Bread bag technical support

Bread bags on the feet have their own large category on the internet, but in case you don't have you own experiences or an explanation of the principles, here's mine.

In the 1980s, when I started winter camping, climbing, and mountaineering, vapor barriers were the hip thing. Their advocates acknowledged that vapor barriers would turn anything inside them into a swamp, but the benefits of keeping your body moisture from reaching the cold outer layers apparently outweighed the grode factor of marinading in your own sweat for hours or days.

In my particular circles, we limited it to vapor barrier socks, and, for some, a vapor barrier liner inside the sleeping bag. Basically a basting bag for your whole stinky self. I had one in case of an emergency, but I never used it. But the socks became a standard item.

I actually bought a set of coated nylon vapor barrier socks at one point. The coating wore away in a few uses, leaving me with pointless nylon socks I could use as whimsically shaped stuff sacks. Bread bags held up better.

The layers go like this: thin poly liner sock, plastic bag, thick insulating sock, boot. The boots might be military surplus "mouse" boots, classic leathers, or the new plastic double boots. In any case, the VBL kept your foot sweat from saturating your essential insulation. If we were staying out for days, I would have fresh liners for every day, but I would also plaster wet liner socks to my chest when I got into my sleeping bag, to dry them out as much as possible in case I needed them.

In low-speed applications like mountain climbing, you might encounter ferocious winds, but it's still a simpler problem than riding a bike, where you're flying your feet through the air with a minimum wind velocity of perhaps 15 miles per hour, often higher. Heavy, insulated boots provide the real protection, and the vapor barriers just help that insulation stay at peak efficiency.

A winter bike ride is a calculation of acceptable loss. You will get moist, and your insulators will fail if you stay out long enough. If you dress lightly enough to keep from getting moist, or noticing that you have, you have no margin of safety if you can't complete your route quickly enough.

You could try vapor barrier suits like the plastic-coated heroes of the 1980s, but I don't recommend it. Arctic natives don't use vapor barriers. My father overwintered on Baffin Island in the early 1950s, the heyday of the military mouse boot. He ditched those for native footwear right away. He wasn't dealing with the challenges presented by either ice climbing or winter cycling. There's no good breathable option for winter cycling footwear as far as I know. But he also took up native outerwear as more effective than military issue, and the system there operates on the same principle as my winter cycling outfit with thicker, breathable insulators rather than shell layers that will cause condensation on the inside of them.

All factors influence the success of a given system. It's not just a matter of generic human in generic cold environment. Activity level and type of activity completely determine what has the best chance of working.

As I have previously noted, the winter cycling sock system requires more bags. Bagging the outer sock blocks wind coming through the shoe. Even if you do have a winter cycling shoe, it can use the help.

Overboots are okay if the conditions are dry, but any openings for a cleat put a hole where you really don't want it. You could use flat pedals, as long as any aggressive traction spikes on the pedal won't damage whatever you chose to keep your feet protected. I use traditional toeclips and straps, so there's some wear and tear on anything I use as an overboot in wet conditions, but nothing overtly jagged.

Back in 1980, the shop I worked in sold little toeclip tents: fabric fairings that fit over the toeclips to block the breeze. You could probably make something out of all kinds of everyday objects, like those red Solo cups. Just try to make it as sustainable as possible.

If all goes well, I get weeks of use out of a bread bag before it is ready to head down the waste stream.

If you think riding a bike is slow...

 A transportation cyclist in an urban setting can often travel faster than a motor vehicle. Prudent riders have learned not to go absolutely as much faster as they possibly can, because the trapped audience would love to see you brought down in your arrogance, but even at a sedate pace a rider can thread the jam and take advantage of some shortcuts denied to the prisoners of car culture.

That advantage disappears when the commute gets longer, over open highway. During driving season, if I get lucky with traffic, I can get to work in a little over 20 minutes. If I get stuck behind an obstruction, it could be half an hour or longer. But on the bike these days it's solidly the better part of an hour inbound. Even at my best it was a big day when I made it in 50 to 55 minutes.  What is that in metric time?

Going slower than a motorist doesn't feel slow. I know I'm doing the best I can. A rider acclimates to the pace. You know how you feel, and how the bike feels, rolling over the terrain. I have written before about how the variations in my time on the bike are a much smaller percentage -- barring mechanical or medical crises -- than the variations I routinely encounter in a car. You get a rhythm and flow.

Following my successful ride in the rain and chill on a Sunday, I went out on the same route the next day, under similar but slightly less cold conditions. Eight miles out, I felt the unmistakable squish and waggle of a punctured rear tire. It went down gradually as I looked for a good place to pull well off the road to put in my spare tube.

