My riding buddy, Chuck just bought a new Salsa fatty a couple of weeks ago. It’s a full carbon race rig with many of the bells and whistles… and tires fat enough they sound like a mudbogging truck going down the road. He just got the tubeless setup sorted out at the shop and he wanted to ride it Thursday night. We’ve got some unbearably cold weather coming up so he was itching to get it outside before we were relegated to the trainers for the next week or more.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t as enthusiastic.

Even though everything in my melon screamed trainer, I prepped my mountain bike for duty when I got home. Oh, how I wanted to skip that ride, but I knew Chuck’s usual test ride average worked out to about 9-mph so I figured it would be a nice, easy jaunt around our normal paved road loop. Even the sketchy couple of miles didn’t seem like they would be a big deal with my 2″ mtb tires.

And so, begrudgingly, I met Chuck at the end of my driveway and we rolled out into the wind, what little breeze there was. Please keep in mind here, I was planning on an easy ride, maybe 10 to 12-mph because Chuck’s on a fat bike for God’s sake. His tires are something like three inches wider than mine… I expected to be able to hammer him into the ground.

Well, to keep it simple, what I expected and what I got were two very different things. Chuck had maxed out the tire pressure and was riding like somebody (other than me) was chasing him. Within the first three miles we were knocking on a 15-mph average and we were still there after the first mile of sketchy subdivision. After the sub we headed north, into the wind again for a half-mile before turning west, Chuck was absolutely hammering it into the wind and just before we were about to turn I ran out of want to and said, “Alright, that’s about enough of that”. I had to check to make sure we didn’t have a herd of buffalo trying to run us down or something. One mile West and a quick northerly section and we were cruising into the second section of sketchy road – that my mountain bike tires handled excellently – not even a sway in the slush.

Chuck asked if I wanted to do a second lap of the subdivision, adding another 2 miles or so. I flipped him the bird. But laughed and agreed to the extra miles. We took it fairly easy through the subdivision, but once out on a surface road, the pace heated up again. Anything south was fast. And we kept the gas on all the way home.

After I cleaned up, I checked out the stats for the ride and saw my estimated average power… an unbelievable 181 watts for more than an hour-twenty and just shy of 20 miles.

I wore a smile the rest of the evening, and it was good.

No such luck this weekend. We’re currently sitting about ten degrees below my cutoff of 20 F (or -HOLYSHIT in Celsius) for a temperature. I’ll be, unquestionably, on the trainer… well, there’s a chance for a ride tomorrow afternoon but I’m going to need a big change in “want to” to get out there.