ok commuters...what's the worst

[spiderman]

weather you've traveled in...?
yesterday was my bravest or dumbest choice:
winter weather advisory
freezing rain/sleet turned to 1.5 inch accumulation of new snow
and road conditions ice/snow packed and slippery
with a 30 mile per hour wind with a 10 degree wind chill.
there was no school delay or early dismissal
which is what i use to gauge whether or not i ride...
...if the bus doesn't run, i don't ride...
i made it to and from work without incident
in some very challenging riding.
a 5 mile round trip
seemed like plenty.
i came home at the end of the day
and drove to a pottery class with my wife.
my wife remarked that i looked like a skier on a bike
and that it might be more fitting
to be running a front ski instead of a wheel!

[flydhest]

Something similar. Freezing rain coming down on top of a couple inches of accumulated--and in places packed--snow. Fun in a perverse way--if you don't think about the downside to falling with trucks near you. I think it's better that I commute through a city. Lower average speed of cars. Unfortunately, peds and drivers are in a hurry to get out of the crappy weather, so that presents a great problem.

Cyclocross tires are good things.

[Too Tall]

Haha, I'll bet you loved every min. of that. I love riding in foul weather...it is the clean up after I hate.

The worst? Had to be the snowstorm we had two winters ago. It had been snowing for days and the Park Service closed the road that travels along Rock Creek into DC. GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY time ;) Mtn. bike with studded tires and off we go....snow turned to sleet....sleet tuned to freezing rain...I arrived at work a popsicle! What a hoot.

The second worst? Worth mentioning. 146 miles along Natchz Trace Parkway in a howling thunderstorm with 35+ wind gusts and lightning strikes all around us....two stops...tooooo scared and motivated to get to the hotel. YIKES.

[spiderman]

Something similar. Freezing rain coming down on top of a couple inches of accumulated--and in places packed--snow. Fun in a perverse way--if you don't think about the downside to falling with trucks near you. I think it's better that I commute through a city. Lower average speed of cars. Unfortunately, peds and drivers are in a hurry to get out of the crappy weather, so that presents a great problem.

Cyclocross tires are good things.

you're right about that...
...getting passed on a rural sidestreet/backroad
covered in rough ice and snow
by a truck that must have been going 50 + in a 25 mph zone...
was disconcerting, to say the least!

[znfdl]

This year, snow and freezing rain on the W&OD trail into DC. The ride in was fun, but I left a rut in the snow. The ride home was more trecherous, as the freezing rain and lower temperatures caused the ruts and footprints to become quite hazardous. The rut that I created then became a nightmare for two more weeks.

Second worst weather was riding thorugh a hurricane while riding PAC Tour. Horizontal rain and wind. However after the first couple of hours I had a tremendous tail wind, how do you say effortless 30mph.

[Fixed]

bro those are the rides you remember after it's done that is all you have i.m.h.o. :beer: cheers

[djg]

Now that I'm old and soft, I tend not to get on the bike in traffic in town if it's seriously raining, much less if there's a blizzard. I don't trust the local drivers entirely under the best of circumstances, and if you combine poor visibility and rotten traction you'll observe some new driving low nearly any rush hour. Certainly I've been caught in thunderstorms, as has nearly everyone I expect, but I try to avoid them. The kids are still at an age where they really want me to come home each day.

When I was a kid, I rode my bike to school no matter what the weather. Taking biology at a local high school meant a round trip of a few miles each way from aand to the junior high in which I was actually enrolled, rain or shine. Montgomery County wasn't much like Mt. Washington, but I saw rain, snow, freezing rain, and sleet at one time or another.

My most interesting weather on a cycle was not on a commute or a bicycle. Riding a motorcycle down to the north rim of the grand canyon, through terrain entirely devoid of shelter, I was once caught in a monster hail storm. Big nasty chunks of ice in August. Disconcerting.

[Argos]

When I would commute past the crawling steel boxes, it was never the weather, it was the unpredictability of the cars. If cars are driving 20-30 in traffic, that's one thing, but I think sometimes when they are just sitting there or stop-n-go to 10 and back to zero they can be worse.

Maybe its a relativity thing. Me going faster then them by 15-20 or them going faster then me by 5 to 10. Seems like the latter is safer, though the former is much more satisfying.

[wanderingwheel]

I can't remember any specific day, but I'll put down an entire winter commuting 20+ miles each way between Germantown and Carderock, near DC.I had to ride, regardless of the weather because I had no car and the metro was just as far. Work started at o'dark-thirty so I was always riding during the coldest part of the day. Test days were at least 12 hours so I was often riding back after dark, too. Snow and ice regularly clogged up the gears and brakes, but I got pretty good at riding over ice.

