We gather every year with family in Southwestern Wisconsin for Thanksgiving festivities. It’s always a good time, and this year, in addition to a delightful meal, LB led a game of Dungeons and Dragons which added to the fun. The following day - Black Friday - MLW and her sister go off to Madison to battle the shopping crowds, and the rest of us seek our own fun in the Driftless Area. For me, for the past few years, that’s meant tackling the Military Ridge trail.
I’ve written about the trail itself before. You can look there for detail, but it’s a rail trail with a nominally crushed stone (but mostly packed sand and grass) surface. I was pleased when I looked out in the morning and could see that the Wisconsin weather gods had chosen to bless me with a bit of snow.
The dusting of snow really is a blessing - I enjoy riding in the white stuff, and it often has the additional effect of putting a hush over the world and of keeping most other people off of the trail.
When I woke the thermometer sat at 30°F, working its way up to a high of 35°. The main artifact of this is that, while there is a chill in the air, the ground isn’t really frozen. And that means that the snow and the sand conspire to provide a soft, resistant surface. This isn’t a problem, per se - I’m riding for exercise and to enjoy the countryside, after all. But it does have an effect on the speed and distance traveled.
In sum: soft is slow
When I loaded up the Expedition for the ride - its first adventure on this particular trail - I also included a growler in the saddle bags in anticipation of riding from Ridgeview to Mt. Horeb for a stop at The Grumpy Troll.
I knew I was probably being optimistic with that decision. Mt. Horeb is a solid 13 miles along the trail, presenting with a 26-mile round trip. The distance doesn’t scare me, mind, but I was looking for some exercise, not to spend the day on the trail.
As it all laid out the trail was reliable and consistent with past experience in terms of the ride through the countryside, albeit softer.
Enjoying this post? Check out our Cycling page for links to other cycling articles on Applied Life
What became clear, as I rode along the trail, enjoying the scenery, was that it was not going to be a speedy trip. I do most of my riding on the big ring when I’m on pavement, especially on the relatively level roadways of northern Illinois, but it quickly became clear that I was going to need to drop down to number two.
And then, as the ambient temperature rose, down to the little ring.
Ultimately, as I entered Barneveld - the first town East from Ridegeway along the trail - and I was already an hour in, drenched with sweat, I knew I was nearing my endpoint. I rode to the far end of town and turned around.
I came out of ride at 12.27 miles and an average speed of 6.75 mph (but with a blistering top speed of 12.18, so there’s that...). But the landscape and snow more than made up for the lack of distance. I’d also been looking forward to seeing how the Expedition managed one particularly soft uphill portion of the trail - one which has required me to get off and walk both with the Pocket, and with MLW’s Schwinn years ago. In other, similar things the Expedition’s larger footprint has seemed to provide an advantage, so I was curious.
Here, too, it shined. That section appears on the return trip and, despite the softness of the trail, the Expedition crawled its way up the sand on its decidedly road-oriented Schwalbe Marathon Plus’s with little slippage. Riding that ride this time actually made me wonder what had made it so difficult in the past...
And I was once again very pleased with the presence of the fenders on my Expedition. I’ll probably get tired of bringing them up at some point, but it really is amazing what a difference such a seemingly simple technology can make. Without them the climactic conditions and season would have conspired with my wheels to throw untold amounts of a conglomeration of sand, snow, ad leaves into my lap. Instead they were arrested at the wheel level.
Soft or not, because of the snow I was able to see, and thus follow, my original track on the return trip. Although the effect was likely small, there did see to be some benefit to remaining in the wheel path, perhaps from a bit of compression gained on the way in. And besides, it’s neat to see that evidence of where you’ve been (and the trike makes a pretty unmistakable footprint).
Of course, some cleanup was needed upon arrival back, but this is not an uncommon component of winter riding. And given that the trail isn’t cleared, there’s little by way of road salt to be concerned about.
Probably the only other downside is that Cyclemeter, which I generally like, seems to track calorie expenditure based upon speed and distance if you don’t have supplemental sensors attached. The assumption, then, seems to be that my slow pace means I only worked through 584 calories. My dripping sweat begged to differ with that assessment. But I’m far too cheap to pony up for the additional equipment to rectify that situation, tho, so here we are, and here we remain.