No more excuses

Recently I mentioned buying an exercise bike, which at the time had yet to be assembled. Well, I waited to see if the house elves would take care of, but no such luck. (It's so damned hard to find good house elves these days.) So I had to bite the bullet and do it myself. After the first page of instructions I had this:


Heartened by the ease of this part, I forged ahead, only to be confronted with some instructions that seemed to be written for some other bikw, in an alternate universe perhaps. I finally called it quits for the night with the rear end of the bike assembled but nothing done on the front end, aside from attaching the stand to the flywheel assembly so it wouldn't fall over in the middle of the night and scare the bejeezus out of me.


That was Sunday night. Monday night I wrested with increasingly unhelpful and incorrect instructions, as well as increasingly awkward chunks of assembled parts. (The instructions ought to say that it's a two-person job.) But finally I prevailed, and from the chaos emerged this wondrous vision of a fully assembled exercise bike that -- amazingly -- actually works!


Pay no attention to the clutter in the background. I'm not up to Photoshop-ing it out, and besides, it shows it's authentic and not another product shot off the Web.

Now I can select from ten "profile" programs ranging from "Ride in the Park" to "Pike's Peak" (yeah, right); three "heart rate control" programs, at least one of which would probably kill me if I was foolish enough to attempt it; a time trial program, a fitness test, and more. All at 16 different resistance levels. Meanwhile you can watch your pulse rate, RPMs, speed, "distance", calories burned, and I don't know what else. Good thing this is a stationary bike; I sure wouldn't want to try to assimilate all this while riding a real bike.

So now I have no more excuses for not exercising. Too dark? Turn on a light. Rain? I hope not -- a new roof costs a lot of bucks. Safety concerns? If I keep the door bolted, the only danger is that I could fall off (not likely with such a large seat) or have a heart attack (also not likely, since I'm probably going to stay at the Ride in the Park zone for some time).

The wheels on the bike go 'round and 'round...