Brian's World

Cycling

One of my recent worries is that I’ve ridden my usually road/mountain bike onto one of those stationary trainers, putting a significant damper on the ground I’ve covered in recent weeks and months.  I know that I’m still riding the bike, as I can continue to count the lines of code I write and the hours of sleep I don’t get as a result of it, but I’m worried that I’m no longer traveling in any direction, never mind new directions.. I’m just facing a direction.  It feels like I’m peddling more for the sake of peddling than to actually make progress like I’m used to.

I think the most worrying part isn’t actually the fact that I don’t feel like I’m moving anywhere, but instead that the actions I need to perform to return to making progress and moving are completely out of band.  I have to stop riding, get off the bike, and physically move it off the stationary trainer.  I know, that’s all rather simple to do, but then you have to get back on and get back in the groove of riding again.  It might be preferable to peddle through wet cement, I’d at least be moving (albeit slowly) and also have something fairly exciting to say at the end of it or a great reason if I had to give up.

Riding on a stationary trainer does give me something to say, technically speaking it tracks tons of stuff like my total mileage, the average speed I travel, the total time I’ve been riding and all this other potentially useful stuff, but I don’t think that information is nearly as useful as talking about where peddling has taken me and what it’s let me see along the way.  I can report day after day that I’ve been starring at the same wall, but no one really wants to hear that.  The statistics I’ve gathered are purely useful if I was trying to beat some record or achieve a super quantitative goal, and no one likes to measure their life by that.

Good night moon.