I posted a while back about dragging my mountain bike out of the attic for exercise. In that post, I bitched and moaned about it being much more difficult than I’d remembered. The post is here, by the way.)
Since then, I’ve done a bit more riding. And thus, I have a few more thoughts on it:
- High gears are good. Peddling at a constant pace with low resistance is much easier / less stressful than peddling briefly at an extremely high resistance.
- Raising the seat so my legs can fully extend on every downstroke helped immensely. I’d never really thought to check that before. After raising the seat to as high as it would go, it occurred to me that before I did so, my legs, even when the pedal was as low as it could go, were scrunched up. Not good.
- Along the same lines, raising the handlebars up so that I could mostly sit up straight, as opposed to leaning over constantly, also helped a great deal.
If I continue riding, I think I’ll eventually end up getting a different seat. One that is made for, ahem, male anatomy. While I know that riding more will make the posterior-soreness fade a bit, the fact is, standard bicycle seats just aren’t very comfortable. 