In Which I Prepare by Riding Inside

Feb. 19--bike in bike rack at Mount Mercy University. When I posted this image on Facebook, my sister asked it if was my bike. No--wind chill was double digits below zero, and I am not yet recovered enough to ride an outdoor bicycle.

How cold was it in Iowa this week? Frigid air from northern Canada settled on the state, and low temperatures overnight were often double digits below zero Fahrenheit. Wind chills of 30 below or so caused local schools to open late.

And even if I was healthy, most of those days I would not have ridden my bicycle. Well, I guess I am sort of healthy now but I am recovering from a heart bypass operation, and am not yet allowed to ride a bicycle outside.

But I have begun cardiac rehabilitation—twice a week I report to a small gym where they have me walk on a track for a while, and then ride a stationary bicycle. I have an indoor stationary bicycle at home, too, and I try to ride it every day that I don’t go to the rehab gym.

Riding indoors on an exercise bike is not really bicycling as I enjoy it. The sense of actually going somewhere, seeing trees and birds and flowers—or, at this time of year, the shape of the land and the snowy hillsides—that’s a big part of the biking experience.

View from exercise bike, watching a Taskmaster video as I cycle. It's not as good as seeing scenery from a trail, but it's still practice for biking.

But riding indoors is what I can do right now. I watch TV while I go for rides of 20 minutes or so—tonight, I watched a Taskmaster highlights video about live tasks gone wrong. Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie reaction or TV reaction video on YouTube (the TV is set to access my YouTube account) while I bike—I’m particularly fond of people seeing key Ted Lasso episodes for the first time.

Now that the week is ending, the winter weather is warming towards more normal temperatures. In the final week of February, we’ll see high temperatures above freezing—the 40s will feel pretty warm. March is coming, the transition into spring, and when warm spring weather actually arrives in the coming weeks, I hope that I’ll be allowed to enjoy the spring blooms outdoors on an actual bicycle actually rolling across the planet.

Anyway, biking inside may be a poor imitation of riding outside, but it is still the best preparation I can do now for biking season. And I grateful to have my feet on some pedals and my legs in motion