As predicted back in December in my first post about riding indoors for the winter months I have pretty much worked my way up to a 45 minute session three times a week.
The indoor cycling videos are great, but the only sounds to accompany the visuals is either nothing or a very quiet, unoffensive elevator background music -boring! So I have started to listen to a podcast with the visuals. Right now I ride on Tuesday, Friday & Sunday. I picked the first two days because that is when my favorite car guys from Everyday Driver put out a fresh episodes of their podcast. On Sunday, my standby is something from the 99% Invisible archives.
For the heck of it I have been keeping track of the time I spend on the bike. Midway through I started writing down the mileage figure from the display, although I don’t know for sure how accurate it is in real world measurements. In December and January I rode a dozen times each and in February I rode eleven. I didn’t start the mileage count until the 4th ride in December, but in those 9 “rides” I covered 62.3 miles in 5 hours and 25 minutes. This translates into an average 6.9 miles a ride at an average speed of 11.5 MPH. For January I covered 103.9 miles in 8 hours and 41 minutes for an average ride of 8.7 miles at 11.9 MPH. Everyone of February’s rides were 45 minutes long totaling 8 hours and 15 minutes to go 98.8 miles, so the average was 8.98 miles covered at 11.97 MPH.
When I stop pedaling it has been only a few seconds or tenths of a mile over or under for the last several sessions. But yesterday was the very first time the display said I had ridden exactly 9.0 miles after 45.00 minutes. While not exactly a round number at the end of yesterday the total mileage that Donna and I have put on the exercycle read 700.5 miles.