Yes, it’s that time of year again — the season of indoor cycling, which sucks a mile of yak dong but still beats ballooning to Orson Wellesian proportions due to one’s fondness for food and drink.
I usually bolt a lesser bike to my Cateye CS-1000 trainer for use in evil weather, but this is an imperfect solution. For one, it sounds like a speed freak with a hand saw trimming up wood for the stove. And that spinning rear wheel is a cat magnet.
Worst of all, it won’t accommodate Herself without much clusterfuckery — fetching bikes in and out of the garage, popping off/restoring front wheels, adjusting the Cateye framework, and so on and so forth. I’m 6 feet tall, she’s 5 feet tall; you get the idea. And anyway, the whole idea is not to go outside, where the garage and the foul weather are.
So, fearing a long and unpleasant winter based on what we’ve seen so far in October, and lacking a gym membership, I bought us a Giant Tempo exercise bike from John Crandall at Old Town Bike Shop.
The Tempo is adjustable without tools — seat post, saddle, and stem/handlebar combo all raise and lower and slide forward and back, using knobs or quick releases. Everything’s neatly hash-marked so you can quickly rearrange the bike to suit the tall or small. The fixed-gear flywheel has a recessed magnet so you can add an aftermarket cyclo-computer (I did), the stock pedals are easily removable for replacement with the pedals of your choice (ditto) and the belt drive keeps things quiet enough so you can hear the old iPod without cranking it to 11.
Like most human constructions, the Tempo is not without fault, especially as regards the stem/bar combo. It could go lower to accommodate smaller riders (a hacksaw can fix that), and it could have a longer horizontal track, which would allow the vertically challenged to bring the bars closer to the saddle (one possible workaround is disassembling the setup and flipping it 180 degrees).
But these are nits I’m picking here. The Tempo is solid, quiet and reasonably priced, and we’ve both ridden it and like it a whole lot more than doing the Ice Capades on two wheels with a critical audience of SUV pilots entranced by the texting capabilities of their Crackberries. It’s not as much fun as riding outdoors, but what is? When you’re wearing clothes, anyway. …
Full disclosure: I got this rascal at a considerable discount, thanks to John and Steve, our local Giant rep. I can see why John might cut me some slack, since I’ve been buying bikes, parts and service from him for a quarter century or so and live within eyeshot of Crandall Manor, but Steve’s assist was entirely unexpected and most appreciated. A tip of the Mad Dog skid-lid to both gents for their generosity.
Mad Blog Media 
Clamp a bigass piece of plywood (carpeted of course) on those handlebars so the cats have someplace to perch while you’re sweatin’ to the oldies!
Still don’t know how you ‘married up’ so much. Where are her coke bottle glasses? Did you hide them again?
Unlike us she still looks like she did in ’92!
Indoor trainers? brings to mind the AP.Now quote ..” and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger”. This Nor Mn monsoon season is forcing me to the CycleOps much too soon.
Clear skies and dry today. But this morning there was a boatload of black ice on the roads. Bike stayed home again. Its bad enough worrying about texting drivers on icy roads, but doing it from a bicycle seat ain’t my idea of fun.
Gramps — I dunno as I want to give the Turk’ a free shot at me from the handlebars. You never know which one of the voices in his head has his ear from moment to moment. He’s liable to try to climb into your lap or claw the living piss out of you, depending.
O’Neill — indeed, we both wed above our respective stations in life. Herself and I will hit our 20th anniversary next May, if she hasn’t shot me by then, and she doesn’t look a day older than she did when we got hitched at Hyde Park outside Santa Fe. Me, now, I look like her grandpa. Maybe her grandpa’s grandpa.
Boz — I feel your pain. Nineteen degrees here at the moment and the Turk’ has come in from a tour of the outdoors with a disgusted look on his face. He considers my control of our climate imperfect.
And K — black ice and bikes go together like whisky and firearms. The place for ice is in a drink, parked next to the hammock slung between palm trees on a white beach somewheres. Not here.
While your riding indoors, I just rented a road bike to a Barnett student…
Unfortunately, we donated our spare TV to a friend. So my winter battle station (the older Cannonball sitting on rollers in front of the spare TV, with a fan sitting on top of the tube) is no more. I might have to banish myself to the garage, where I can set up next to the beater stereo(left over from my first Hawaii days, speaking of 20+ yrs ago)..
