Bini is the new ARD Support trainee, and I’m her primary mentor. She took her first run ever at the end of the sim last night, and I got really nervous — as if it was my first run all over again. I realized that training her is going to be fun.
I got home at 10 (these late night sims seem to be showing up more and more on the schedule as the training division tries to accomodate missions plus a zillion training objectives) and my new bike trainer was sitting outside my door. Woohoo! I opened it up and took everything out of the box, and immediately got frustrated. Why is it that the more expensive the item is, the fewer clear instructions it comes with?? There were only a handful of separate pieces, but it took me more than half an hour to get everything together correctly.
I must admit here that bikes intimidate me, for reasons I can’t quite explain. I have a perception that they’re really complicated, and really easy to screw up. I don’t think it’s true, but I can’t quite get over it. I was terrified that I’d set the trainer up wrong, strip one of the screws, or put my bike on incorrectly. To work with the trainer, the rear wheel skewer on my bike had to be replaced with the one that came with the trainer, and I had a mental image of all the gears just falling apart in my hands at the moment I took the old skewer out.
Of course that didn’t happen, and Jose gave me weird looks the whole time. In his attempts to help, I felt like he was rushing me, and I was unreasonably worried that he’d mess something up. Finally he sat back and smiled and said: “So you do slow down when you care about something. Just like I wanted to go slow when I first set up my iPod. You want to check everything twice before you set up your trainer.” He looked rather satisfied. I guess he’s right.
The trainer is pretty cool, though I only rode it for a couple minutes last night (mainly because I needed to put air in my tires; the slightly deflated tires made the wheel slip occasionally on the roller). One problem I immediately realized is that my speed sensor is on the front wheel, which isn’t moving, and therefore I have no feedback on my speed and distance. I’ll have to switch the sensor; I hope the wire is long enough. The trainer does cause a fairly low-level hum and vibration, so it’ll be interesting to see if I get any complaints from the downstairs neighbors.
If I can’t get the sensor moved tonight, I’m going to do my workout anyway. I’m planning on 10 miles, which, assuming 15 mph (which is on the slow side) whould take me 40 minutes. So I’ll just put the bike in a medium gear and go for time.