Eszter Horanyi's Arrowhead 135 Blog: Lessons Learned

Read Part I, Part II, and Part III of this blog series.

Yesterday was my last day of cold weather riding before heading off to the land of International Falls for the start of the Arrowhead 135.  My morning routine has become pretty standard: Google ‘Current Crested Butte temperature’, eat some breakfast, walk the dog, get dressed, and ride to work.  After brushing the sleepies out of my eyes on Wednesday, I sat down at the computer and opened Google - current temperature was 14-degrees.  I shrugged, knowing that my last chance to test really cold weather gear wasn’t going to materialize.

Then I rode to work and was not warm.  Not cold, but not the comfortable warm that I expected to be when the temperature was hovering in the mid-teens and I started to get a bit worried.  It wasn’t until I pulled up to work where a large thermometer was prominently displayed that I felt relieved: -2 degrees.  Clearly the weather station I had been Googling wasn’t taking into account the inversion that was sitting over the valley and it was, in fact, okay that I wasn’t feeling toasty warm in my mid-teens layers. 

As I’m preparing to ship out via Denver International Airport, I can’t help but think back to three months ago when I went on my first snow ride and froze every body part imaginable.  Now I’ve become the well-known site on the side of Highway 135 as the girl who rides 45 minutes to work every day.  People have stopped pulling over and offering me rides.  So in the spirit of retrospect, I’d like to share the top five lessons I’ve learned in this adventure because regardless of how this race goes on Monday, I’ve been able to commute to work on my bike everyday this winter, and that in itself is enough to consider this adventure a success.

1.  Patience and calm are virtues. 

Before I invested in a pair of pogies, I would lose my hands to the cold fairly quickly and bringing them back to life was often a painful or impossible process.  I would panic the moment I started feeling the cold creeping in, knowing that once they were gone, they were gone.  With pogies, heat generated by the hands is very effectively trapped the in the air pocket surrounding the hand.  Unfortunately, when the hand is removed to eat/drink/futz with something, some of that warm air leaks out and early on in the game, I was futzing with stuff a lot so I’d lose my hands to the cold.  Initially, I’d panic but I learned keep pedaling and without any extraneous movement, my hands would magically get warm again.  I learned that as long as I could keep my core warm and my hands in my pogies and not panic at the cold, cold hands were no longer a game stopper.

2.  Learn from your elders.

The Internet is a wonderful thing and I spent countless hours reading about other peoples’ winter set up.  I copied Mike Curiak’s shoe system right down to the after-market studs I screwed into the bottoms of the shoes.  I learned about vapor barrier clothing and how to keep water from freezing in a camelback hose from Dave Byers.  I adapted his method of thawing a horribly frozen hose to make my water supply accessible on a 0-degree morning.  I read countless blogs detailing the Arrowhead 135 route and read forums for ideas on good foods to eat.  Greg from Fatback bikes answered countless questions about snow riding ranging from staying warm to proper weight distribution on the bike for different snow conditions. It takes a village to prepare me for a race like this.  I am forever in debt to this village.

3.  Running is not a sin.

The first time I lost my feet, I felt silly getting off my bike and running for a couple minutes next to it to revive the blood flow.  I was in the middle of a subdivision and although no one was outside  to see me, I still felt silly.  When the blood started circulating again, I swallowed my pride.  Feet are the single hardest body part to keep warm and if all it takes is getting off and running for a few minutes, then I’ll contend with all the strange stares that I get. 

4.  Falling on snow doesn’t hurt…most of the time.

Earlier this summer I crashed my bike and tried to knock all my teeth out.  I failed, but ended up in a dentist’s chair on a Sunday afternoon getting my pearly whites shoved back into place, a pleasant experience followed by two root canals.  Since then, I’ve tried to avoid crashing.  But earlier this week, I got going a little too fast on the snow bike and was maybe a little bit out of control and had to bail at a relatively high speed. I tumbled through the snow, ending up at the bottom of the hill, laughing.  I’m sure that it’s possible to get hurt riding on snow, but a crash like that would have put me out of commission for the season on dirt and rocks.  On snow, it was just comical.

5.  There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

Each and every time that I’ve gotten cold this winter, it has been due to a clothing mistake.  While I did under-dress a time or two, my biggest mistake was always wearing too much, sweating excessively, and then trying to use the descent to cool off.  I’d cool off but the temperature swing would take me far past the comfortable line and into the cold range.  With the right gear, I’ve come to decide that there really is no weather condition that I couldn’t ride in.  Of course, if it comes to riding to work in a blizzard and cars are sliding off the road on Highway 135, I may call the ride off based on safety concerns, but not on account of the weather.  There’s something liberating about the thought: I could never ride the trainer again. 

Final Thoughts

I actually am feeling fairly prepared for this Arrowhead adventure.  Temperatures aren’t predicted to be terribly low for the race, a fact that is comforting since I haven’t actually ridden below -10 degrees.  Snow conditions on the route are reportedly improving and my number one goal is to avoid permanent damage to the body.

The bike is dialed, the gear is dialed, it’s go time.