Meena just noticed that we are coming up on Friday, Nov. 13th. That has a special meaning, as we first met on Friday, Nov. 13th, 1987. I had stumbled off the plane from New York about five weeks before and was still looking dazed, confused, and wearing my old Avocet touring shoes with white socks on the Manoa campus, trying to figure my way around Oz. Have no idea what that girl saw in me.
Amazing that with that Friday the 13th meeting and all the black cats that have crossed our paths, we are still doing a good impersonation of a couple. Go figure.
Rush — well, wrench-slingers are all nuts. But you knew this. And anyway, was he a bald-headed 55-year-old fat bastard with bad knees?
K — I managed 40 minutes of light intervals without TV yesterday, but I did have the iPod on. A little “Street Life” from The Crusaders, though I ordinarily favor The Allman Brothers Band’s “A Decade of Hits,” which is pretty much the ideal indoor-cycling music.
And good on you and Meena for sticking it out so long. She must be a very patient woman. Hee haw.
Ah… winter. Seeing “herself” (I’m also one of those lucky guys who married far above my station) on that contraption brought me back to the old days when I welded and otherwise butchered a Tunturi ergometer into a passable indoor cycling machine. Nowadays it’s an Elite trainer (thankfully much quieter than the ancient Blackburn windtrainer used for warming up before races back in the day) and the winter beater posed in front of a small cathode-ray tube connected to a DVD player in the shop when it’s too nasty to go outside. Two or perhaps three times @ 40 minutes per week on this thing is all I can handle, no matter what type of entertainment I can scare up for distraction. The final straw on outdoor fun is the onset of standard time this weekend. How long before an “Old Guys Who Go Crazy in Winter” t-shirt?
I can’t deal with more than minimal time riding the Tour de Living Room. If its a dry winter, the mountainbike and running shoes will get more use than during the summer and if we get snow, I’ll banish myself to the Jemez cross country ski trails. But its never enough.
I hear ya! Last couple of snow seasons we were lucky enough to have a local rich guy get into XC skiing and pop for a snowmobile and grooming sled to drag around a local nature preserve. WOOHOO! Beautifully groomed skate lanes and classic tracks just 20 minutes by car from our house. Sadly, here in SUX the snow is unreliable..we get enough to set the trails and trax, then it rains or thaws out enough to wreck everything and we wait for the next snow. But when it’s skiable, it’s WAY better than pedaling away down in the shop staring at a small screen getting wound up every time Shiggett and Lerwen butcher some Italian rider’s name or complain about the confusing color of the Giro category leaders jerseys! Now if I could just learn how to skate ski without looking like an idiot…
I’ve avoided looking like an idiot on skate skis by not buying skate skis. The ski club up here, which I send my check to, sets both traditional Nordic track and skate lanes. So I plod along looking like an idiot in my track skis. But its a lot of fun and the alpine areas just west of town are to die for. They make for lung-busting long rides in the summer and great skiiing in the winter.
I imagine Patrick must have done some riding up in the Jemez when he lived in nearby Santa Fe. Dude?
I have both skate and “combo” skis, both sets being Fischer Revolution shorties. I can skate a little, but it’s not a pretty sight. On the rare occasion that we get enough snow in Bibleburg to lay down some track in a nearby park, we almost always stick to diagonal stride, there being no snowmobiles handy to create a skate track.
As for the Jemez, when I lived outside Española, I did most of my riding to the east or north, though I occasionally headed northwest toward Abiquiu. There was the High Road to Taos, with the painful ascent to Truchas, and if I wasn’t up for that there was a nifty little loop that went from my adobe in La Puebla to just past Chimayo, then hung a right for some stiff climbs and a fast descent to Pojoaque. It used to be the Sangre de Cristo Cycling’s Club’s club-championship course, IIRC. Looked very Euro’, with itty-bitty roads and ‘dobes scattered around on the hillsides.
After I moved to Santa Fe we did all manner of foolishness: the Santa Fe Hill Climb, Glorieta Pass, the Santa Fe Century (with the fabled ascent of Heartbreak Hill) and the Watermelon Mountain Classic (the original, a road race, which started in Bernalillo and included seven miles of improved dirt Forest Circus road up the backside of the Sandias; it topped out at the ski area and then descended through Cedar Crest to just outside Albuquerque). There was a similar dirt-road back door to the Santa Fe Ski Area, north of Tesuque, but it was better suited to mountain bikes or cyclo-cross bikes. We also rode a ton of MTB in the national forest.
