Short Day Evidence: this picture was taken at 3:30pm on November 15, 2009
Sunday afternoon, I’m working on my Damn Yard™ clearing leaves from approximately 8000 trees and look into the sky. Figuring how low the sun is hanging along the horizon, I determine it’s got to be fairly close to 5pm. Maybe even 6:30pm.
Nope – it was only 2:30pm.
Is it just me, or does the sun seem to be setting earlier and earlier each day?
Fall in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere makes for a very brooding place to live. Every day is shorter than the last. Snow is only a few degrees away from sticking around for several, chilly months. I will soon be driving both to and from work with my headlights turned to the “ON” position.
Thus, any outside time with a little blue sky and some sun shining needs to be immediately taken advantage of. I packed the kid up in the car and we headed over to French Regional Park to join nearly half of the West Metro residents in enjoying a nice – but rather cold – afternoon before the sun went back into hiding.
Why does 45 degrees sometimes feel really warm, and other times feel terribly cold?
If you’ve never been, French Park is a great place to blow off some steam for kept-up toddlers and elementary kids. They have a monstrous climbing structure with various ropes, nets, and tunnels that make every kid (and their tag-along parent) work hard to move from one side to the next. But, since my kid is 13, we simply walked past the “fun” and targeted a brisk walk around the park and along the shores of Medicine Lake.
Although it could have been a great weekend for an outdoor ride, I was simply too busy with mandatory tasks around the house. I have resolved with myself that my riding is now confined to the basement and have several rounds in me this past week.
Erin does her best to avoid a picture taken by her Dad
My indoor riding routine is a little different than outdoor riding. One of the downsides of fluid trainers is that they ALWAYS apply steady resistance during every stage of the pedal stroke. This is great for strength training and leveling out the cadence, but it doesn’t mimic outdoor riding very well. Outside, the mix in terrain allows for variation in effort, with soft pedaling for some parts and monster cranking during others. This means that riding indoors is not very great for outdoor training.
Thus, I try to break up my routine and add a few elements I don’t do during the summer months. I typically only ride the bike for around 45-50 minutes (which just happens to be enough time for an hour-equivalent of TV on Hulu.com – go figure). After boredom has set firmly in-place, I’m off the bike and into a core strengthening routine. This usually includes three sets of 40 sit-ups, 15 push-ups, and 1 minutes side-plank poses (ala yoga). With that completed, I move to the hard stuff with three sets of 5 pull-ups and 20 squats (10 each leg). That’s a little over one hour of work and I wind down with five minutes of stretching.
Now, if you haven’t noticed from the pictures, I’m a really skinny, scrawny guy. All the upper body stuff really takes a toll on me and I am generally more sore in the upper half of my body than anything induced upon my legs from the bike work. But, I figure that it balances out from the summer where the most workout my upper body receives is lifting the beer bottle at the end of the ride.
