It’s a Sneaker Bike kind of week, and after riding high aloft the mighty cockpit of the Rivendell yesterday, this morning I lowered myself both literally and figuratively by getting back on the vintage mountain bike:
While both bikes sport quill stems, the cockpitular similarities between the two ends there, as you can see from this photo of the Rivendell taking a breather after cutting a shitload of firewood:
Hey, better the bike than me. The toughest thing I’ve chopped recently is a radish. In fact, it’s been seven years and I still haven’t used the hatchet Grant Petersen sent me:
I’ll cut something one of these days though, mark my words. (Though it might just be a radish. Next time I make a salad things could get a little crazy.)
Maybe I should make chopping stuff to bits with an axe part of my exercise regimen. Sure, cycling is good exercise, but you can always do more. In a way I am doing more, since by switching back and forth between a high cockpit and a low one every day I’m essentially doing push-ups. Unfortunately that only amounts to like a half a push-up each day, but hey, they add up…eventually. And at least it it beats working out with your car:
Seems to me that by skipping the car and using the ground like Lob intended you’ll get a much better workout. In fact, if you get rid of the car altogether you’ll really get in good shape since you’ll be walking and riding everywhere. I mean yeah, without a car you can’t do Spare Tire Walking Lunges:
But you can do Carry A Bunch Of Shit Home From The Grocery Store, which is a lot harder, especially if you hold the bags straight out on either side of you like a gymnast doing an iron cross.
Or, instead of your car’s spare tire, you could always carry your bike for a workout. In fact, I hear that’s already a thing:
Seems to me there should be an automotive equivalent of cyclocross in which you have to get out your car and push it up hills and through mud bogs. Maybe there is and I just don’t now anything about it. Or maybe it’s just called “owning a Saab,” since that basically describes my brief tenure with one.
Speaking of workouts involving tools and tire components, this very morning I passed someone in the park who appeared to be doing a form of exercise that involved whacking the shit out of a giant tractor tire repeatedly with a sledgehammer. I’ve seen people turning big tires end over end for exercise, but this was a new one for me. And yes, I briefly considered the guy was simply losing his damn mind, but his attire and physique suggested to me that this was fitness-based behavior. Either that, or he’s putting a new tire on his tractor and he’s tenderizing it first so it will mount more easily.
What, you don’t tenderize your tires before mounting them? There’s a Park Tool for it and everything:
Now go pound rubber.