It’s a classic trope of the tough-guy genre of film. The bad guys jump the good guy, and one of them holds him while the others work him over. It’s not personal, you understand. It’s business. So the head bad guy, the one with the speaking part, says, “OK, bub! The face or the stomach?”
Late November in the Northern Hemisphere, we get a similar proposition, the basement or the cold?
I know some very strong riders who build their strength on the trainer during the winter. In fact, to call it “the trainer” these days is a lot like calling the device in your pocket a phone. Today’s “smart trainers” are more like massive on-line role-playing games. The days of pedaling tempo against a resistance fan with vintage Paris-Roubaix on the VCR are long gone.
I don’t do well on the trainer. As it turns out I don’t really love to pedal. What I like is to move through space outdoors. You can jazz it up however you want, I still don’t love it. I do it sometimes, because madness lies the way of inactivity, but I can seldom stomach more than 20 minutes.
Then there’s the cold. And here again, just to call it “the cold” doesn’t get at the real challenges of wintertime riding. Howling winds are problematic. Snow and ice are complications that sometimes make the riding not safe. So you don’t just have to tolerate the cold, which some of us do better than others, but you also have to navigate a whole array of further obstacles. Will your tires hold the ground? Is the snow packed down or loose? Are we on the rain/snow line today and how do we deal with that?
When I put myself in the good guy’s shoes, I’m pretty much always gonna choose the stomach. Sure, I’ll get the wind knocked out of me, but I have muscles there, and I can mount a modest resistance.
I will also almost always choose the cold over the basement (not that the basement is that warm). Maybe this is really a confession that I don’t ride a bike for exercise, but for sanity. Fitness is only ever a side-effect of what I’m doing once I throw a leg over.
How about you? The basement or the cold?
