Definitely the coldest conditions I've ever ridden in today! The fog wasn't too thick when we left in the morning, but by the time we got up to Barnet we could hardly see where we were going. Werner was out today and we did about 10km at the front of the group, noticing that ice was building up on our clothing and eyebrows. Werner came up with a good one - "Frozen by Max Factor"...
The pace was quite slow as no one was in the mood for pain along with the pain of the freezing conditions and the roads were slippery and dangerous. After about 50km we suddenly had to make a stop and saw my front wheel sliding out from under me, but managed to control it by hoping onto a grassy patch. Someone behind me wasn't so lucky and went down - but he wasn't hurt.
We then went over Ivinghoe to get the HR going up. I found myself blocked on the way up and unfortunately let the front 5-6 guys open a gap of about 10-15 seconds. Kevin, Costa, Nick and I worked together to close them down and did do by the bottom of the descent. I was happy to see the guys didn't choose Bison hill to go over, but rather another nasty (but far from as difficult as Bison) hill called Bridens Camp which started off steep (11%) then evened out.
Werner suffered a flat here and I stayed with him to help change the tube. After that was a medium paced ride back through St Albans and back through Barnet and to the coffee shop in Whetstone. When I arrived home I saw my bike was in a right state - covered in frozen sludge, so got stuck in cleaning with a bucket, soap and sponge... ain't winter grand!
View this ride data at Motionbased
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