How To Ride An Elliptigo

All right, about right there. It's pretty good.

So you're just joining me. This is down to the ymca.

And you know, now that I think about it, I don't know if I've really broadcast live for you before while I've been out, you know, on the trails, mucking around. But you've got nothing better to do with your time right now. You can get a feel for Washington state and the suburbs. Here comes a car. Hopefully they see me. That is the one nice thing about this Elliptigo is it's up high. So you're like twice as high as you are on a bike, which is cool for both being seen by cars.

And it's also kind of cool for just being able to see the sights.

Look around a little bit more. And your core muscles, your core muscles get a little bit more workout than they do on a bike because.

You'Re standing up. If you want to see a picture of this thing, just.

Go to tinyurl.com.

Elliptigo.

That's hill number one. There's basically.

I guess there's really only two hills on the way to the gym.

In a couple years, we're planning on moving.

Up to the top of a really big hill and.

My hill climbing skills will improve. Okay, we're going downhill. It's going to get kind of windy, so.

I'm not going to talk for a minute.

So you know me on a kind of tooling around. Typical day, I'll average on this thing. You know, on a day like today where I'm just out kind of for fun.

It'll be about 15 miles an hour or so average.

I've gotten this thing up to 30.

Ah, pickup truck full of dogs and dudes without their shirts on.

See a lot of that here in Spokane.

So here we are kind of going down to the entrance to the trail. Look out for people with strollers and, you know, I like to take this route. There is a slightly more direct route I could take on the roads, but this is fewer cars, much more scenic. So this bridge goes over the Spokane river. And this is actually, I'll run down here sometimes, bike down here and swim like I came down here yesterday and swam. It's usually a pretty cold river, so it's actually nice for like, you know, recovering after a race like the one I did a couple days ago when your legs are really sore.

All right.

You know what else is kind of cool about this, I didn't really think about. Now I've got my phone mounted up here.

You know, I don't know. I don't really know how well you. You can hear me. I'll kind of know after I watch the replay of the video how much wind.

Kind of mutes my voice.

But the cool thing is that.

You know, I could probably talk on the phone.

Maybe record a podcast. I don't know about that.

Sometimes.

Podcasts while you're exercising can get a little messy.

I did that a few times on the. On the enduranceplanet.com nutrition podcast.

On my indoor bike trainer.

I really don't sound all that intelligent because so much blood goes to your exercising muscles and not so much to your brain, if you know what I'm talking about. So that makes it interesting. You see all those firefighters and dudes, they're like, who's that? Who's that schizophrenic dude talking to himself while he's out exercising? Little do they know that I'm broadcasting to an audience of.

Probably nobody.

But I like to imagine there's thousands of you at your office on this Wednesday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon. Nothing better to do. Just out for a little look to go ride along the Spokane river with me.

Cheering as I get to hill number two, cheering me on. Oh, the only thing that sucks about broadcasting live is that if I try to put my music on, it will interrupt the broadcast.

Close out my broadcasting software so.

I have no music to motivate me up this hill.

Wow, that guy was really hairy.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's like blowing in the wind.

I don't know. I don't know if that would be hot or if it would, like, kind of help you cool off as the hair collects sweat and becomes like a, you know, wet cotton T shirt or something. I don't know. If you're hairy and you ride bikes with your shirt off, let me know how that's going for you.

All right.

So now we're heading south.

If you're just joining today's broadcast, we are in eastern Washington state, in the bustling town of Spokane, Washington, on the Centennial Trail. Yes, the very same paved asphalt trail that Lewis and Clark discovered as they hiked from Louisiana to the Pacific Ocean. I'm not sure if this trail had the yellow divider line in it back then, but it does now. As you can see, lots of pedestrians.

As well as cyclists. That guy was laughing at me. I get that a lot when I'm on this thing. They're like.

He doesn't have a bike, yo. What's funny is I. I was fresh Last week, riding this thing, and I passed, like, a group of cyclists. That was close. I passed a group of cyclists, like four guys.

Just kind of comical because they were in their, you know, their spandex and their serious riding gear, and I put on the sprint and passed them.

But everybody knows I'm a blood doper, so, you know.

Have to take into account my illegal performance enhancing supplement use.

