Ready and waiting

When I got home from work today, Charmaine was already dressed in her cycling gear and ready to ride the trainer. I was a little late leaving work, so I was a bit concerned that she would have started without me, but she was still waiting. It turned out to be a pretty good ride. I was in a higher gear than normal and doing fine… but then we started messing around, seeing who could ride at the highest gear for the longest. That burned me out rather quickly, and then I ran into a problem. My bike refused to down-shift. I was stuck on my big gear in the front. That wasn’t all that big of a deal, since I could still make it fairly easy on the back, but it was weighing on my mind. Finally I took about a 1 minute break and got it to shift back down on the front. After that it was hard to get back into the rhythm, but we eventually did. We made it through an entire West Wing episode and then about half an episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Friday on the trainer

Charmaine talked me into riding our bikes and watching a couple episodes of The West Wing Friday night. I’m hoping that I’ll start getting used to being in the saddle, but so far I don’t last more than about 40 minutes before I’m pretty uncomfortable. We ended up finishing the first episode and got about 5 minutes into the next episode before I couldn’t take it any more. I think that means we rode about 50 minutes, which is pretty good for me. Other than the 25 mile ride in last year’s Spudman Triathlon, I don’t think I’ve been on my bike this long.

Saturday Charmaine jumped back on the trainer again. I was in no condition to hurt myself again, so I felt a bit bad about letting her ride on her own. She didn’t want me to feel bad about it, so she said she would be pretty quick. More than 2 hours later she was still riding. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m holding her back on this training thing. Hopefully I’ll start to catch up one of these weeks.