After several days of not cooperating weather it finally warmed up above 60 degrees and I hit the road. I waited until 12:43 PM to start the bike ride to allow a couple of extra degrees to appear. With the later start I chose the “Kingwood Streets” route and rode 24.4 miles. These are the first outdoor miles for November towards my 360 mile goal. I need to bike 12 miles each day to reach my goal. That is not a lot but with the weather and change in time that can be challenging.

Before the bike ride I changed the seat bag on the Canyon Endurace CF SLX bike. The reason I wanted to make the change was to make room for the NiteRider taillight to attach to the seat post rather than the seat bag cloth strip. Removing the light from cloth strip required extra effort because NiteRider designed the clip to not easily come off during a ride. That’s great until I need to take the light off and charge it after each ride. Moving to the light holder provided by NightRider makes removal much easier. Some photos of the old ToPeak seat bag setup and the new Lezyne bag arrangement.

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The Lezyne bag is smaller than the ToPeak bag but includes three dedicated pouches, one for a multitool, one for money, and one for patch kit items. I used the first two but not the patch kit one. I swapped multitool’s in order to get a more compact one to fit in the pouch. The bag held a tube, tire tools, patch kit, cash, and a multitool. As you can see in the photos the old bag allowed the light to droop more than the new mount. (click on the photos to enlarge them)

Back to the ride. With today’s miles I need 15 more miles to reach 14,000 miles on the Canyon bike. After 3 days of Zwifting a real ride felt good event though the temperature fell below my comfort zone but above my cutoff threshold.

Weather while I biked: start 65 (41% humidity, 40.5 dew point), partly cloudy, wind -. Finish 65 (43% humidity, 41.9 dew point), mostly cloudy, wind N 15 mph. Because of the chill I dressed heavier than since spring time. I wore shorts, leg warmers, thermal long sleeve jersey, and wind breaker jacket. The first jacket I tried on the zipper broke so I moved to a Pearl Izumi one. the zipper broke on a fairly new Voler jacket. I kept somewhat warm but the strong north wind put a chill in when I rode through the shade or headwind.

Real wind feels different from riding on Zwift. I am learning more about how Zwift simulates biking from the ZwiftCast podcast and reading. I am not sure a mile in Zwift equals a mile outdoors. I looked at Rouvy today and may give it a try.

Sunday should warm up a few degrees and I plan on biking at least 12 miles to keep on track to reach that goal.

Relive ‘Kingwood Streets in the coolness’