I didn't ask for one, but my husband, knowing how much I love to alternate biking with running when the weather is nice for about 3 seconds per year here in Illinois, got me a stationary bike so I can still do this during the winter. Last year he got me a treadmill so I can run in the winter as well.
I can now not only run to nowhere, I can bike to nowhere as well. I was actually perversely excited about this.
We put it next to the treadmill in my itty-bitty workout "room," so now my treadmill has someone to talk to and doesn't have to stare out the back window at the empty farm field through the sheers all the time. I am sure they will become good friends.
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| BFFs! |
After we let those two get acquainted, I hopped on the bike to grab a workout. It was quiet. Too quiet. I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting "quiet." This thing is an EXERCISE MACHINE, dammit. It was EXPENSIVE. It should make lots of stationary bike noise to match the tremendous amount of calories I was burning. It should groan along with my grunts to tell any person or escaped farm animal that happened to be walking through the empty field behind my house that we are WORKING OUT and we are SERIOUS about it.
Instead I pedaled quietly along. Pedal, pedal, pedal. Quiet, quiet, quiet. I thought I heard the treadmill chuckle softly. Or maybe it was just one of my dogs snoring away somewhere.
I decided to try one of the pre-programmed interval workouts on the bike. I chose a speed-interval one over a resistance one, because I am a masochist and am starting a 10K training plan soon and didn't want to wear out my legs for all of the speed intervals I would be doing. It kept bouncing me between the mind-boggling speeds of 13 mph and 14 mph, and playing with the resistance as well. But it wasn't anything too tough.
Pedal, pedal, pedal, quiet, quiet, quiet. Ho-hum. Kinda easy. How anticlimactic. I feared the bike would have little to say to my loud and noisy treadmill.
That is, until I had pedaled for about 20 minutes. I looked down and several rogue beads of sweat landed on my shirt after they rolled off my brow. They joined a few thousand other ones that already there.
It seems I was getting a workout. My heart rate was at about 160 when I gripped the silvery heart-rate-measuring thingies on the bike. Quiet but effective, this stationary bike was. It was all action and little talk. I can respect that in a piece of workout equipment.
I have been using the bike on days where I do weight work, and it's a great low-impact cardio workout that's easy on this runner's knees. Maybe it will give me the courage to sign up for that triathlon I've been thinking about doing for the past 2 years or so.
Or maybe it will make the treadmill jealous. I guess we'll see soon enough.
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