Find a spot, dismount, remove the wheel, start to work the tire off... damn, this is a tighter fit than I remember. Put my gloves back on to enhance grip on the wet, gritty tire casing. Still not good enough. Try barehanding it again. Nope. Shit. Dig around for tools. All I could find was a 6mm hex key left over from when my seatpost clamp kept loosening up for some reason. Well, the tube was already punctured... I jammed it under the beads and pried. I tried to keep the tube out of the way, but it still made two more holes.

Once the tube was out I used the 30-year-old Silca frame pump to try to put enough air into it to locate the original puncture.

Tech tip: always put the tire label at the valve -- or vice versa -- so that you have a known reference point to help you zero in on where a sharp object might still be in the tire. I mean, feel around the whole casing, but it really speeds things along if you have a rough idea where you're looking.

Two problems frustrated me. Three, really. One, the tube had two significant holes from the hex key. Two, passing vehicles on the wet road made constant hissing noises. Three, I only had my distance glasses with me, so I couldn't see detail up close. And there was another problem I hadn't noticed yet.

Unable to narrow my search area, I felt around the entire casing with bare fingers until I felt the sharp end of a common culprit: a tiny, eyelash-size piece of wire. With wet fingers, I had to use my teeth to pull it out. I deposited it down the hollow center of a rotted fence post. Not as satisfying as dropping the little fucker into Mt. Doom, but then it was hardly as significant an artifact.

The spare tube had been in the pack with no valve cap. It had also been in contact with the rusty old hex key. It had only been in there since a flat I'd had back in April or May, but I worried that it might have chafed through where it vibrated against the metal objects. Oh well. Let's pump it up.

As often happens, the tire went back on somewhat more easily than it came off. I put the old Silca onto the valve and started pumping. I'd tried to put a few breaths into the tube before I stuck it into the casing and had been unable to round it out, but I'd gone ahead because I had no other option. Everything was wet, so even if I had a patch kit and had been able to locate holes in the tube, nothing would stick. I had one shot.

Nothing. The tire remained flaccid. Hissing vehicles paraded past. I hoped that someone I knew might happen by, but if they did they slipped past while I was looking down. I don't know that many people, and the odds of seeing one right there were slim on a day when normal people are at their jobs.

The good news was that my route home would only be seven miles. The bad news was that I had no choice but to walk, pushing the bike. I estimated my time in transit would be an hour and 45 minutes. Best get at it.

Crap like this is why I haven't ridden with cleated shoes in years. Once in a while I'll risk it for the fun of feeling full power, but with stiff-soled touring shoes and toestraps I do well enough.

Funny thing is, this was my second hike home in just a couple of months. On one of my last commutes of the season, I was coming down a fun descent on Route 28 on my way home in the gathering twilight, when passing cars herded me too far to the right. I went through a shoal of gravel that had been kicked out from Old 28, which was being repaved. Pow! Hisssssss. My rear tire, a Gravel King, had taken a terminal hit. Gravel's Bitch, more like.

I pulled off at the bottom of the dip, where I could get well off the road, the usual precautions. In that instance, the spare tube was just plain rotten, because literally years had passed since I had a flat on that bike. With no one at home but a couple of cats, and no one I cared to call, I started trudging. That one was only about 4 miles and change. I put all the bike lights on as night settled on the landscape.

Elm Street is hilly, curvy, and narrow. I veered off into the weeds numerous times on that plod. Finally, when I was a quarter-mile from home, someone in a pickup truck stopped to ask if I needed a ride. Just about the bendiest, narrowest bit lay between me and the relatively wider Green Mountain Road, and I could see the lights of a lot of vehicles slaloming through those bends, so I took him up on it. When I told him where to turn in, he said, "Well, that wasn't much!" I assured him that after my long day at work, a cumulative 26 miles of riding, and a somewhat anxious trudge in my fatigue and hunger for supper it was still welcome, but I got the feeling he thought I was a wimp.

With that in mind, I set very strict limits on the type of aid I would accept this time. I generally do not like to burden anyone with the unfortunate consequences of my stupid decisions.  I wish I could say that was a lifelong habit, but in my adolescence and young adulthood I definitely burdened people with my stupid decisions.

At least the dry slot that I'd seen on the weather radar when I prepared to ride that morning was still holding, although a hypothermic downpour would have put the chef's kiss on the whole fiasco.

