Too Hot to Ride

I'm usually pretty tolerant of the heat but this past weekend it was almost too hot to ride. Friday and Saturday's peak temperature was well over 100 degrees as shown in the picture. For me riding in the low 90s is not a problem as long as I take it easy but once it goes above the mid 90s I stay indoors.

At these extreme temperatures you usually see the local news showing you the old sidewalk is hot enough to fry an egg demonstration. I found a different way to show how hot the sidewalk is.

I didn't ride on Saturday because of the heat so when I put my dog out the early afternoon I threw and ice cube on the side walk because she likes to play with ice cubes. The ice cube not only melted really quick but the water also evaporated almost as quick. Since I was just hagging around the house on Saturday I decided to do a little time lapse photography. You can see the video here

What I did was to set up my thermometer next to a few ice cubes and then setup my camera to take a picture every 15 seconds. It took only about 10 minutes for the ice cubes to melt and another 10 minutes for most of the water to evaporate. Its not a great video but it was a good distraction on a Saturday after noon.

I did manage to get out on Sunday. It was still 81 degrees when we started at 8:00 am but we managed to get a little over 50 mile in and were back around 11:30 am. It was in the low 90s but we had cloud cover a lot of the time which really helped. In fact at a 17 mph average is was one of my fastest rides this year. Hopefully it will be cooler next weekend.