It's kind of funny. Somebody actually accused me of that at that triathlon. Not to my face. One of my friends was talking to a referee at the race, and he's like.

He's like, you know, that Ben Greenfield, he's kind of an unethical guy.

And my friend's like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? He's like, well, I did a little research on him and turns out he used to be a bodybuilder, if you know what I mean.

And the guy's like, no, what do you mean, my friend? Yeah, like, oh, you know what I mean. So there you have it, folks. Apparently I inject steroids up my butt every morning.

And keep my own blood in my freezer. Re inject at opportune times.

Oh, and by the way, I am jesting. I do not and never have used anything. Even when I was bodybuilding, I was scared of that stuff. You know, quit working early.

I think I'll still probably want to have sex when I'm 60 years old.

Hopefully my wife shares that.

Opinion.

It's hot out. Guessing maybe it's 90 right now.

Right now I'm training for the Vegas Half Ironman World Championships, And.

I think 90 in Spokane, Washington is nothing compared to what Vegas is going to be like. So next week, I'll start sitting in a sauna.

Every other day, trying to work myself up to about 45 minutes at a time spent in the sauna, sitting there, biting my lips, staring at the wall.

Usually I'll bring a magazine or, you know, an MP3 player.

And after about 15 minutes, you kind of start to lose your ability to concentrate. At the 30 minute mark, you're pretty much like, sitting in the sauna.

Pretty much not doing anything except just like.

Counting.

Count to 20 over and over again.

Just waiting to be rescued.

Swear, though it makes racing in hot weather seem easy.

The nice part is if I do that and then go race Vegas and kind of hold on to some of that heat acclimation for hona. All right, so gonna have to get off the trail now and cut over to the ymca.

Join all the young men at the Christian association for a workout.

We like the ymca. My wife will be meeting me here and we'll go upstairs and the plates together and the kids will be over in kid care and then I'll ride home and we're gonna have some fish tacos tonight. My wife told me that as I was leaving, I'm like, we having dinner? She's like fish tacos. I'm like woohoo. Tell you what.

I could work out for a long time if there's some fish tacos waiting for me at the end.

We had beef liver last night. Lots of good fat soluble vitamins and iron and niacin and.

Good healthy protein.

Little chewy textures, you know, texture is not quite heavenly ambrosia like, but.

It'S interesting.

They organic grass fed beef liver.

Had it with onions on top of a salad.

I've been doing more and more of the low carb stuff lately.

Got a few athletes who I'm working with.

I've got three of them right now doing one variation or another of a low carb diet. I kind of want to. Sometimes when I do that with athletes, I want to make sure I see what they're experiencing, what they feel like. So I.

Have been doing that diet a little bit myself.

It doesn't work too bad, but I still think you need to eat carbs during a race.

I was like 20 gels during that.

Half ironman. And then, oh gosh, I'm just not used to eating sugar. So I, yeah, the rest of the day is kind of nasty from a toilet time standpoint.

That's one thing I don't like about racing is if you're not used to eating all that sugar, you just like your body rebels after the race. It's like get this out of my system.

Eject, eject, fail, evacuate. So here we are at the ymca.

And.

You know what I think I'm gonna do is not park on the bike rack because I always get nervous. This elliptical trainer is so kind of like different that I get nervous, you know, like some kids are gonna take it or something. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pull back around to the door of the Y.

I'm going to park it up by the door.

I'm going to park up, up in the grass and what I'll do is I'll lock it up.

By just locking the wheels together.

Okay.

Is that a bike or is that a scooter? Yeah, it's kind of a bike scooter. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun.

Wow. I even had a. Looks like a couple folks watching. All right, so let me. Let me unhook my phone, and I'll show you kind of a picture here of what I was riding.

So you can.

Know what I've been doing for the past. It took me. It's like 17 minutes to get here. That's not bad. That was quite 15 miles an hour. But. So.

This is what I was just riding. Okay. That's what it looks like. And there you go, the elliptigo. And, yeah, if you have any questions about that, just tweet me or Facebook me or email me or do any of those other geeky social networking things. And. Yeah, cool. Anyways, I'm gonna go in and pump iron now. Go to pump iron.

Get myself jacked. My steroids. All right, folks. Later.