Last Friday the sun was shining and the weather told me it was 45 degrees outside, and with that sun shine it felt more like the mid 50s. So, for the first time in around 4 weeks, I actually went for a bike ride outside. And looking ahead at the weather it looked like this would be my last time outside riding until spring.
I put on my tights and a long sleeve undershirt with a short sleeve jersey over it and took off. Between the time I decided to ride and actually riding the sun had disappeared behind some clouds and it felt every bit of 45°. I would get warm climbing a hill and be chilled when going back down, but still enjoyed the fresh air.
We bought an inexpensive indoor exercycle for Donna to work on strengthening her drop foot so she could rejoin me in bicycling again and when it got chilly in October I actually used it a couple times too.
A couple of decades ago I tried indoor cycling to keep in shape, but never really took to it. We tried one of those where the rear tire ran on a shaft connected to magnets for resistance, but it felt so sterile. Then I borrowed a set of rollers from another bike club member thinking that because rollers required you to use your balance it might seem more like actually riding. That was marginally better, but still boring as hell. Both these were setup in the garage and all I could look at was the wall. I added a fan to simulate movement. I tried adding music to listen to, but nothing worked, if I made it 15 minutes into a workout it was a great day. After a month or so of trying, I returned the rollers, donated the mag trainer to Goodwill and resigned to limited cycling over the winter.
Here in Oregon there will not be limited cycling because, while a few folks around here do ride year round, I’m not hardcore enough. The indoor exercycle is it. But I can stand it a lot better than those earlier attempts back in South Carolina. Firstly, the bike is indoors in the family room downstairs. Secondly, we have turned the 55″ TV so that it faces the bike nearly head on six feet away. And thirdly, we have found a YouTube channel called Indoor Cycling Videos so I can pretend I’m actually bicycling outdoors.
The videos range from 30 minutes to a couple of hours and are mostly from over in Europe. There are road bike rides and mountain bike ones as well. Almost all of them have a readout along the bottom showing time, speed, distance and hill gradient. Because this exercycle has a heavy flywheel where you control the effort by twisting a knob on the downtube I try to make the resistance larger when going uphill and less when the gradient reads negative.
Most of my outdoor riding around here was right was around an hour in duration. Riding indoors on this type of bike really can’t do coasting because the pedals are connected to the flywheel unlike outdoors where coasting down hills is a nice respite. Also I can’t really stand up on the pedals and spin like I can on the road bike. Indoors I am really sitting and pedaling all the time, so for now the 30 minute indoor rides are enough. I may try and move up to 45 minute ones, but probably won’t go longer than that because just sitting for that long won’t be fun.
A few weeks ago while wasting time on the Insta I came across a sticker that someone I follow had on the their Miata. I just had to have one. So I ordered one. It arrived in the mail a few days later.
