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Archive for May, 2009

100,000 views on Webshots

It’s been in the making for a while, but I just saw that my albums on Webshots have crossed over the 100,000 views threshold. While it pales in comparison to other albums out there Webshots and on Flickr, it’s still pretty cool to me. And the catalog up there is far smaller than what I have presented on this site.

It may not be monumental, but I’m pretty pleased.

I’m just starting to get used to the trainer. It’s an awesome machine to work with. When I was a kid all you had to do to ride a bike was keep your balance, pedal and try not to crash into any mailboxes or parked cars. While the avoidance of cars and mailboxes is always a good idea, it seems there is a lot more to riding a bike these days. You need your feet pointing the right way, you need to have the right hand position, the correct pull when turning the crank, the correct cadence and all sorts of things I’m just starting to learn.

Regardless of all these finer points the trainer is great. I really enjoy riding on it and I have come to realize it’s not just about sitting there riding it, you’re supposed to pedal hard and fast then rest, then drop to the lower gears and pedal in the big gears for just a minute then switch back to something easy to get lots of RPMs going. Apparently riding in place is a thinking man’s game. Who knew?

I’m obviously not used to working with a bike trainer, but this thing provides more of a workout than I was expecting. I figured it would just lift the back of the bike and offer a tiny bit of resistance to the wheel. There’s certainly a lot more to it than that.

Riding the stationary bike was easy and quite frankly rather boring. It has resistance but it wasn’t like riding a bike at all. And you could make it harder to pedal rather than the sensation of more tension because of the different gears. All that’s changed. The easy gears still seem pretty easy, but once you get some speed and hit the lower end gears it all changes. There is more tension, you can feel more strain and of course there is a lot more sweat. I’ve ridden for two hours straight and not been phased. After ten minutes on this thing I can feel it.

Is this a complaint, no way! This trainer is amazing and everything I wanted. I rode it twice yesterday and twice today. It’s great experience. I really can go as fast as I want, not that I can sustain those speeds for too long. I actually want to ride it some more, but alas, chores around the house will have to put that on hold for the moment.

But there’s always tonight.