Originally Posted by
Broctoon
My wife has been sick and almost completely unable to ride lately. Prior to this, we went out together fairly often. One of our favorites is a Saturday morning ride to a local diner for brunch. We'd do this even in winter, with temps as low as 30 degrees F.
The hard part isn't getting out. It's riding several miles, sitting down to eat, and then going out to start riding again. Sometimes we step out of the diner for the ride home and she gets so cold she sends me to get the car and come back for her, or she just calls our daughter to pick her up.
We're both becoming pretty big wimps about cold weather. And yet, I still consider myself a "real and serious cyclist." I went out for rides last summer when temps were in the triple digits, just avoided big climbs. As I age, I find I can tolerate hot temps better than cold. I see the trainer as a really good option in the cold, dark winter. I see jogging as another. I've never considered myself a "real" or a "serious" runner, but I don't get nearly as cold when running, so it's a fallback activity.
I'm pretty much the same way you are as I age--more tolerance or at least no change in my ability to cope with hot weather, which I've generally always been pretty good at, and less and less tolerance for cold. I haven't ridden in a couple weeks now as it's too dark after work and my routine weekend rides would have involved many 10s of miles in temperatures in the 40s. I would've put up with that in previous years, but I'm finding that kind of riding very unpleasant what with the nose running like a faucet and the cold fingers. I've switched to my fitness strategy of absurd amounts of indoor cardio for the last two weekends.
Gotta say, I think this thread topic is pretty great. The only trolling that seems to be going on here is an attempt to hijack this into a discussion of who are the "real cyclists", and we all know who to "thank" for that. To be clear, it isn't you. . That is probably the biggest recurring BS topic in General Cycling, an obvious attempt by people to explain why they're better than everyone else.