There are pros and cons to riding indoors vs. riding outside. On the one hand, when you’re riding outside you get to experience terrain change and adjust accordingly — you can work hard to climb hills, coast on descents to give your legs a break, etc. You also don’t have to worry about creating a lake of sweat underneath you when you’re moving along an actual bike route, and your place won’t smell like wet feet and buttcrack when you’re done with your ride. Riding indoors, however, gives you some nice luxuries — you don’t necessarily have to get up super early to begin your workout, you’re always near a bathroom, and you don’t have to worry about running out of fuel or getting in a crash. These are all nice perks, but my absolute favorite reason for cycling at home is the obvious one, and that is I can watch whatever crap I want for the duration of my workout. Jason and I watch a lot of movies when we ride. We watch TV too, but usually save the DVR’d shows for shorter recovery rides and opt for full-length movies or TV on DVD for longer workouts. Our preferences typically include the following: something with subtitles so we don’t have to blast the volume too loud no heavy dramas or depressing crap that can suck the cadence right out of you; this means we usually end up watching a lot of mindless action movies or lighthearted comedies something that’s long enough to last the entire ride (either we’ll watch a bunch of TV episodes in a row or we’ll try to find a movie with a running time that matches closely with our workout) I thought I’d try to chronicle some of the movies we watch while cycling in a segment I’ve coined Cyclepiece Theater. My first two entries come from the Paul Verhoeven collection, my favorite guilty pleasure director. Two weekends in a row we watched some awesome vintage Verhoeveny goodness. RoboCop Genre: Action Year Released: 1987 Running Time: 102 minutes Awesome?: Yes! Memorable Quote: “Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.” Lesson Learned: Crime doesn’t pay! Also, in Verhoeven-envisioned futures, men and women share locker rooms because they are sooooo progressive (see also the Starship Troopers communal shower scene). When I first met my friend Matt and told him I was from Detroit (I’m not, but saying “I’m from Detroit” to people who aren’t from Michigan is better than saying “I’m from 40 miles outside of Detroit”), he perked up and said, “Oh, really? I don’t know anything about Detroit — do you guys just have a bunch of RoboCops wandering around the city policing it?” Dude, I wish! That’d be supremely awesome. Alas, I have to make do with watching it while doing a dumb cycling workout. Boo. The movie holds up well, although you might be weirded out seeing the dad from That 70’s Show acting like a total dickwad to the entire population of Detroit. It’s a good one to cycle to — you’ll get caught up watching Peter Weller transform into RoboCop while his partner who had been paired up with him for literally less than a day feels an inexplicable bond with him (it’s like those d-bags you barely spoke to in high school who are now all of a sudden coming out of the woodwork to friend you on Facebook because OMG REMEMBER WHEN YOU BOTH WENT TO THE SAME HIGH SCHOOL?! BESTIES 4 LIFE!!). He mops up the street while Clarence Boddicker mops his toxic waste-soaked henchman off his windshield (that scene is so nasty-cool). The actual citizens of...

When I first started this nonsense sport, Teresa lent me an extra bike trainer she had so I’d be able to do indoor rides. It was a sad little thing that Jason wasn’t allowed to use because I was convinced he’d snap it in half. After a couple seasons of slumming it on the little trainer that could, I finally shelled out major coinage for a Kinetic fluid road bike trainer, the luxury sedans of trainers. It’s supposed to be one of the quietest trainers on the market, meaning I’d be able to ride and actually hear the movie I’m watching without having to blast the volume up so loud, my neighbors want to murder me. The first one I bought had some B.S. problem where some hole wasn’t drilled properly, forcing Jason to hammer the screw in all janky-like. You’d think shelling out a few hundred bones for a pricey hunk of metal meant it would be engineered properly, but I guess that’s not the case. Despite the minor setback, I was pretty stoked to finally be rollin’ on a “grown up” trainer, and a whisper quiet one at that! …or so I thought. About six months after using the trainer, one day I hopped on my bike for a spin and my Kinetic promptly sounded as if the Inception buzzy noise had personified, gotten stuck behind my wheel, and was being slowly and tortuously ground to death. I tried to ignore it at first, but this stupid noise got louder and louder to the point where I was blasting Teen Mom 2 at full volume in a futile effort to hear whiny girls and their baby daddy drama over the honking whir of my trainer (yes, I watch Teen Mom — it’s part of a Scared Straight program for my uterus so it doesn’t try any funny business). Eventually I gave up and hauled the bright green abomination back to whence it came so I could swap it out (REI, you mofos have the best return policy ever). Thankfully, the apathetic customer service rep was fine with me exchanging the nearly year-old trainer, so I grabbed a brand spankin’ new one and brought it home. Jas offered to help me set up Kinetic 2: Electric Boogaloo, but when he unpacked it and began assembling it, he noticed something wrong. Kinetic, you’ve screwed me again. The new trainer came with a screw that was, inexplicably, too short to fit through the one hole it was designed for. You’re kidding me! This shit is worse than Ikea — I expect some discrepancies when I’m buying hard-packed sawdust passing as furniture for a fraction of the cost, but when I’m plunking down hundreds of bucks for a hefty piece of machinery, I (foolishly) figure that all the pieces are manufactured properly. Rather than have an entire department in REI hate my guts, I opted to go to Lowe’s and shell out 15 cents for a replacement screw. Afterwards, Jas was able to get my trainer working properly and I’m once again riding in relative quiet…that is, until it borks again (which, considering my luck, I fully expect it to do). Of course, Jason’s trainer has given him zero problems while I’m on my third one. Oh well, the best I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the Kinetic plays nice so I can ride and watch my crappy action movies and trashy TV in...

I’m at the tail end of nursing my Achilles back to health after a bout of tendinitis left me sidelined from running all winter. Lately I’ve been increasing my jog-walks and the Achilles has been feeling better and better, but my trainer has thrown in some elliptical workouts as well until I’m back in running action. Thus, I’ve begrudgingly trudged over to the Y to elbow my way to a machine in the cramped, stuffy cardio cave so I can sneak in workouts longer than the 30 minutes the equipment is programmed to allot me. While I was there last night, ellipticising it up, a girl got onto the machine next to me and commenced her workout. The rest of this post is dedicated to her.