After a break that was God-only-knows-how-long, I’ve finally managed to get my butt back into the bike saddle! This is a huge accomplishment for someone as inherently lazy as me, especially since it’s starting to get cold out and riding outside just doesn’t seem as fun. Not that I really went out much more in the summer, but that’s not the point.
I used to bike with my friend’s house at his house every week, but he’s gone away on a year-long exchange to Germany and I no longer have access to his fancy CycleOps trainers. This means I had to invest in one of my own in order to bring my workout inside for the winter. A CycleOps trainer is a liiiiittle out of my budget, so I went the cheaper route and drove to Scarborough to buy a $70 trainer I found on Kijiji from some company that’s apparently made up of 2 Asian guys in a rented storage space. Sketchy? Maybe, but aside from the worst assembly instruction booklet ever, the trainer seems pretty solid.
I set up a sweet workout station in the living room, and even dragged over the electric fireplace to use as a side table. I had a few hitches – had to run out and buy a tire pump, scoured a piece of wood from the backyard for under the front tire, and spent at least an hour trying to rig my front wheel-only bike computer onto the back wheel so it didn’t think I was stationary…
Don’t worry, though, I fixed that with a thing of dental floss, a cut up elastic band and some saran wrap. MacGyver would be proud 
I gathered all my necessities (including a hammer gel because it had been 2 1/2 hours since I’d had my after work snack and I didn’t want to die on the bike), and then pedalled away for about 45 minutes while watching Blue Crush. I didn’t feel like I was going particularly slow, but I only ended up covering about 15km. Gotta build up my speed again with more practise!
I wasn’t feeling a real dinner after biking, so I made a smoothie with dark chocolate almond milk, a banana, protein powder, peanut butter and ice.
x2. It was huge, and at first I thought I was freezing from all the smoothie, but then I realized it was because I had left the window open from when I was biking. Oops.
Even though I managed to get warm again, I think it’s almost time to cozy up in bed for the night. Hopefully my bike ride will knock me right out and I’ll be able to wake up on time for once. I can always dream, right?
Have a good night!
