When the Basement Bike Is Broke

Finding an indoor cycling alternative.

Sometimes you cross-train because you see the benefits of it. Sometimes you cross-train because you’re forced into it.

I fall squarely in the second camp. But I’ve learned that it’s not a bad thing.

January’s been a tough month for me. There’s been a tremendous amount of illness in my house, including my wife getting sick for more than a week, which has never happened in our 32-plus years of marriage (yeah, she’s tough), myself, and my daughter’s family, which is here for an extended stay.

That means we have a baby in the house again, the first time in a couple of decades. While Kathy and I are over the moon to have our granddaughter with us (the family lives in France), it’s also reminded us of the joys of the winter flu season.

In addition, a part broke on my Wahoo KICKR bike, right in the middle of base training season. Grrr… Since the weather wasn’t conducive to riding outside, I decided to do a different kind of workout until the new part came in.

We have a treadmill in the basement, although it’s primarily for the runners in the house (which is not me. Running, as you know, is an activity only slightly more enjoyable than passing a kidney stone. That’s something I unfortunately know much about.) But then I realized that I don’t have to run on the thing—it could be useful if I was just walking.

So for a week, I walked on the treadmill, but not just a flat, easy walk. I walked at 3 mph, with the treadmill at a 10% incline. This provided a solid workout, getting my heart rate up and keeping it up. It’s also an excellent workout for my new cycling-adjacent hobby of hiking and backpacking. (In fact, I’m starting to get semi-serious about combining the two and doing some bikepacking. More on that in the future).

It was a lot of fun to do those workouts. Since I wasn’t running, I wasn’t putting a lot of pressure on my joints, and I got a lot of Zone 2 work in. That’s good for endurance riding, which is my preferred type of riding.

By the end of the week, I found I was able to start doing longer sessions without getting winded, and my stamina ramped up—much like structured training on the bike.

I wouldn’t say that this is great cross-training for cycling in general. I think that more effective workouts involving strength training and building core muscles will be more beneficial for that. Still, it provided an alternative to indoor cycling that was a lot of fun, and kept me from losing my fitness during the break. It’s also helped prepare me for more hiking.

In the end, although I can’t say I’m happy to have missed that base training, at least I stayed productive, and kept my body moving. As I age, that’s a key motivation for me. I work out so regularly now that my body expects it, and misses it when I don’t do something in the course of a day that gets my heart working harder.

That’s a good place to be. For years I was sedentary, and paid the price with Type 2 diabetes. Not moving my body had become my default. It was the mindset I’d adopted, and become comfortable with. It was a dangerous comfort, though—when your life consists of going from place to place and sitting down, the world passes by you, like a river rushing past. Isn’t it better to get in the stream and swim? You see a lot more.

(I’d love to hear what you do for exercise when you don’t, or can’t, ride your bike. Let me know in the comments below).

Do more than watch it go by.