After only about a mile, a driver did pull up, in a large gray SUV -- not a windowless white van with a mysteriously stained mattress in the back -- and asked if I need a pump. I assumed tire pump... I reported that both my available tubes were NFG, but thanks. He then offered a lift, but I was just settling into a good swamp of penitent meditation. I thanked him again and excused him. I just wasn't in the mood to make a new friend. Or to drag some stranger 12 miles out of their way, because he had been driving the other way when he looped around to check on me. Was it a lovely gesture of generosity, or did I narrowly escape ending up cut up into several garbage bags distributed across 50 square miles of Maine? Either one is possible.

As I walked, I thought about how the bike manufacturers of the 1880s and '90s found a surprising customer base among working people who scraped up the coin to buy what was at the time an expensive item. From the point of view of someone who had to walk everywhere, the bicycle was a miracle. Sometimes when I ride I think about how I'm flying along above the ground, the "stride" of a pedal stroke multiplied by the gear ratio and laid out on the road by the circumference of the tire according to the result. Steps become circles feeding bigger circles, devouring distance. Even on the fixed gear, where I'm unable to coast, I get to rest on the stretches where the bike drives me. The magic of the gear ratio still works. Until it doesn't, because the cushion of air fails. Fsst!

Looking at the bike computer as I pushed along, I could see that I averaged either side of four miles per hour, usually slightly below. On easy downgrades I could lope along at five-plus. Pushing a bike turns into work really quickly. I considered burying it in the woods somewhere and loping home a little faster, but in the shoes I was wearing it wouldn't have been that much faster. And I would have had to drive back out to retrieve the bike. Keep walking.

No one else even slowed down to look at me for the rest of the seven miles. That's cool. I wasn't looking at them, either. I was just experiencing these roads at this laborious pace and comparing it to the slowest I'd ever felt when riding it. Even when I was "almost there," I had to take every single step to get there. I got my 10,000, I can tell you. Actually the phone says 15,333.

Once I got cleaned up and fed, I put the bike in the work stand to put in a good tube. While I was at it, I checked out the ancient Silca and discovered that the dried out rubber grommet in the pump head didn't come close to sealing on the valve stem. So a tire pump would have gotten me going after all. Of course if what he had was one of those Schrader-only electric compressors I still would've been screwed, because I didn't have a Presta adapter.

The next day, in dry weather, I set out with a significantly beefed-up tool kit and the Lezyne pump off my road bike. All went well, but I assume nothing. Changing a flat in the rain or in a snowbank is still a pain in the ass. We won't see snowbanks for a while, but rain, sleet, and assorted semi-frozen splather are traditional elements of November's repertoire.

You go to ride on the day you have

Only an idiot would go for a bike ride in November rain mixing with snow, with a temperature barely above freezing. So let me tell you what I wore...

Cold weather riding depends on moisture management even in dry conditions. Your body puts it out constantly. Exertion makes you sweat even if the air is cold.

Any outdoor adventurer is advised to wear fabrics that are "warm when wet and fast drying." These fabrics are not as warm when wet as they are when dry. If you expect to get wet, add layers to slow the rate of heat loss through the wet fabric.

Quick review: you lose heat through conduction, convection, evaporation, and radiation. Conduction occurs when you put your warm self in contact with a cold substance -- water, for instance. Or ice. Or cold rocks. Convection is just a fancy word for the wind blowing across you. It could be an annoying cold draft inside your house or a winter gale on a treeless mountain. Or it could be the constant self-created breeze as you pedal through the chilly atmosphere. Evaporation is how your sweat keeps you cool in summer heat, or tries to. It's the body's response to rising internal temperature, so you will perspire when you exert even when you wish you wouldn't. And then radiation is just your precious heat beaming away from you in all directions.

Cold weather cycling is just about the hardest activity to dress for. You can block the wind or mitigate its effect with either shell clothing or more insulating fuzzy layers without a shell. I used to use the second option until I got a particular yellow Sugoi wind jacket that hit the perfect balance of wind blocking and breathability. I wanted something that gave better visibility than my former dark layers, without the full panic mode of hi-viz please-don't-kill-me-yellow. When it was brand new it even repelled water pretty well, but that always fails early in a garment's life. I have never been able to reestablish it in any shell garment, with wash-in or spray-on treatments. But it cuts the wind whether it's wet or not.

