problem in itself; my concern is that it’ll affect my hands. I’m wearing Castelli’s warmest gloves, the Espresso GT, which have been awesome over numerous cold rides. But today is one of the more brutal days I can remember riding in; the wind is 15-20kph against me. F-off, wind.
The other thing not going so well is the lack of recent plowing on the pavement I’m riding. I’m relying on my Garmin Varia radar tail-light to inform me when cars are approaching, so I can ride clear pavement instead of whatever the hell is along the shoulder. The thing is, I know the Varia’s battery won’t last all day. My 520+ head-unit is plugged into my Jean Coutu generic spare battery up front to get through perhaps half the day with out burning into its battery, and my plan is to swap the battery to the Varia later on. I have my Forerunner 235 watch in my handlebar bag, recording GPS, for if/when my head-unit dies. My other back-up is my phone, which happens to be a new iPhone 12 with a good battery. I't’s in a Silca wallet thing in my back pocket to keep it ‘warm.’ I’m listening to a podcast in one ear, which won’t burn much battery, so my plan-C for recording, which is also my plan-B for navigating, should be ok. I also have two life-lines I can call if things go way whack: Iain Radford and Scott Emery.
40km down, highway 148 is going well, and my jacket isn’t costing me any energy through flapping. I did a few special things to my bike for the day, and everything is working nicely. To prevent chain woes. I did a couple things: 1) new front fender flap installed, 'custom,’ naturally. It’s a mouse-pad, keeping the road spray off my drivetrain. Once I hit snirt….who knows. Depends on how wet the snow is. I took the time to wax my chain with Absolute Black’s GraphenWax on Saturday, to fill it up with good stuff and leave as little room as possible for bad stuff. I also installed the set of 55/65mm deep Woven wheels I used for road stuff in the summer, with my fanciest ‘dry’ cyclocross tires: 33mm Specialized Tracers. I’d always thought they’d be great for snow and nice, but never wanted to wear them down for local rides; today I’m finding out. They mounted up tubeless without hassle, and didn’t leak any air overnight. Sweet.
Chapter 2: Still with the wind? What, Garmin is gonna die?
I’ve turned off the 148 onto snirt, and FFS, it’s spraying all the F over my bike despite my fenders. This is worrisome; I should eat my first cookie. Which is frozen. Which was anticipated. A sip of hot electrolytes helps.
In my head, turning off the pavement was going to signal the point I’d get some relief from the wind. But that was just self-delusion, the kind we craft tactically. I’ve not been thinking about the 8 hours this ride will take, but my first ‘finish line’: Wakefield. From there it’ll be 40km home, a shade away from ‘easy.’ I won’t need navigation once I’m on Kalala Rd., one of the best pieces of the Ride of the Damned route, but that’ll be more than 5 hours from the start. I plugged my Garmin 520+ head-unit into my generic Jean Coutu external battery back at home, knowing the Garmin would never make the distance while navigating and receiving my (essential) Garmin Varia radar tail-light’s alerts. The Varia wouldn’t make 8 hours in this cold either, so my plan was to run the 520 off battery for about 4 hours, then plug the Varia in to take what remained of the juice.
You can imagine my surprise when I get a low battery notification on the 520 for my Varia after less than three hours. Scrolling across to the field on my 520 that shows its battery level, you can imagine my added surprise to see it read 10%. FML. The irony of my situation is palpable. Conditions are this gnarly, and this is my problem? Batteries.
90km in the bag, my phone’s battery is hardly dented, and I feel confident enough to pull up my route on Strava and hit go. Once the 520 dies I’ll have to navigate from the phone, which will suck time, since face ID isn’t registering my face in its current state. Fortunately, the touch screen is working with my gloves on, which feels like a small miracle. It’s the small things like this we appreciate most when the going is tough.
I plug the spare battery into the Varia, hoping it’ll somehow take charge. It doesn’t. I’ll turn it off later on, as I get onto smaller roads. I roll through Fierobin as fast as I can, battling two, then one set of truck tire tracks in the fresh snow. Frozen ruts catch me out twice; my second crash is markedly more elegant and less harsh than the first. My podcast volume went quiet; did I crack my phone? I’ll find out later, it’s not cookie time again yet.
Chapter 3: Tabor in the bath! Yeah! How many more do I need for 200k?
