I love biking. Sometimes I power up a hill until my lungs are bursting and the sweat is pouring off of me and I crest the hill with satisfaction, pride and relief, but mostly I amble along enjoying the day or coast gloriously down hill. (Coasting downhill is the closest that I get to flying on a regular basis, and I would love to be able to fly. I can fly in my dreams which is a true delight. When people ask me what one superpower I would choose, I always choose flying despite how cliche it is) I like the speed of riding a bike for exploring. Walking is too slow and driving too fast, but when I am biking I am traveling fast enough to encounter many sights but slow enough to take them all in. I can appreciate a homemade sign for tomatoes for sale, a sudden glimpse of a lake, a sunshine-dappled bend in the road, a corner deli. Biking I can feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my arms. What could biking on a stationary bike possibly have to offer to rival that?
Biking outdoors is an experience; biking at the gym is pure exercise.
On the bike at the Y down the street, the display displays my heart rate, my distance, my RPM's, my calories and my time. There is no fascinating scenery or intoxicating whiff of spring air to distract me, no shady stone bridge to tempt me to pause and sketch the horses in the field, no long downhills to soar down without effort (I always choose a single level and leave it at that for my whole workout) to distract me. The room is dull, the view out the window is the parking lot, the lights are unpleasant flourescent lights, the closed caption TV giving me the daily business news or a long infomercial on something that looks like a fanny pack that supposedly zaps your abs away does not interest me (and without my glasses I have to strain to read the captions anyway) so I am completely tuned into my own experience of my body and to the constantly-updating data in front of me.
I can begin to quantify the qualitative experience I always have running: About 30 seconds into the run I am already tired and at two minutes I hit my low point. Two minutes into every race or run I've ever run I think "I'm this tired already. . . There's no way I'll finish!" And yet I always finish. I experience just this on the bike at the gym, too. I try to keep my heart rate and my rpm's steady and so I can see when I am working steadily or flagging. So I can also tell when my subjective experience differs from those objective outputs. On Friday during my cardio workout on the bike everything suddenly felt easy at 14 minutes. This morning that second wind hit at 8 minutes.
I am also completely fascinated by being able to track my heart rate. In general, I had always thought of my heart rate as a constant (or as something that would slowly decrease as I improved my fitness) and concentrated only on increasing my distance and improving my speed (running). To be able to monitor my heart rate throughout an entire workout is a boon. When I warm up on the bike before my strength training session, I have to pedal as hard as I can for four minutes before finally my heart rate creeps up to 165, where I then keep it for the last minute. After my strength training session, when I get back on the bike for a cardio workout, my heart rate first registers at almost 150 and is about to 165 after one minute and by ten minutes I have to struggle to keep it below 175. To what degree is my heart rate increasing because I am working harder and to what degree is it increasing because I am getting more tired? Well, I get to watch the RPM's to try and tease those apart.
The uninteresting surroundings are allowing me to focus all of my attention of my body and the data constantly flashing in front of me. I feel that I have only just begun to scratch the surface in interpreting the data about my heart rate, RPM's, time and calories, and there are so many variables that I have not even begun to play with (or consciously hold constant). I may not be admiring scenery while biking in the fresh air, but on the stationary bike I am off on an odyssey into the workings of my own body.
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