Beware of Your Winter Wears...

Winter riding can be a love/hate endeavor. Beautiful landscapes often make winter riding a joy. The desolate look of winter provides an amazing backdrop for any cold weather ride and surely keeps me coming back for more. But winter riding is not all barren trees and snow-lined winding country roads. There is all that damn clothing.

Dressing for winter can be a real drag. Finding the exact right balance of warmth, breathability, and wind or water protection can sometimes seem like a Rubik’s cube with no solution. Overdressing or under-dressing can be equally devastating to your winter miles. So here is my winter what-to-wear guide, a step-by-step (or more accurately, layer-by-layer) guide to staying comfortable throughout Philadelphia’s toughest months. 

Failure by Another Name

Cycling is a sport filled with failure.  Out of countless entries, only a single rider wins—sometimes by nothing more than the width of a tire. And while second place gets to stand on the podium, there is an emotional chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between winning and second place. Just ask whoever was second place in last year’s Paris Roubaix, uhhhhh… Oh I guess I can’t recall. What is more telling than that?  I am an avid cycling fan, and Paris Roubaix could be my favorite race of the year, and I can’t remember, without significant mental difficulty, who got second. 

Does anyone remember the podium from important races?

So why do we keep going? Why keep competing if the odds are so not in your favor? Arguably an athlete could do everything right in their training, preparation, mental preparation, and race strategy and still never win a race. So how do we deal with this? How do we cope with constantly losing, getting dropped, and bonking? Well I’m not sure. If I knew, I would probably be some kind famous sports psychologist.