My near digit death experience.

I made 2 mistakes on my ride yesterday after work: 1 - forgetting that 24 degrees (15 degrees windchill) is really effin cold. 2 - I though by wearing 2 pairs of socks, and duct taping the vents in my mtb shoes, my toes would be fine without any other booties or chemical toe warmers. Wrong, wrong wrong wrong....

So I rode from work, downtown, South to Bellevue blvd, into old town Bellevue, out 370 to 25th, onto the trail to home. Well at about halfway on Bellevue blvd, or 45 minutes into my 2 hour death march, my toes are just starting to go numb. By the time I'm in old town bellevue, 1:10 or so, my toes are past numb into painfull throbbing. So I focus on just lifting my feet instead of pushing down since that helps sometimes. This time, not so much. When I got to the trail, the little entry way off of 25th was pretty snowy still so I hiked over it. I remebered reading somewhere that a cure for frozen toes was to get off and walk for a while. So I walked for a good five minutes. Once i got back on the bike, I could feel some circulation getting back to my toes. This, unfortunately didn't last long. I was also thirsty, but both my bottles were frozen so I was out of luck there. So for the rest of the ride I just sort of zone out and just tried to think about getting home to a nice hot shower. By the time I got home it felt like I had 2 blocks of ice attached to my ankles that were stuffed in shoes. I was underdressed a little for the temps so my arms and hands had very little functionality. Openning and closing my garage door along with using my keys was difficult to do with no dexterity. I could only use my hands as if I had leather mittens on. So anyway, I got my shoes off and noticed some bad swelling in my toes. And now the worrying starts. I got into the shower and couldn't really tell if the water was warm or cold since I had that pins and needles situation going on. After showering down, I made a bath and fell asleep in the nice warm water for a good half hour. After I got out, I couldn't move my toes on my right foot. The big toe was swollen really bad, and didn't have a lot of feeling. I was sure that pretty soon the skin would start going black and brown indicating that my toes were dead. But luckily, I still got all 10. And that's all I gotta say bout that....