Rides: The bad kind of bianca

The plan today was to ride hard for an hour, doing repeats on Joy Road, a ribbon of rolling hills amid horse farms and McMansions in Washtenaw County. The unknown factor, though, was the snow. Before the ride, I envisioned myself hammering along, my ‘cross tires digging into the layer of white powder that covered southeastern Michigan the past two days. When I got to Joy Road, I found a bianca strada. Oh yeah, it was plenty bianca. The unfortunate thing was that it was the bad kind of bianca. There was no powder. There was just a hard layer of hard-packed snow with strong ambitions to become ice. This made the crowned roads a bit treacherous. If  I didn’t ride exactly in the middle of the road, I was riding on a slightly off-camber slippery patch. A few times I hit a weird rut and almost lost control. Instead of riding to get a good hard workout, I was riding not to crash.

When I got to the end of Joy Road, I didn’t turn around for a repeat, as I had planned. I took a right onto a paved road clear of snow. Scuttling my plans to ride the remote snow-covered roads was a disappointment, but there was no real good choice. I ended up riding on pavement for an hour, then doing repeats up a long hill near my home. It was a cold day, with highs at -4 degrees C and lows at -8 degrees C. It didn’t bother me much. My old self, the one that spent the past 10 years in the subtropics, would have froze his butt off. But I guess I’m finally getting used to the North.