Looking For A Sign

I've got the February blues, and I'm looking for a sign. The road bike sits in its basement bunker, waiting patiently for it's moment to attack the twisting roads up to Lansing, Dryden, McLean, Groton, Trumansburg, Ellis Hollow, Richford, Brooktondale, Spencer, Candor, and beyond. Yet these are desperate days for me, as I realize how I'm in complete withdrawal from road biking addiction. Sure, I see brave cyclists on the road in winter climbing up East State St. and elsewhere, but I have no intention of breaking out the road bike until the bulk of the road salt is washed away.


Every day I visit Accuweather and check out their 15-day forecast temperature graph, hopefully looking for signs of a warming spell, but today's graph offered no encouragement. The anticipated high temperature has essentially flatlined for the next two weeks, so I guess I just have to face the inevitable, and prepare for some more indoor riding with the trainer. It's so hard to get motivated for indoor cycling, but it will surely pay off.


Speaking of indoor training, my friend Joe sent me the link to a story that ran on the radio show Only A Game about an annual event called Bikes and Beer. This event sounds like a blast, and if I lived closer to Boston, I would definitely participate. Nearly 300 cyclists visit the Harpoon brewery for an indoor time trial, a stationary bike race that simulates an eight-mile course. Imagine all these riders riding on trainers that are all networked to an electronic scoreboard. The software is so sophisticated that it allows for drafting! Somehow an event like this appeals to me (in theory at least) much more than a spinning class, not just because you're using your own bike, and it's not just because of the beer reward afterwards. As one of the participants pointed out, if your a recreational cyclist participating in a race with Cat 1 riders, you'll only see them for a minute or two, and then they'll be out of sight for the rest of the race. In this even, however, you see them for the whole race, which might offer some inspiration and some performance tips. Here are some pictures of the event.

If you're starting to think of cycling events to participate in for the summer, I recently heard about an event called BikeIt! Here's a blurb from their web site:

Imagine 5,000 bicyclists riding into Detroit, the Motor City, to help bring about a different world. We see thousands of cyclists coming from every direction converging on the United States Social Forum next June, voting with their legs for a greener, cooler, fairer society. We’re taking that ride, and we invite you to join us.

The first U.S. Social Forum took place in Atlanta from June 27 to July 1, 2007. Like the annual World Social Forums, the Atlanta event brought together activists, organizers, people of color, working people, poor people, and indigenous people from across the United States. They built unity around the common goals of environmental and social justice, formed alliances to broaden the social justice movement, and had a blast while doing it. Now the second U.S. Social Forum is organizing. It will open in Detroit on June 22 and run until June 26, 2010. We are now looking for organizers to recruit squads of cyclists and biofuel-powered support wagons to ride from wherever they are to the Opening March.

Hopefully I'll be chatting with the organizer soon and providing more information about the event. Lots of rides are being organized around the country to head to Motor City and participate in what looks to be a really important event that will hopefully initiate grassroots activism on a range of environmental and social justice-related issues. If you're interested in joining the Finger Lakes BikeIt Ride, check out this link. This group will have a max of 50 riders from Ithaca, Syracuse, Binghamton, and smaller towns in Central NY. The ride will be about 500 miles, and here's the map of the route:

If I had the time, I'd love to participate. The Canadian section of this ride is spectacular. There's very little traffic for most of this stretch, and the views along the Lake Erie shoreline are spectacular. 

Winter Distractions

It's another beautiful winter day in Ithaca, and snow drought seems like such an aughts concept. The ski conditions at Greek Peak have been terrific and the season looks promising, with lots of snow on the ground and no warming trends in the forecast for the next two weeks at least. If you're a winter sports enthusiast in the Northeast, there's nothing to complain about.


This time of year, I look at the messy, snow-covered roads, littered with potholes and contaminated with grit and road salt and am having a really hard time imagining what it was like to bike up the magical hills on my road bike only a few months ago. Sure, I could get the old beater mountain bike out of the garage and do some sloppy winter cycling, but it's just not the same. Winter cycling in these conditions is a much different aesthetic than road biking, and it just isn't as appealing as it used to be. A few years ago I turned a pair of mountain bike tires into studded tires, thanks to a helpful online tutorial. While I can't find the exact one I used, this one is essentially the same. The trick is to screw sheet metal screws into the tire so that the tips stick out, and use tire liners or just old tube rubber to prevent the screw heads from poking into your tubes and giving you a flat. It turns out that you really only need to have a studded tire on the front wheel, though it doesn't hurt to have the rear studded as well.

I think I'll just stick to skiing and the trainer, and keep following the latest crazy experiments of Lance, as he swallows thermometers to measure his core temperature and experiments with cooling vests and other high tech silliness, as Team Radio Shack looks for whatever competitive edge they can find. And then there's the snide hilarity of Bike Snob NYC, my favorite bike blog by a mile. Oh yeah, and there's EA Active, which continues to be a fantastic way to burn calories in the living room. The 2010 road cycling season is only a few months away...

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.