This last weekend I assembled the exercise bike and actually started to use it and record data on fatfuckingbastard.com. After settling in to using it every day, today – the fifth day of using it – the thing went ‘clunk’ and stopped feeding data to the ‘trip computer’. Annoyingly it did this at four minutes and 25 seconds, and since today’s minimum time was five minutes I got a zero score.
While the bike itself still appears to work as a bike, without being able to record distanced travelled my plan for encouraging myself to keep going is pretty much fucked. I’m pretty scunnered about this, and my options aren’t great either. I doubt I could take it back to Argos, given that I’m substantially heavier than the bike is rated for and that could be the direct cause of it breaking. I don’t fancy my chances of keeping it up every day without some scoring/tracking mechanism, and with the heart rate monitor I bought being hilariously unreliable (to the point of claiming that my heart rate was zero) – and heart rate numbers not being great for calculating a score from anyway – the only metric I can really measure is time spent, and that’s not really enough.
I don’t really want to buy another bike. Yeah, I got 1/3 off this one, so it only cost £33, but if I replace it at normal price I can expect to pay £10 a day if it lasts as long as this one did. That’s just stupid. I could get a bike that’s actually designed for my weight. John Lewis will sell me one that’s rated for near enough for around £300, which seems like a lot of money to spend on a bike that doesn’t go anywhere. (They have one that’s actually rated for above my weight. It’s described as a ‘basic’ model and costs £900 – or more than the fee for my wife’s citizenship application. Madness.)
I could try taking the thing apart and see if I can fix it myself. As a child I always loved taking things apart, and that still lingers on as an adult – but I can’t imagine that I’d have much luck getting it working and there’s a fair chance of destroying the basic cycling functionality which does still actually work.
What to do? Suggestions from the audience are welcome.
Comments 2
What about picking up a normal bike trip meter? Calibrating it might be tricky, though, if your stationary bike doesn’t have actual wheels.
Other than that, your best choice may be to just suck it up and save for/spend the £££ on proper equipment. You get what you pay for and all that.
Posted 08 Sep 2011 at 5:33 pm ¶Yeah, it doesn’t have any actual wheels – the pedals just go into a black box where magic (doesn’t) happen.
I’m probably going to crack it open this weekend and see if I can get it working again, failing that replacing it will have to wait – we’re going on holiday this month (my first actual proper holiday in well over a decade), so money’s a bit tight.
Plus it’s difficult to justify spending nearly an entire iPad’s worth of money on an exercise bike.
Posted 08 Sep 2011 at 5:41 pm ¶Post a Comment