Since 30 Days of Biking began in Minneapolis in 2009, it’s become an annual tradition for cyclists around the world, a way to kick off the warmer season. And because it takes place in April, the month-long commitment is intentionally designed to challenge new riders to embrace the elements, as April in Minnesota is guaranteed to be a temperature roller coaster.
As someone who’s been on a bicycle only a half-dozen times since last fall, based on my gloomy glances out the window, this April has seemed like a dreary, rainy slog. After another week of gray skies and cold weather, I’ve been wondering how the 30 Days of Biking cyclists were faring. Was this cruel April just my bitter imagination, or was this truly a soul-sucking year for a Minnesota spring?
Here’s what I found out.
A test of spiritual resilience
“This year has been just back and forth [and] we’ve experienced every type of Minnesota weather: snow, terrible rain, crazy wind, and on Friday it was an idyllic spring day,” Jake Scott told me. “On my bike ride home I saw dozens of people walking and biking. Today I biked on the same route and no one was there, it was so cold and drizzly.”
Scott bikes regularly from his home in St. Paul’s West 7th neighborhood to an elementary school in Minneapolis, where he teaches fourth grade. If he wants to fight with traffic, he’ll take the Ayd Mill Road bikeway into the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood; otherwise, he rides along the Mississippi River trails.
But for Scott, like most April cyclists, this year has been a test of their spiritual resilience.
[image_credit]Photo by Jake Scott[/image_credit]
This year is so bad that even Scott’s children have refused to join their dad on a cargo bike, save for the one warm April day that fell on a weekend.
Meanwhile in Minneapolis
Jake Scott’s not alone in feeling frustrated.
“You’re waiting and waiting for the weather to become nice, and it just doesn’t,” Kyle Goertz told me this week, describing his experience bicycling through April 2022. “Even if it’s nice and sunny, it’s been really windy. [So] it’s been a challenge, but I think the cool thing about 30 Days of Biking is that it forces you to find creative ways to get on a bike, even though the weather isn’t good.”
Goertz is in his mid-30s, lives in Northeast Minneapolis and sometimes bikes to his job downtown at a financial services firm. This year, dealing with the cold and wind, he’s been keeping his bike pledge with shorter trips to neighborhood stores or breweries.
“If the weather is overly inclement I’m going to reward myself by stopping and having a beer somewhere,” Kyle Goertz said. “The highlight was last Thursday; it was super nice, and I actually got out and did 20 miles on a whim after I was done with work.”
Goertz’s other trick has been altering his routes to explore Northeast’s many murals on his new Surly Bridge Club, challenging himself to discover as many new ones as he can this spring. Even a short trip keeps the everyday bicycling streak alive, which is the whole idea behind the 30 Days of Biking challenge.
[image_credit]Photo by Kyle Goertz[/image_credit]
Introducing the Gloom Index
One final note: Curious about whether my negativity about this April was a reflection of meteorological fact, or something more subjective, I looked through the last 10 years of April weather. I came up with something I call the Gloom Index, meant to calculate how many days are particularly nice or particularly horrid. I assigned one point for every sunny day, one point if the temperature hit 60º F, and gave a bonus point if both those things happened simultaneously. Then I subtracted points for every day with rain or snow, or when the high temperature failed to hit 40º.
To me, anyway, the results were surprising. This year’s April was only the third-gloomiest in the last decade, surpassed in bleakness by the bipolar April of 2018, when the weather was either quite warm or quite chilly. But the most soul-sucking April of the last 10 years was back in 2013, when the mercury never once hit 60º and it was legitimately cold for half the month.
The lesson here is a Minnesota truism: It could always be worse.
“St. Paul and Minneapolis have some of the most magnificent places to ride,” Jake Scott told me when I asked him if he had any last words of bike advice. “St. Paul has really opened a lot of nice new stuff in the last couple of years and makes it pleasant to ride around and support your local bike shops.”
There’s probably a bike in your garage right now, and the next time the sun peeks out from behind a gray cloud, you might consider putting some air in the tires. As they say, April showers bring May flowers, and the sun will come out tomorrow.
