Last night I followed through with my plan of alternating nights between running and biking. I pulled out my 4-year-old bike, filled up its tires with my trusty foot pump, adjust the seat, and went out on my merry way. It was great at first, if a bit uncomfortable on my posterior. Mostly, it was just nice to move along at such a higher speed than running. I had a breeze in my face, and pleasant memories of a childhood spent permanently attached to a bicycle playing through my internal video player. However, before long, maybe half a mile, things went down hill.
I started to notice that the seat of my bike was insanely uncomfortable. Not just a bit of a nuisance, but honest-to-God painful. I couldn’t adjust on it to find a position that didn’t feel like I was sitting on the edges of a steel I-beam. Shifting cheeks, sitting almost sideways, and scooting back so my thigh rested on the seat was useless – there was no relief. I won’t mention in detail what other locales of the anatomy were finding the situation uncomfortable as well. The result was a lot of “stand-up biking”, trying to give my poor butt cheeks a break from the unrelenting adamantine construction abusing me with reckless abandon. The result from that particular development is that I am walking a bit like a cowboy today, I think I may have bruised, but there’s no way I’ll ever be able to really tell.
By the end of a mile, I started to feel the muscles in my thighs responding. I didn’t think of it before, but biking and running really works two incredible different parts of your legs. With jogging/running, I get a lot more of a calf burn, and a cardiovascular impact. With my back, my thighs felt like liquid after 1.2 miles. I was sweating, but my breathing was barely elevated. I felt great – other than the urgent need to not be standing on the suddenly unstable ground.
Those memories of youthful days spent on a bike: I’m trying to recall how I did it, because it seems a near impossibility now. I must have been in some ridiculous shape as a kid!
