I Nein!

The ‘I’ is for Indoor, as in Indoor Cycling, and my attitude about it is expressed in the title. And ok, it is also a kind of tortured word play on a form employers must have on file for each employee to prove they are eligible to work in the U.S. Cut me some slack, I’ve been so busy working my writing skills have gone into hibernation.

The nuts are almost all counted, but with today’s storm neither nut counting or cycling outside is possible. So for the eighth time this walnut season, I resorted to spending 30 minutes of self inflicted misery on my indoor trainer set up. Which is usually not ‘set up’. I only mounted the Sampson to the trainer at the beginning of the season, and I’ll be taking her (all my bikes choose female pronouns) off as soon as we finish.

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On the left you can see the effect of walnut counting on my cycling. In a typical non-walnut counting month I do around 600 miles and spend at least 40 hours in the saddle. For the last month I have done only 4 road rides, all from home and completely flat except for the occasional freeway overpass. And I supplemented this with those aforementioned eight 30 minute trainer workouts. I give myself credit for 9 miles for each effort, since I am working hard enough that if I did the same thing outside I’d be doing about 18 mph.

I have heard that if one stops doing cardio workouts altogether it only takes two weeks to start losing a lot of fitness. I’m not sure if that is true, but I don’t want to test the theory by taking all of walnut season off. So I got up really early and hit the garage around 5 am for 30 minutes of fun. I think I did enough this year so that my heart will remember what it is supposed to do when I get back on the road.