A little warmer today for my bike ride. Fog and mist hung around long enough to dampen the ride for a minute or so as I rode through North Woodland Hills in Kingwood. I started the bike ride at 11:40 AM and finished at 2:24 PM. The route name is new but the roads are the same: “Atascocita South – Walden – FM 2100”. The new part of the route is leaving out Huffman due to road construction at FM 2100 where I made a u-turn to head back to Kingwood. The ride was a little longer than I guessed at the start with 33.89 miles. This improved my February total road miles to 169.5 leaving 230.5 miles to reach my goal.

Weather conditions: start 68 (90% humidity, 65.2 dew point), fog/mist, wind E 3 mph; finish 73 (76% dew point, 65.2 dew point), mostly cloudy, wind S 8 mph. The wind was much lower today than yesterday. The starting temperature was on the borderline of whether to wear leg warmers and I chose to wear them. As the ride progressed the clouds thinned enough for more sun to come through warming me up. I could’ve taken the leg warmers off but then I would’ve had to stuff them in jersey pockets that had other things in them. I wore shorts, leg warmers, long sleeve thermal jersey, and a windbreaker jacket. I was plenty warm, no wind chill today. I prefer overdressed to underdressed.

The weather forecast still talks about a strong cold front arriving late Thursday and hanging around until Monday or Tuesday. A whole lot of Zwifting those days!

The ride wasn’t as powerful as yesterday’s. I rode my Lynskey R300 bike. 54% of the 2:31:26 moving time was in power zones 1 and 2. This was more than yesterday. I am expecting a new FSA handlebar stem today which will shorten my reach by 10mm. I think I am stretched a little too far on the bars. This hopefully will ease my back muscles and improve my pedaling.

Strava assessed the bike ride as harder than my usual efforts even though my power output was lower.