After a few days of single-digit temperatures and lake effect snow, the temperature finally climbed
to a balmy 12 F this afternoon, sunny and dead calm. Great day for a ride. I've been itching to try
out my new Nokians for a while, so I slapped them on the singlespeed and headed out on the Ellicott
Creek bike path. In the summer, this route is useless, jammed with dogs, baby carriages, and
rollerbladers.
There were no rollerbladers out today. I had the path to myself. I knocked off a delightful twelve
miles or so, cranking through a couple of inches of fine powder snow the whole way.
Thumbs up on the Nokians. I'm running the Mount and Ground, which is a relatively svelte 1.9 tire,
studded. The damn things were a [censored] to get on my Sun Zero-Degree rims: I even broke one of the
tire levers on my Alien putting them on. God help me if I ever get a flat out in the cold. Luckily,
I think you could shoot these tires with a .30'06 and they would still hold air. They weigh a ton,
and I doubt they could have more rolling resistance if they were square. But you can ride across
boilerplate ice on the things with total confidence, and the tread sheds snow almost magically. Plus
they make a really neat sound on pavement. They corner like [censored], they're expensive, heavy, a pain
to deal with. Indispensable.
Maybe I'll start training for the Ididasport.
CC