September 14

[cerealjoe]

Saturday morning I broke out the "winter" thermal tights (they're described as "winter/tough conditions" on the Wiggle website, that means mid-September in Helsinki...) and I was quite glad I did. I also got reminded that I have yet to acquire proper overshoes because frozen toes are no fun after an hour or two. Actually it wasn't all that cold in town but once I hit the back roads on my way to Nuuksio there was quite a bit of fog (I tried to capture the valley full of fog in the second photo, not sure it really came out, maybe on the original Instagram one it's easier to see) and that stuff is nasty. At least proper sun came out when I was heading back. And the few hills on that Nuuksio road kept me entertained… and by that I mean that I had nice choice words towards all cycling gods out there on that one hill that has a metre or two at 15%, I definitely will not be going to to the top of the Ventoux any time soon. Overall, 2 hours 50 minutes well spent! And speaking of cycling, want to see another example of how little respect is shown by organisers to women's cycling? There is only one HC race on the women's calendar, you'd think that it would be the biggest and best organised race because, well, HC race, that means that UCI deemed as the most important one on the calendar! Well, no. The safety issues around the race (stray cars disrupting the race, stray photographers getting in the way of riders and causing them to crash, etc.) have pushed teams to withdraw from the race (imagine the money lost for these team that already function on shoestring budgets!) and that's just both sad and disgusting. You can read a really good account of how things happened here. Imagine something like this happening at the Tour de France... when will women's cycling be respected as much as men's?