Torture Room Less Torturous

This...

...leads to this.

Above, you see version 2.0 of MIMIC: The Meteorologically Immune Musculocardiorespiratory Improvement Center.

Okay, okay, it's our study. But the good news this year is that, having moved our butts all the way out to Western Mass, we're currently living in an apartment with no basement. The reason that's good news is that it means I don't have to ride the rollers in the basement. The missus gave me permission to ride upstairs, in the large, airy room that also holds our desks and a couple clothes closets.

I already spend way too much time in this room, because it's where I keep my stretching and physical therapy tools -- a big plastic bin filled with foam rollers (ouch!), yoga mat, tennis balls of all sizes (used for rolling, like the foam rollers -- again, ouch!), playground balls for doing wall slides, the shorter version of The Stick, and so on and so forth. Because of my IT band issues, I already stretch, foam-roll or otherwise torture myself in there at least twice a day. Now that Old Man Winter's arrived, I also spend some number of hours in there each week goin' round and round on the roller-thingies. No matter how miserable I get doing mile after mile (and -- as the saying goes -- not getting any closer to the wall), I try to remind myself how much better my current roller set-up is than last year.

• I have two big windows. (I had one tiny one, far away, last year.)
• I have a TV with a VCR built-in. (I only had my iPod last year.) (And I'm now interested in trading with anyone who has VHS tapes of cycling races, endurance sport movies, etc. Just post a comment.)
• I have a comfortable, relatively bright, attractive room. (The basement was dark and dank, nothing but old cement everywhere.)
• I don't have to clonk down two flights of stairs in my cleats and kit to start riding (and then realize I forgot something and clonk back up, and back down -- ad infinitum. On one of those trips, my cycling shoes were guaranteed to slip on the carpeted stairs and I'd go flying). I just walk in the room and hop on.
• And get this: The bathroom is right across the hall. Woohoo for the small luxuries!

Let us now praise indoor riding! (OK, let us at least be less grumpy about it.)