Snow Day: Learning to ride pow the hard way

Having lived 28 years of my life in Mexico, I never really had the need to learn to ride in the snow. Now that I’ve been here for a year, I guess it was something inevitable. It will snow, and I will still want to ride.

 

I knew there was somewhat of a snow storm a-brewing since the beginning of the week. As your typical mountain biker, I’m checking weather forecasts for the weekends on Monday mornings at the office. I had thought about it for some time and I decided that the best way to get stoked about it was to try to make a project out of it. I wanted to make a mountain bike short about riding in the Chicago snow.

Come Sunday and I traded the Divvy for my mountain steed. I dressed smart, at least I thought I did, and I headed out to face my new reality for the upcoming winter months. Trains, buses and road riding to get to the trails meant it was going to be a long day out in the cold.

All in all, I think I thought it would be worst at first, but then it did end up being pretty bad. After riding, handling the camera gear and riding some more, my hands and feet where numb. My wool base layers where soaked and I still had a couple miles left to the bus stop.

Fortunately, I made it out before it went dark. A few lessons learned:

  • Snow is fun, for a while. Limit outdoor activity time to 2-3 hours.
  • The train ride back can be cold when soaking wet, carry some extra dry layers for the downtime.
  • Don't try to shoot a whole short in a day. Specially not for amateurs.
  • Sunday was not really that cold for Chicago. Beware of what's to come.

It seems like every time I try to tame the cold it comes back and bites me in the ass. I guess I might not ever be able to shake my roots. Still, I recon it would be twice as challenging to try to give up cycling during the winter altogether. Not to mention cycling to work shaves 15 minutes off my morning commute. Better harden up if I don't want to be late. Enter the pain cave for the next few months. Hope all you locals are handling it better than me.

P.S. The short definitely needs more takes with the big camera so I plan to head out there again for some more takes, in the meantime, here’s a brief from the GoPro footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xbbn8zJVTc

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin on December 13, 2016 at 9:00am

I love it! I love seeing people deliberately going out riding in the winter, as my co-workers just love to complain about the cold. :) If you would like a hand shooting, I'd be happy to help.

Permalink Reply by Marcelo Marcos on December 14, 2016 at 11:56am

Thanks man! I would definitely love some help man, I'll let you know next time I'm roll out. 

Permalink Reply by David P. on December 15, 2016 at 6:34am

Dale duro, Marcelo! Yo tambien tengo raices tropicales; ya me ha acostumbrado al invierno hace muchos anos, pero nunca lo voy a gustar. Pero si vale la pena sufrir! :)

Permalink Reply by Marcelo Marcos on December 15, 2016 at 8:22am

A darle, no nos queda de otra haha. Saludos David!

Permalink Reply by Tom A.K. on December 15, 2016 at 8:57am
Por favor, una traducción en inglés, ¡gracias! :-)
Permalink Reply by David P. on December 16, 2016 at 5:14am

Sorry! :)

Me: Way to go*, Marcelo! I also have tropical roots, and while I've been used to winter for years I'll never love it. But it's worth the pain!

Marcelo: We don't have any other choice, ha ha. Greetings!

*"dále duro" is a colloquial expression that transliterates to "give it hard" and can mean something along the lines of "go hard", "keep it up", "great job", "kick ass", etc.

Permalink Reply by Yasmeen on December 16, 2016 at 5:34am

I thought it was cool to see a conversation on CL in Spanish (I used a Google translator to get the gist). No need to apologize!

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