Cranking away on my bike trainer one evening after work last week, I got to thinking about the indoor activities I do throughout the winter that connect in some essential way with the outdoor life I lead in the warmer months.

I’ll begin with the bicycle. I set my road bike up on the trainer in the little alcove off my living room sometime in October. I hop on a few times each week, not just for exercise during the months when short days make outdoor exercise difficult to fit in, but to maintain the muscle and lung conditioning I’ll need when I once again start commuting by bike in late April.

My indoor winter riding serves another purpose, too. I read—actually skim—a lot, propping my book, magazine or newspaper up against the aerobars that extend up and out from my handlebars. I keep a little sheaf of Post-it tabs handy to stick onto pages or paragraphs I want to return to for closer reading when I’m no longer puffing and panting.

Two or three times a week from November through April, I hit the Concord YMCA weight room. I don’t go there to “trim 'n tone,” but to push big weights that help maintain my strength year-round. An aging body can’t simply pick up that seasonal grunt labor where it left off a year ago. I’m talking about shoveling paths and walkways after a mid-winter blizzard, swinging that eight-pound splitting maul to work up my winter firewood, and the hundred other tasks of a self-reliant, semi-rural life.

Weight training does more than build strength. It helps prevent injury. It improves balance and grace by training the body’s proprioceptors, the little spindle cells embedded in muscle tissue that help the body orient itself in space and deliver information about the relationship of the various body parts to each other. Heavy weight training also helps develop a single-pointed focus in both mind and body, an awareness that translates well into other dimensions of my life. 

Because we heat our house exclusively with local wood we cut, split and stack during the warmer months, our indoor winter activities involve a lot of wood-lugging, stove-feeding and ash management. And because we don’t have an electric clothes dryer, we use the woodstove’s heat to dry our clothes, which, in turn, humidify the dry indoor air as they release their moisture. It takes less than five minutes to hang a large load on a wooden rack set up in the living room in front of the woodstove. The clothes typically dry in about two hours.

Another benefit of air-drying: energy savings. Project Laundry List (motto: “We are changing the world through clotheslines—one household at a time.”) claims that clothes dryers consume between five and 10 percent of total residential energy.

In mid-March, I’ll move the bike trainer to the spare bedroom and lower the shop lights, fitted with full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs and currently suspended near the ceiling of the alcove. Then I’ll set up the large plywood table that fills the alcove and use this space for starting hundreds of seedlings that will become part of my big backyard vegetable garden: onions, leeks and lettuce first, then cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and the hardier annual flowers. Around the second week in April, I’ll sow the warm-weather crops that don’t get transplanted until early June, tomatoes, peppers, basil.

Pretty soon after that, the ground will have thawed enough to spread my dry wood ashes in the garden and plant peas, lettuce, and spinach directly in the ground. The snowbanks will have melted enough so I can get to my clothesline without snowshoes and the light will last long enough to dry a load of wet clothes outdoors. And then I’ll get a day that allows me to pull the bike off the trainer and take a spin to the corner store for the Sunday papers. I’ll be ready!

Writing this, I notice two common threads that connect all these activities, winter and summer alike. They rely on human, instead of mechanical, power. And they turn me into an active co-producer, rather than a mere consumer. But pretty inconvenient for a busy modern life, eh?

Well, yeah, at least according to conventional wisdom. But then, in light of a growing number of inconvenient truths: global warming, the volatile global energy situation, rising rates of obesity and chronic disease, the alarming incidence of foodborne illness—staying fit on the bike, raising my own fruits and vegetables, burning local wood for heat, and hanging my laundry—make my inconvenient life feel more convenient every day.

By Peg Boyles, Writer/Editor

3/8/07