The Gray Cold

The gray cold doesn’t give much away. I stand in the front window and look at the morning empty street, and I can’t get any real read on how it’s gonna feel out there. I consult the weather app. Numbers.

Then I get dressed.

Dressing for the gray cold is guessing. It’s a time of year when you can easily overdress, your fear of feeling the prickle of cold on your skin or worse, the seeping into your bones, causing you to add one (or two) layers too many.

The meteorologists get it. They know it’s hard to express the true nature of the gray cold in numbers, but since that’s what available to them, they developed more numbers. Wind chill. Real Feel. New numbers which are composites of old numbers.

As a bike rider, you have to know what part of the gray cold you’re really sensitive to. Is it the air temperature? The raw cold. Or is it the wind? The delivery system of temperature to bones. Rain can be a factor too. Drizzle. If wind is the delivery system, then water is the amplifier.

Sometimes when you’re standing there at the front window, looking out, what you’re trying to do is imagine yourself outside and then feel what you must be feeling. I can tell you though, that I have more than once failed to realize there was a fine mist in the air. I have also failed to look at the branches at the very tops of the trees, which is where the wind reveals itself best.

If you’re heading for the trail, the gray cold presents still more challenges, because it’s this weather that drives the leaves out of the trees to form a loose carpeting. Those leaves are next season’s soil, but in the meantime, they make traction a variable, and they obscure rocks and roots that you thought you knew by heart, but of course, in the gray cold you have your doubts.

There is something reptilian also to the gray cold. Even on a January day, in bright sunshine, the bike seems like a good idea. All the numbers can tell a story about staying inside, but that sunlight convinces you everything will be ok. The gray cold tells you, like it tells the snakes and salamanders, to stay under your rock.

Experience tells me that if I can get myself out in the gray cold, if I can absorb the mistakes of under and overdressing, if I can acclimate, if I can make the endorphins that create a positive association with seemingly negative weather, then I can ride right through the winter and be better for it. It’s hard to convince yourself though, standing at the window, looking out at almost nothing, with the smell of hot coffee still in the air.

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