My giddy aunt it was cold this morning. and by cold i mean absofuckinglutely freezing. my hands hurt for the first five miles before they warmed up slightly. My fingertips were beset by a tingling and stabbing sensation so acute that i nearly stopped at one point. even my toes began to feel the incremental creep of icy air through the thick overshoes. by the time i got to work my bidon was frozen solid. the same thing happened on the way home.
but in amongst the raging, omnipresent, staggering cold, was the eternal beauty of the morning, with delicate shards of ice clinging to trees from car-splashed puddles and an azure sky so clear and clean it was as though it had been ironed on. on the way home the low winter sun eked out only a few microdegrees of warmth, but bathed the countryside in a warming amber glow. i rode fast and listened to richard hawley, two things you’d think would be mutually exclusive, but apparently not. i bagged a few KOMs on strava, including one at 6.30am when it was around -7 degrees, god only knows how. probably because riding fast was the only way to stop myself from shattering like plexiglass into a million tiny frostbitten pieces.
this weekend will not see much cycling. the training regime has been paused for 48 hours.