And of course there was the Tour de Los Alamos in Khal’s neck of the woods, plus some road race up Highway 550 whose details elude me — racing with the likes of Kent Bostick and John Frey tended to fray the synapse and make for inaccurate recollections of the Five W’s (who, what, when, where and why the fuck am I doing this for fun?).
Meanwhile, Larry, I think my personal best on an indoor trainer was 90 minutes, back when we lived in Weirdcliffe and I was still racing ’cross. I’d plug a Tour tape in, or some bootleg video of ’cross worlds, slap an Allman Brothers CD in the player, put the headphones on and get down to business. But there had to be a lot of snow outside. I’m talking feet.
Patrick:
I had many a race with Kent Bostick and John Frey in NM back in the mid-80s. Suffice to say that both were formidable opponents and good guys. I hope both are well and happy. Thanks for helping me look back to those youthful days of glory on the NM roads.
Dale
Still OK for riding for another month here in the northeast, but about to get dark way too early. Fortunately I work 5 minutes from a golf course that turns into an XC ski center in the winter, with nice groomed skate trails. After many years of living here I finally got cajoled into going out on skate skis last winter, and quickly discovered that I suck, but kept at it until I didn’t suck quite so bad and it actually started to be fun. All my biker friends go flying by, poetry in motion — I’m prose in motion! But until I discovered this, I was an old guy who gets FAT in the winter (One of your finest comic creations, Patrick). Now I’m just an old guy!
Ah – winter is around the corner here in the Pacific Northwest. Luckily, it’s usually not that bad – just wet. Still, combined with darkness, the dreaded indoor trainer gets dragged out once again.
My high tech set up includes a ’80s Supergo wind trainer and my ’91 Bridgestone RB-1, complete with special wasted back tire. Spinning away in cluttered garage, noisy trainer drowned out by first generation iPod blasting the Ramones. Welcome to winter, I’ll be your tour guide.
A stationary exercise bike looks like a cool option – if I had the dough and space for such a contraption.
I’m putting off the Tour de Nowhere as long as possible. So the commuter is now in winter configuration. I swapped out my heavy duty road tires for Richey cross rubber on a set of XT/Salsa Delgado Cross wheels (they work pretty well in an emergency if it starts to snow), put the HID lamp on the front and an auto-size SAE reflector on the back underneath a set of strobe lights. Weather is nice this week, so the fast road wheelset is in use.
One helmet is now graced with my old headlight, a NightRider with a 10W beam. Festoon myself with reflective crap on arms and legs and wait for the inevitable. I’m thinking of putting the fenders on it, but will have to swap out the MTB front derailleur for a road model, as the XT is pretty clunky with a plastic mounting system that sticks out from the seat tube at least a centimeter towards the rear tire and blocks the fender mount. Seems like a dumb design as it would catch mud and glop as well as get in the way.
Khal,
Just set my commuter up for winter, which means I dug out all my winter cycling gear. May swap the Marathons out for the old cross tires. Otherwise it’s fenders and lights all year round. Urban riding presents too many opportunities for interesting stuff to get flung up by a wheel. The front lights are just a L&M Vega and a Cateye EL500 with a couple of steady and blinking LED lights at back.
The Digital Headtrips killed their battery packs years ago, but they were really nice on the helmet. Great way to get a driver’s attention.
Starting today every commute is a night ride.
I found some little LED flashlights (link below) at Sam’s club about a year ago. Been using them at home, but if I wanted to make an inexpensive but powerful LED headlight system, for thirty bucks a pair, I’d put a couple of these on my handlebars with hose clamps and a piece of inner tube for shock insulation. Set one for flood and one for narrow beam.
http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&item=417255&pCatg=4427
Inexpensive, commercially available LED flashlights are becoming common and throw a lot of light (at least as much as my old Niterider 10W lamp) with 1 to 3 W LEDs. No reason to spend big bucks any more unless you want to. I keep hoping this will convince more nighttime commuters to start setting up their bikes properly rather than riding around as invisible riders waiting to be hit–or to hit something.
Have you seen:
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=86
and
http://www.aukweb.net/lights/index.htm
no doubt you’ve seen Peter White’s stuff