[CNY rider]

I rode to work last Monday. It was 9 degrees out. My first 2 miles are essentially straight down, at about 30 mph. My fingers went from warm, to cold, to numb, to a state of intense, ethereal pain in the span of about 2 minutes.

The other 5 miles were just fine, as was the ride home.

[spiderman]

I can't remember any specific day, but I'll put down an entire winter commuting 20+ miles each way between Germantown and Carderock, near DC.I had to ride, regardless of the weather because I had no car and the metro was just as far. Work started at o'dark-thirty so I was always riding during the coldest part of the day. Test days were at least 12 hours so I was often riding back after dark, too. Snow and ice regularly clogged up the gears and brakes, but I got pretty good at riding over ice.

but with today being a much nicer day
even though i'm 'on call'
i had time to get up around my favorite lake/ride
the roads had melting slush
but the temps were in the 20's.
at first my brake froze up
and i was able to break it up
by pulling the brake lever
and went on...
then the front fork and brake lever
started to click and then bog down.
i got off the bike
and the fork/brake mechanism
had plugged up with snow and ice around the tire.
that was something!
made me wonder if i would have better clearance
with a kirk!

[Fixed]

bro whats worse than bad weather? ...... gettin doored i.m.h.o. cheers

[shoe]

we wanted to go out to the bar one night this winter total highwinds snow ice the storm is upon us and it's like 10 at night...so i asked my girl if she wants to take the bikes and she was like yeah ok...so we headed out and road along the boardwalk at the beach so no cars would hit us...once your bundled up right nothing seems to matter...you get some funny looks when you show up at the bar on the bikes ..but then again almost no one commutes by bike around here so they just think you have two heads...did a 20 out of a 25 mile commute in a snow storm once too that was fun . all ice in my beard when i got to work..cheated and got a ride home from my customer that night though...dave

[NateM]

A few years back I rode to work on the Mt bike in a 20" driving snowstorm.Took the ferry across the river from NJ and proceeded to ride uptown on Riverside Drive,3 lanes all to myself with about a foot of snow.I could ride about a 1/2 block and then fall over from exhaustion.At one point I realized I had 3 snow plows behind me which gave me incentive to try even harder.I would fall,the plows would pause to let me get going again,the drivers yelling words of encouragement,or so I thought. 20 blocks of snowplow intervals,ouch.

[Brian Smith]

Well, not strictly a commuting ride, but one day as a courier I was out in it for 9 hours (well, in and out as a courier) in freezing rain and breeziness. I had to readjust my brake pads 3 times throughout the day; they started to dive below the rim's braking surface. I wrote it off to dramatic pad wear, brake cosine error, yadda yadda.... I had been doing nose wheelie turns, nops onto the sidewalks for lockups, lots of front braking all day... My home at the time had a 3' grass bank ~30 degrees to bypass the stairs to head for the front door. When I got home in the twilight, I maintained my momentum to make it up the transitioned hill, but by the time I'd made it up, the front end of the bike had dropped 6 inches. I thought maybe my handlebars had rotoated in the stem clamp or something, but when I stood up to walk and lifted the bike off the ground, the front wheel was only held into the fork by the ice around the brake pads: both fork blades had snapped 75% through and deformed in a way that gave me about 150mm of fork offset. Flashbacks to the many nosewheelies, endos, and nops in/amongst traffic throughout the day, I think I felt a cold sweat come over myself as I imagined what had just happenned possilby happenning hours earlier while the fork was surely already cracked....

Like Fixed said.... a ride I'll remember!

[bigbill]

Flash floods on Oahu. I posted these pictures on another forum but here they are for the enjoyment and wonder of the Serottakind. This time of year we have heavy rains in the mountains that cause all kinds of flooding along the coast. My commute is 13 miles each way from Ewa Beach to Pearl Harbor using the Pearl Harbor bike path and some sections of road. One section of path is susceptable to flooding and flood it did. I could only get one picture attached due to the size. I have a new computer coming next week with the software I need to resize.

[erty65]

8 inches of snow on the road, - 4°F an snowing.

[shumanmo]

Yesterday and today are toward the top of my list - 25mph NE winds, around 30 degrees. I ride along the Chicago lakefront, so that means it's blowing spray on portions of the bike path and freezing into smooth ice. My bike slid out from under me this morning (after I had moved off the path onto grass!) at one point and I slid on my back for at least 15 feet is was so slippery. That was the easy part of today's commute because the wind was mostly at my back. I gotta ride 12 miles home tonight primarily against the wind.

[spiderman]

even though the raw temp is supposedly warmer
that nasty 30+ mph wind
makes it seems colder than it's been all winter!
i'm back to wearing my downhill ski goggles
just to keep my eyelids from freezing shut!
sorry to hear about your fall.
i slipped on the ice before mounting my bike this morning.
it made me ride much more cautiously.