Hunkered Down

Snow is in the air! Now that I'm hunkered down and all set up for spinning in the basement with my trusty trainer, let the snow fly, I say. The big challenge now is to keep up the schedule of indoor biking workouts three times weekly through the winter. This is unchartered territory for me, as I've never maintained an indoor training schedule of any kind before. It's so much harder to get motivated to ride with a trainer than to ride on on the road. How do professional athletes do it?

One of the obvious reasons that I slowly gained weight through my 30s and 40s and had such a hard time losing weight is my strong aversion to exercise. For my whole life I've held stubbornly to my position that exercise for exercise sake is just plain boring and that I'll never do that. If it's not fun, I'm not doing it. I've been able to hold true to this mindset all through this year of substantial weight loss and improved fitness by doing a Wii Fit workout almost daily since February in addition to road biking all summer. For those of you who haven't experienced the magic of Wii Fit, you have so much fun working out that you don't resent it. I've never been into gaming, but I can do Wii Fit for an hour or more without getting bored, and the cumulative effect is incredibly beneficial. The Wii Fit experience is data driven, and I've written in prior posts about my obsession with gathering and analyzing data from my rides. Wii Fit Plus improves tremendously on an already fantastic product, with lots of new fun activities like Island Cycling, Obstacle Course, Birds-Eye Bullseye, Skateboarding, Boxing, and Snowball Fight. In addition, it tracks an estimate of calories burned, and analyzing the graph of your weight loss is very motivating.

So why am I rethinking my anti-exercise stance? Wii Fit alone will not keep me in shape over the winter months, given the limited amount of time I have set aside to work out. That leaves the bike trainer, not the most fun thing in the world, so it means...gulp...exercise for exercise sake. Yikes! Can I succeed? I'm definitely motivated, so hopefully that will make all the difference.

Ask any cyclist who has tried riding on even the best trainer—it's a pale substitute to the euphoria of road biking. It's a good workout but you have to work hard on making the environment comfortable and find distractions that work for you. I get bored quickly with my music mixes, so I have to keep on top of this issue and make a few new playlists in anticipation of my next workouts. It's all about mind games, but there's no doubt that my positive state of mind, thanks to many months of intense aerobic workouts, will contribute greatly to the success of this workout strategy.