A few weeks ago, I ordered an early birthday present for myself. I had to get rid of our well-used exercise bike because of vein issues. I could no longer sit on the seat without causing problems in pretty much the entire lower half of my body. I had been ogling recumbent exercise bikes for a while now, and found one that could (sort of) get squashed into our budget. Naturally, I then informed my loving husband of my actions, and he (thankfully) supported my decision. Ever since then, I have been cyber-stalking the tracking information for my new bike, and was grateful to discover it would arrive today.
Now, before you start scolding me for calling something with only one wheel a "bike," let it be known that I'm a stubborn creature. I've been calling them "exercise bikes" for decades now, and I am not going to change. "Exercise cycle" just sounds weird to my ears, and there's no way I'm calling it a unicycle.
Getting back to today, I spent far too much time staring out the window in the hopes that the delivery van would make its miraculous appearance and I could cart my sixty-seven pound box of unassembled parts into the house before the kidlets came home from school. Fat chance. (See? It's not just me that's fat around here!) The dang thing arrived while I was out at school picking up my little darlings. Thankfully, two of the kidlets were arguing over who had the right to use the bathroom first, while the third simply slipped in the open door and won that race, so I could drag the box into our living room without too much interference.
Once in the living room, I opened up the box, and surveyed the contents. There were approximately 3.45 billion parts to this thing. I decided I would carry them down to our basement a bit at a time, and assemble it down there where the kidlets could not "help." I very carefully laid out all the pieces, and even wrote tiny numbers on minuscule squares of paper so that each and every piece could be matched to the instruction manual by part number. (That worked so well, by the way, that I intend on doing the same thing for everything else I might ever have to assemble.) I read the instruction manual first to get a general feel for what I had to do, then set about assembling my recumbent exercise bike.
The exercise bike I had chosen was actually quite simple to assemble, despite its numerous parts. There was no need to translate Gnomish writing or practice using my expletives. Granted, I did manage to rip the skin off my knuckles at one point, but that was due to my own stupidity and not a manufacturing defect or error in the instructions. Once it was assembled, I raced upstairs to find my sneakers and sat down to test it out.
Back when I had ordered this thing, I had read pretty close to 200 reviews to make sure I knew exactly what I was getting myself into with this purchase. The only thing that really made me leery was a number of people saying that this recumbent bike just was not sufficient for a decent workout. They found it too easy, and the resistance levels were, um, futile. So when I plunked myself down to do a quick test run of my new machine, I was expecting it to be fairly easy for me to handle.
By the love of all things sacred, that recumbent bike just about killed me in the five minutes I tested it. First of all, I had to dial down the resistance almost immediately. Granted, I had not realized it had been set to the highest level, but it was still disconcerting to realize I could not handle something a number of people found not even worthy of calling exercise. Secondly, I am not actually used to having to hold my legs up in the position to pedal this thing. I guess I never bothered to find out if "recumbent" actually meant "having to use muscles that you did not know you even had." I think I met my match in my piece of exercise equipment.
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