We’ve reached that time of year here in Northern Illinois where late autumn just cannot decide whether it wants to hang on and work through the end of the season, or give it up and cede to winter already. As such, high temps are ranging between the low 20’s to the mid 50’s (F) from one day to the next. For cycling, this can make it especially challenging to determine what to wear for a given ride.
Once you get into the heart of winter here you know that, for the most part, it’s just going to be cold. This allows you to get into an easy pattern of dressing in more or less the same multi-layered approach from one ride to the next. But when one day is 55° and on your next ride it’s 23°, that just isn’t the case. In these cases, it’s not just about knowing what to wear, but more about knowing which level of it to wear today.
Inevitably, for me, this leads to miscalculations. Mostly this involves the extremities, as one might expect. I can generally keep my core warm enough (though too warm is a definite possibility), but I will find myself realizing, in the middle of a ride, as I begin to feel that characteristic spreading, borderline painful chill in my digits, that I’ve chosen the wrong gloves or shoes for the temperature.
For my hands this is an easy enough fix. Gloves are a lightweight, low volume item, so it’s easy enough to pack along different weights of hand protection in the pannier bags. Often I will simply start out with more than I need - I like to put mittens over insulated gloves, for example, and if I reach the point where my hands get too warm (and yes, that does happen) I can simply pull off the mittens and tuck them into the front of my jacket. This location is handy also because sometimes that changes. Out here on the prairie one might find that one’s hands are too warm when one is riding with the wind, but that they cool right back down when the wind is striking from the side or head-on. Then I can pull the mittens back out of the jacket and slip them back on.
It’s the feet where things get more challenging. In part, this is because I resist the transition to heavier shoes. I’m a sandal person for nearly 3/4 of the year. I break the Keens out in March, and try to keep them in service into November if at all possible. To do this requires committing the fashion crime of wearing socks with the sandals, of course, but enforcement of that particular ordinance is relatively low in my jurisdiction, so it’s worth the risk.
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Even with my hot feet and wool socks, sandals stop being comfortable on the trike somewhere a little south of 60°. At that point I move to hiking boots (these are also my regular daily footwear through the late fall and winter) with varying levels of wool sock. If the sandals are Level 1 for foot gear, I suppose the hiking boots would be Level 2. And that Level 2 covers that space between, say 55° and ~30-35° pretty nicely.
It’s the transition between Level 2 and Level 3 where I really begin to struggle. Level 3, for me, is a set of heavy winter boots. These are an affair with a leather upper, rubber lower, lined in wool felt. They are everything you need in a winter boot. All that said, it is somewhat challenging to get myself to want to move from the hiking boots into the these items, particularly early in the season, when I am mostly not wearing them at any other time. They are heavy and require adjustments to the sizing on my foot retention system (this can result in an extra 1-2 minutes of setup time before I ride - excruciating!). This means that, on a 25° day I find myself looking over at them and debating putting them on, before then putting a second layer of socks on and just wearing the hiking boots anyway.
Ultimately what this means is that I then find myself halfway through a ride realizing, as the spreading chill once again emerges, I should have worn the heavier boots. But unlike the mittens, the boots won’t fit easily into the panniers. And then an idea occurred to me:
Strapped on
This was my solution for the past couple of rides where the temperatures dipped below that 35° mark. While they won’t fit in the bag, they can be strapped to the top of the rack. It’s not nearly as quick and efficient as pulling the mittens on and off, but I have them with me if I need them. And from an exercise standpoint this is good too, because the boots add approximately 50 lbs* to the weight of the trike.
But this is an interim solution. I realized, as I was working through this, that part of the difficulty is that I while I’ve sorted out cold weather gear in general, I don’t really have a clear idea of specifically when to move from one level to the next. I think that I get to the point, towards the end of the winter, where I’ve just got it down, but in the long months between, say March and December, I forget, and have to learn it all over again.
So - over the last few rides I have started to collect data on what I’m wearing on my extremities, and how they work. I had considered putting together a spreadsheet for this (I do love a good spreadsheet), but for the moment I’ve just been keeping it in the notes section for the ride on Cyclemeter. This is handy because the subscription version of Cyclemeter also keeps track of weather information for the ride - temperature, humidity, wind speed, and level of sun (e.g. partly cloudy, etc). And, conveniently enough, you can export that information - including the weather data, separated out each into its own cell - into a spreadsheet. This should help me not have to relearn this over and over again each winter.
I think I am also going to consider using chemical warmers with the hiking boots. These are always an available part of my kit, and I keep extras in the panniers throughout the winter riding season in case of emergency, but I don’t usually break them out until it gets cold enough that the winter boots aren’t enough by themselves. It might be that I can extend Level 2 - maybe we could call it a Level 2.5 of sorts - further into the season with a bit of help.
*This may be a slight exaggeration.