More than 7 hours into this thing, my Garmin’s been dead for 3 of those, my Varia is still back on and still blinking, I can’t see very well through my salt-sprayed glasses, but I feel pretty good about the state of play. Just having rolled into and through Wakefield, the tentative thought I held in my mind about it being warmer than expected, and sunnier too, still, is gone. Rolling along River Rd., I ride in the worst kinds of shade: winter’s. My Garmin’s screen is blank, I’m soul riding. JK, this is a mission. At the end of the mission, the Tabor cyclocross races I left behind this morning, and a hot bath. Will it be my sole bath of 2021? Number 2? Who cares; it’ll be dope. I’ll watch Tabor IN the bath. Yeah!
I’d hoped for more tailwind, but let’s be real, I can’t really tell what the hell the wind is doing at this point, unless it’s in my face. The only way I know what time it is for sure is when I take my phone out, but I haven’t needed to do that for hours. Except when I was onto a crap podcast. Like CBC World News. Do I really need to hear the 05:00 edition, then 06:00, and 11:00? Gawd, stop it! Is there some sort of wireless remote I can get for my bars? That would be nice. My phone battery is going strong, insulated by the Silca wallet it's entombed in, against my back.
This is the SOLSTICE 200 Challenge or whatever I’m calling it, not the SOLSTICE 198.3. Doing ‘math’ in my head about where I’m at in total kilometreage as I pass through Gatineau would be a gross, no, hideous, overstatement. I’ve never been talented at math, and whatever ability I have sure AF doesn’t improve after I’ve been riding 7 hours with various body parts halfway to frozen. Not all parts, fortunately. While the back of my upper legs were cold for the first 2 hours or more, they eventually leveled out into some sort of comfortable. Similarly, my upper arms were cold for a good while, then came around after I turned away from the headwind, and my whole upper body is consistently warm as I approach the Ottawa River. I’m not fooling myself, however. If I stop for longer than a few minutes now, the sun low as it is, I’ll have to put my Unlimited Puffy jacket on. It feels good to know I have it at the ready; after all, a puncture is more likely now that I’m back on urban roads.
16:11 (sunset at 16:21) - Danielle urged, “Don’t you want to take the gross face-ickle off? Eww.” “No, that would be a lie. This is how it is, what it is. It’s not for looks.”
The ‘computing’ I’m doing to ensure I bump at least a little over 200k is nothing more than picturing my trace from 2020 and aiming to replicate it. I loop around the canal, adding on about 5k, as my hands are painfully cold. I’m too close to stop and whip them into circulatory decency. Wouldn’t it be friggin ironic if I ate it 3km from home? That’d be so incredibly stupid. I ride as fast-carefully as I can, wondering whether Danielle will be willing to step outside again to get an ‘after’ photo. Will the sun show behind me as it descends on the horizon? I’m reminded of how much I prefer carbon bars over metal for winter; they are way warmer! This is why I tested a pair from Easton in the first place!
Whoop data
The Whoop scale goes to 21, which would require 24 hours at maximum heart-rate. This is a theoretical limit. My highest stain score since April 2020 is 20.7, which was a 316km ride over 11:35. Including stops, my average heart-rate that day was 125bpm. In contrast, for our second B3R attempt (255k), my average HR (moving) was 148bpm, at 39.6kph, over 6.5 hours. More than 2.5 hours were spend recovering between segments that day, which enabled higher intensity efforts. For a winter mission, effort needs to be very consistent, and time spent stopped kept minimal. I only spent 30 minutes stopped all day in winter’s teeth.
MADE IT!
It was easy enough to patch my two ride files together, and a bit of an amusing surprise to see I wound up at 210km. Using the temperature map option, it’s clear to see where the cold was worst, and where shelter was in effect.
It’s kind of wild how striking cold and warm pockets can be in the winter, and this day featured both. Once my feet warmed up, a bit after mid-day, they remained fine, and were just cold, but not numb once home. My hands were similar.
My upper body was completely dry, as were my legs, the former being sort of a revelation. I hadn’t expected the Perfetto to work so well in such harsh cold; wow. Since I was riding at a very consistent effort level, and the wind speed was high, I think my vapour was easily stripped away. I was in an equilibrium situation, and wasn’t planning to stop for any length of time. The Unlimited Puffy was for that contingency, as it is insulated and nearly windproof. I also had a pair of Perfetto gloves and Craft lobster shells packed, along with a spare neck-tube, in case I needed to swap. If I’d undertaken a bike repair and gotten my gloves all wet, I’d have had to change. If I’d gone indoors for any length of time, the ice on my neck-tube would have melted, and I’d have had to swap. I had a mask packed too, of course, in case I had to go into a car.
