The Catholic Gerbil

I decided to explain one of the biggest fears of cyclists today. It's not that we're afraid of Catholic Gerbils...it's that we're terrified of becoming one! What causes this fear of conversion and becoming your pet?

 ...This...the bike trainer...

I know why could such a small contraption of exercise equipment cause sleepless nights and dark and dreary days? Well for starters there is typically no need except when the nights are stormy and the days dreary to use such a machine. But also it relates to pain...trust me, when attached to a bike, which is then attached to your legs this becomes a torture machine....but that should be okay, cause we're cyclists, we're used to pain.

The problem stems from psychology (and no this is not meant as a marketing gimic, although any psychologists who wish to sponsor this post are perfectly welcome to do so (preferably this sponsorship would be in the form of evaluating the mental health of the author)). Yeah, our minds are trained to pamper our ego, egg it on, and generally make us out to be incredible. As I climb a hill on one of my regular training rides, I feel the glory of being the first man to the top of the Himalayas. On the decent, I transform into a man breaking the world speed record...and foolish enough to do it on a twisty mountain road in the Alps instead of some salt flats. In short we're vain, conceited, self-amazed guys in spandex. A perfect example of positive thinking and self-confidence at work.

Unlike shaving our legs, the trainer removes any sense of manhood we have. We discover that we're simply gerbils frantically attempting to spin our pedals as fast as we can.

40mm driver headphones are an absolute necessity

necrosis

There are small attempts we make to hide this fact. First, we listen to Aerosmith...really loud...like right on to of the amp tower about to do a stage dive loud. It somehow convinces us that the burning from our legs is a side effect of being a ROCK STAR! OH YEAH...but my stage dive ended up landing in a pile of week old sweaty chamois :(

In addition there are the fantasy stories we read. We set up our laptop and read and re-read the blogs of all our favorite pro cyclists. Mostly these blogs revolve around the incredible food these guys cook and eat between 23 hour training rides in the Alps...so then it inspires us to go pro and eat some all natural, omega 256 rich donuts. Oops, I only burned fifty calories on the trainer...that didn't work out well.

Notice this is pink-ish berry flavored...not the yellow-ish banana flavor I won a ton of 8(

To make up for that I'll do better on my hydration. I'll drink six bottles of water per hour (warning: this leads to more time spent on "nature breaks" than on the trainer). But guess what, this water is boring...I'll super charge it. I'll put these holy Nuun tablets in my water, no sugar, lots of electrolytes...and they were blessed by a Belguim-ish priest. These provide entertainment because A. they fizz when you put them in your water B. they taste slightly like some fruit and mostly like hard water and C. THEY FIZZ!

And when all else fails, you resort to these...

...my lucky, ugly, freakishly long, almost a winner socks I got in my bag of schwag at my last race!

oh yeah, and you can blog about it...like I'm doing right now.