This morning’s ride… yet another in the rain, and still nothing to really write home about, not Epic, bit nobody else out there. At least not until the very end of this morning’s ride, when we finally saw a guy on a green ebike heading the other way on Canada Road. I guess Zwift and indoor trainers have really taken over when it’s not nice outside; in past years, we would have seen a number of other silly people out there, making (literal) tracks in the rain.

We’re getting the timing down a little bit better; only 7 minutes late to the start this morning. Still getting the hang of having the right clothing ready to go, figuring out how many layers (4 today, including lightweight rain shell), I felt more energetic this morning, but yeah, once we hit the steep stuff, not so much. It never rained really heavily, but it was still a surprise to see the various creeks on Kings had all but dried up, compared to the high volumes and mini-waterfalls of Tuesday morning.

Fortunately we weren’t so late we had to cut the ride back like we did Tuesday. There was still no way to manage getting in West Old LaHonda, but at least we were able to head south on Skyline to 84 and back down into Woodside. And those 4 layers I spoke of? Definitely needed, as temps were quite a bit lower today than Tuesday. The temp gauge is the Garmin 1040 is a bit suspect, but Purple Air says it was a pretty consistent 40F for most of the ride. The worst stuff to ride in is heavy rain and 38F (it rarely rains below 38F), but we were slightly above that and definitely not a soaking rain.

The hope is that Sunday will be nice for our traditional New Year’s Day ride up Mt. Hamilton. The plan is to take the train (leaves Redwood City at 9:21, arriving San Jose 10:10, ride the 8 miles or so to the base of the climb, and start up about 11am. Past history says we’ll get to the top shortly before 1pm, head down around 1:30pm and maybe make the 3:12pm train for home. If we miss that, there’s another an hour later.

It was fun going to bed Monday night, knowing that it was going to be raining pretty hard for our ride. I was looking forward to waking up to the sound of rain and wind during the night, but didn’t happen. But when I woke up it was at least raining, not hard, but raining. And as is usually the case for our first real rain ride, it took us quite a bit of extra time getting ready, so yes, if you didn’t see us at 7:45am at the start, it’s because we didn’t arrive until almost 8.

But you also didn’t see us because… nobody else was out there this morning. This was the rarest of rain rides, the first time in ages we didn’t see a single other silly person out on a bike. It ended up being even shorter than usual; we climbed Kings, nothing else, because I had no power, no zip, nothing at all to climb with. And the rain was not constant, so you didn’t even have the “epic” nature to spur you on. Kevin was feeling much better, despite not having ridden Sunday.

This was also the first ride in enough rain that my electrically-heated gloves completely soaked through, but thankfully continued to work. Good excuse for finally washing them.

Thursday it’s supposed to be wet again, but not as much as Tuesday. We’ll see!