It was almost a shocker to feel zero handling quirks with my wheel set-up. I’m a fan of deep rims, and figured they’d give me a little confidence bump for the day. I can’t say whether that made much speed difference either way, but the bike felt great. My tires performed exactly as I’d hoped, even though I had the pressure on the high side, not wanting to bottom one out and puncture. I did happen to hit a couple hidden holes pretty hard, without incident. The two crashes I suffered were more to do with overconfidence in riding packed tire tracks than anything else.
I didn’t have to touch my chain all day, which was a treat. It wasn’t ultimately the gnarilest challenge for the drivetrain, however, since there wasn’t a lot of road spray on pavement, then dry cold dirt roads. The alternation back and forth is generally the hardest to deal with. After cleaning my bike - on Monday - my chain seems fairly empty, and there’s no way to know whether it NEEDS more wax to ride again or not. It’ll get some, however. How did I clean the bike? Same as usual, detailed here.
If anyone has insight on a reliable, small, external battery that is not prone to cold, let me know! I had a nice Otter Box unit that died in 2020, and I’m looking for a solution. A generator front hub would be pretty fantastic for powering lights and gizmos, but I’ve been putting that move off for a long time and am not quite ready to dive in. Perhaps for 2022 I ought to.
Will I?
…make the Solstice 200 a tradition? I want to, because I do love a good ol’ race against the dying sun challenge. It’ll always come down to weather around winter solstice, and I’ll always apply reason, in the context of my experience and ability. So yeah, it’s a tradition, with caveats, like Christmas!
Kit Details
Castelli Flanders Warm base-layer
Ibex merino base-layer - about 220g weight (discontinued)
Castelli Polare 3 tights (featured here)
Castelli Perfetto jacket (featured here)
Castelli Unlimited Puffy jacket (packed)
Castelli Perfetto gloves (packed)
Neck thingy from CX Nationals 2019
Giro ambient cap
Polypro thermal socks
Lake MX145 boots (review here)
Giro Ambient shoe-covers
RELATED MATERIAL
Equipment Details
As discussed above, I waxed a few used chains with Absolute Black GraphenWax. This would occupy internal space better than oil, and would be harder to flush out. The small bottle of GraphenLube I packed can be used over top of the wax; they are compatible.
I mounted a pair of Specialized Tracer cyclocross tires to 55/65mm Woven rims. Tubeless, these mounted easily, and held air with one scoop of Stan’s sealant without and leaking. These tires have lots of edges to grip snow and ice, but roll really fast. Mine are 33mm wide, and they also come in 38mm, which would make for a very nice general all-conditions tire. They would wear quickly, however, which is why this was the first time I’ve mounted them for road use.
Fenders not only protect the body and bike, but also help instill peace of mind. Worrying about road spray getting legs and feet wet isn’t helpful; there’s enough other stuff to worry about! Fenders need lots or room around the tires for when they pick up snow. The toughest phase tends to be when moving from wet road to snow road, because snow adheres to the tires and fenders, builds up, then sprays all over the place. I think the fenders might have to find an equilibrium of sorts after a bit of snow exposure, and knocking snow out after the first few minutes might accelerate that process. I mounted a new fender flap (a mouse pad) to provide foot and drivetrain protection. This is an aero hit for sure, but on the balance, worthwhile.
I packed my typical assortment of tools and spares for a ride longer than 6 hours. Within the bag pictured, which went into my Road Runner Burrito Supreme handlebar bag, I fit everything but the external battery and cable. In the photo above, you’ll see a variety of tire-repair items, including pieces of latex inner tube I’ve cut up. I have patching glue, but the odd-shaped bottle of gel crazy glue would be more likely to be used with these patches, externally, if I cut a tire. The objective would be to avoid removing the tire to put a tube in (I had two spares). That would likely get my hands wet with sealant; bad. With my patching materials I can stuff a bacon strip into a hole, then patch over top of that with latex and crazy glue. I’ve found the gel variety of crazy glue actually does work through multiple uses without drying up.
The little hex-nut tool is from an ancient multi-tool. Modern bikes don’t tend to have hex-nuts, except for on fenders! If one of my struts got mangled or came loose, I’d need this tool.
