Michael: Indoors

The butterfly shell
Clings lifelessly to the ground
Wings moved by the breeze.

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Even more so than Southern California, there’s almost no excuse to not to get outside and move everyday here. That’s why I haven’t used my indoor bike trainer in over three years.

 I did ship it over when we shipped our container from the states because it didn’t take up much space, so why not? But oddly, I brought it to our casita from a trip back from reorganizing our storage unit here, even though by then I’d been here long enough to know it wasn’t very likely I was going to use it.  So for over 6 months it’s been sitting in a corner in our upstairs loft collecting dust.

But now, since I can’t ride outside until my wounds heal and my new helmet gets here from the states, I dusted it off and also took out an old packet of discs and decided I’d do the first indoor workout I came across - a CTS training video titled, “Hill Climbing II.”

And surprisingly, I really enjoyed it and also learned a lot about what I’ve been neglecting about my cycling training these past few years. Mainly, I learned that I’ve really lost touch with my cadence. I don’t have a cyclometer with a cadence function on my bicycle and have never taken the time to count revolutions while I ride outdoors. But when I lived in SoCal I rode on the trainer enough to keep in touch with my cadence and keep it at a good 85 rpm. But last Thursday on the trainer I noticed that over the years of outdoor riding only I’ve slipped to under 80 rpms.

So that’s what my focus will be on for this next month of indoor recovery; bringing my cadence back up.

Smashing my face so I have to workout indoors wouldn’t have been my preferred way of discovering this lapse in training, but as the saying goes, when life give you lemons, squeeze them into your wounds so it stings like hell so you’ll learn something and hopefully won’t be such a dumb shit again.