For the legs, I used to wear various layering combinations of wool tights with long underwear under and/or wool leg warmers over, with bike shorts as the innermost layer. For sub-freezing temperatures, I would add wind briefs over the shorts. Then I got Sport Hill 3SP fabric XC Pants. They are incredibly effective at blocking wind, while remaining completely breathable. Made of polypropylene, they transport moisture to the surface, where it forms droplets or frost that can be brushed away. So for most cool to mild cold conditions it's bike shorts and 3SP pants. But actual rain adds a factor. Under those conditions I need to turn the outfit into a wetsuit. So I put my lightest polyester riding tights under them.

For the shirt layers, a standard crew neck poly shirt is first.

Followed by a classic wool jersey.

And then a heavyweight (actually pretty light, just thicker) old Craft zip-t

Because the core is critical, I always put a wind vest in the system. Again, Craft. This one with a solid rather than mesh back. The chest pocket is just big enough for my phone.

I led with the shell jacket. No need to repeat. In case I had to stop for a mechanical or other unscheduled delay, I stuffed a Craft warmup jacket with Gore Windstopper panels on the front of it into the rack pack.

Feet just hang down there in the cold wind. For cool rides, I put cut off ends of bread bags over the front of my socks for toe warmers. When the temperature drops to freezing and below, I go to liner socks with full bread bags over them.

If the air is cold and dry, another set of bags goes over the medium-weight wool socks I put over the liners. For wet weather, I put the bags on the outside, over the shoes. Wet shoes take days to dry out. I don't want to ride in wet shoes or go days without a ride while I wait for them to dry. The bags provide better coverage than any of the official cycling shoe covers I've ever had, and I collect tons of bread bags from buying my weekly groceries.

For the challenge of near-freezing wetness I wore these North Face Apex gloves. They are the most wind-blocking gloves I have owned (so far). Not my absolute favorites, because the gauntlet is too tight to pull easily over the jacket sleeve, but top-level protection from cold wind once you've wrestled them into place.

Under the helmet: this old liner from when our shop sold hockey stuff. It's just a simple beanie that pairs nicely with the Cat Ears ear covers on the helmet itself. For really cold rides I use a thin poly balaclava, but usually do not have it pulled down to cover my face. For whatever reason, I have not had problems with frozen face. Maybe it's because I try to do more hiking and skiing than riding when winter is in full force.

Helmet gets taped up over the front vents, leaving the rear vents clear. The headlamp serves as dashboard lighting if I ride at night.

The final accessory is the windshield wiper, a scrap of bandanna for wiping my glasses.

The cold and wet bike: a fixed gear with full fenders. It will keep you warm.

After all that preparation to endure character-building suffering, the rain let up enough that I only had a bit of a chill on the front of my arms once the fabric was thoroughly wet. Seriously nothing debilitating. I looked forward to riding the next day in a similarly wet forecast, but warmer, so without the snowflakes mixing in.

Driving Season

 The vast majority of the time, when I arrive at work by car I'm in a bad mood. It's a rare morning when I haven't been held up by someone oozing along in front of me, often exacerbated by some flame-brain six inches behind me, as if I could somehow get the obvious car or truck in front of both of us to go any faster or get out of the way.

I've written before about how the drivers who ooze along the highway then race into town like they're strafing infantry columns or something. The metaphor I used was attacking the Death Star. Sociopathic in any case. Or someone I finally managed to pass comes flying in behind me, probably gloating about how I didn't get very far, because I don't like to drive that way in the tight confines of streets with pedestrians, random pets, and other drivers compressed into them.

One diversion amuses me once I get into town. It's called Lid Game. It's very simple: try to bypass or straddle every access lid or storm drain. It started when the road was in worse shape, so these features were more prominent, and I drove a car with lower ground clearance and worse suspension. It's become a habit now, a minor challenge and diversion. I thought I was the only idiot entertained by it, but then I saw another driver playing it down in New Jersey when I was on a road trip. It will never be as popular as pickleball, but I appreciate seeing another player anyway.

When I'm on the bike, drivers might kill me, but they don't slow me down. I slow down in town traffic because it's better than sprinting through every gap, hoping nothing goes wrong. That may feel like a flex, but no one is impressed, and most of them just think you're a jerk. I try to inspire more curiosity and whatever respect a habitual motorist might summon for some bonehead who doesn't have the sense to drive. Keep up. Move smoothly. Maneuver predictably.

Over the years I tried various ways to keep doing at least some of the commute by bike. They end up taking as much time, or more, than just riding the whole route, and don't save any car mileage. In Annapolis, Maryland, a network of streets provided alternatives, and the terrain was pretty uniform. Driving was always the worse option in the colonial era roads and streets there. Here in rural New Hampshire, alternate routes diverge widely from the direct route.