Winter Bike Commuting, Year Six
People find out I ride through the winter here and assume it's a feat of endurance. It isn't. It's a solved problem that takes about four hundred dollars of equipment and one season of small mistakes.
The trail is the whole reason this works
The Midtown Greenway is plowed, usually before the streets are. It sits below grade in an old rail trench, so it doesn't drift, and it doesn't have cars on it. Take that away and I would not be doing this. Winter cycling in a city is less about the cyclist than about whether somebody with a plow decided you count as infrastructure.
Tires, then everything else
Studded tires are not optional and they are not a preference. Ice under an inch of fresh snow is invisible and you will find it at a corner. I run 45NRTH Gravdals, which are made about fifteen miles from here, which is either good supply chain sense or local sentimentality, take your pick. They are slow, loud on dry pavement, and worth every bit of it.
The bike itself should be one you don't love. Road salt eats drivetrains — not over years, over one winter. Mine is an old steel frame with an internally geared hub, fenders, and no exposed derailleur to pack full of frozen slush.
Start cold
The mistake every first-year rider makes is dressing for the temperature at the start of the ride. Ten minutes in you are sweating, and then you are wet, and then you are genuinely in trouble. Dress so that the first five minutes are unpleasant. Three layers on the body, and the outer one has to breathe more than it insulates.
Below about five degrees Fahrenheit, it stops being about temperature and starts being about wind. A calm minus ten is more comfortable than a five with a twenty mile an hour crosswind, and the wind is the thing that will actually hurt you.
The actual advice
Your core will be fine. Your hands and feet are the entire problem, and no glove solves it, because the issue is that your hands are stationary out in front of you in the wind for forty minutes. The answer is pogies — insulated shells that mount to the handlebars, so your hands go inside them wearing thin liner gloves and stay warm at temperatures where mittens have long since failed. They look ridiculous. Everyone who tries them stops taking them off.
The dark
In January I leave in the dark and come home in the dark, and the sun is a rumour that happens while I'm indoors. That's the part that actually wears on you, more than the cold. The riding is the fix for it, not the cost of it — forty minutes outside twice a day in a season built to keep you inside.
Six years in, the ride I remember from last winter is a Tuesday at minus eight with no wind, fresh snow, the trench completely silent, and my own tires the only sound for two miles. You do not get that in a car.