The weather in Minnesota is totally unpredictable until June. I have friends around the country that love to come up to the Range to fish and golf. I tell them to come from July 10th through September 15th, only time you can pretty much guarantee good weather. For those of us that winter elsewhere, you truly realize how long and bleak Minnesota winters can be some years. I am waiting for global warming to kick in, hopefully next year.
I suspect the ongoing covid thingy is a factor too. In the before times I would have commuted in this weather; but now lacking a commute am unmotivated to take a ride I have to bundle up for.
It would be easier to just chart the years that there has been concern over lake ice for the fishing opener. The correlation is exact, and would have saved you a lot of time.
Not a cyclist, and not likely to be – inner ear deterioration, bad knees, bad back, and bicycles have the most uncomfortable seats in the universe, much less the planet, nation or state. That said, I’m a daily walker – usually 2 miles – and I’m right with the author when it comes to the perceived “suckiness” of this April. The stats may say that it hasn’t been THAT bad, and the rational part of my brain agrees, but it has FELT like the “90 days of March” since… well… March. As a pedestrian, what I’ve disliked the most has been the combination of cold and wind. I can take sub-zero, even, and without complaint, if the atmosphere is relatively still, but there have been far too many days this year that combined air temperatures in the teens and single digits with 15 to 25 mph wind. I’ve stayed indoors more days this year than in any of my previous dozen-plus years in Minneapolis. Usually I miss the daily constitutional somewhere between 5 and 10 times over a calendar year. This year, I’ve already missed a dozen constitutionals, and we’re not even a third of the way through the year. The numbers may say otherwise, but it has FELT like one of the worst months in many years.
I would argue that the weather stats back up the perception that this April has been particulary bad.
From the Paul Douglas Weather Blog in the Star Tribune:
“This April ends up as the 16th wettest and 14th coldest for MSP with almost 4″ of liquid precipitation and an average temperature that was 6.1F below average.” So, there have been colder Aprils, but only 13. The silver lining of all the rain is that there is no part of the state that is in drought.
2022 is starting out cold. From Paul Huttner and the MPR updraft blog:
“So far this year we’re running nearly 5 degrees colder than average in the Twin Cities. ”
Here is a run down of the temps for each month. From the National Weather Service.
2022 temp departures from normal at MSP:
Jan: -5.5
Feb: -6.1
Mar: -1.5
The first four months of the year have been below average in temperature. Hope for some warmer weather soon.
I have been doing #30daysofbiking since 2013. Yes, it was cold the first half of the month and there is snow in many of my photos from that year. But, by the end of the month I am in short sleeves and shorts. When I was working, and commuting regularly I much preferred 25 degrees and snow to 30s, wind, and sleet, which seems to have been pretty common this year. Sven Sungaard said this April is 20% windier than normal. It could be that time softens memories, but for me, this April has been the cruelest of the cruelest month. And I haven’t even seen any lilacs yet.
Yeah lilacs are my go-to spring metric, and they’ve barely budded!
I think the gloom factor here might be missing a couple data points. While the over-all temp in 2013 might have been colder, I wonder what the wind, rain, and snow looked like? Regardless how high the temps may have got on some days this year, we started an inordinate number of days below freezing, and didn’t warm up for hours. And if you don’t have a fat bike or a commuter with fenders the chronic wet and icy conditions were quite discouraging even if the temps were manageable. So to paraphrase Johnny Cash when Sue finally met and engaged his dirty dad in mortal combat; I might have seen worse April’s but I can’t remember when.
So sorry you bike ride gets spoiled
But consider those who actually have to work in the elements or the people whose livelihoods depend on weather, and pull up your big boy bike shorts
We’re doing fine thanks, but thanks for the virtue signalling outrage.
Looking forward to taking out my bike for the season, hasn’t happened yet. The rain and winds have to stop *some* time, don’t they?
Not a bike ride but a nice St Paul neighborhood story. My long time boot repair shop on Thomas retired. Sad but on the way home I noticed a newer apt flats complex near Snelling. Great location to grab the Snelling BRT. Long may she run.