Riding my bike on the bike trainer in my basement, is such a different experience compared to riding the bike outside.

For one, it’s always much hotter. I have a huge, commercial sized fan to try and keep me cool.  It definitely helps, but it’s not close to the cooling effect of moving though air outside.  The fan works well on easy rides, but as soon as my effort increases, then I start to sweat…  a lot.  I use a lot of towels to try and wipe the sweat off; today, I ended up using four.

I had a two hour session on the bike today.  It was really cold outside, so I had to do it in my basement on the trainer. The session included four intervals, that were fifteen minutes long, with a goal of achieving my best average power at high cadence across all four intervals.  It was a brutal workout, made somewhat harder by the fact that I wasn’t feeling particularly strong today.

I got through the intervals by closing my eyes and just embracing the pain.  I used my trick of breaking up the time, by counting manageable intervals within the larger interval.  Today I was counting to fifteen.  I’m not sure why, but I felt that I could at least get to fifteen without quitting.  Then, when the fifteen was up, I decided I could easily manage another fifteen.  It’s surprising how many times you can manage to get through these short sub-intervals; it’s takes your mind off the fact, that you have minutes and minutes left to suffer.

The other difference, that I find between riding outside and on the trainer, is  comfort.  For some reason, my butt just hurts when riding inside.  This happens when I am riding at low power and not pushing hard on the pedals.  Never happens outside but inside, like today, it just gets uncomfortable.

Overall however, it was a good workout.  I know I worked hard, because my legs are burning, as I write my blog this evening.  It’s that good burn, that comes from a hard workout. It’s going to be interesting to see how my legs feel on my run tomorrow.  I’ll let you know in tomorrow’s blog.