The Foldable Bike That Got Me Moving Again

There is a kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. Mine started two winters ago when I went down on the icy driveway with a bag of groceries and could not get myself up without help. Nothing broke. Something in my confidence did. My right knee had been grumbling for years, the arthritis kind of grumbling, and after that fall I moved like a woman expecting the floor to tilt. My doctor was kind about it and firm. The worst thing I could do, she said, was stop moving, and leg strength was the closest thing to a guarantee against another fall. That was February. I nodded and did nothing for six weeks.

For a while I did not do much of anything. I tried a printout of chair exercises and made it nine days. My son sent me a link to a BARWING stationary exercise bike, the folding kind, and I let it sit in my inbox for two weeks. I had already looked at the gym across town and could not picture myself driving there in January. I had bought a used treadmill that turned into an expensive place to hang laundry. What I needed was twenty minutes in the spare bedroom with my coffee still warm, something that did not ask me to balance while a belt moved under my feet. Folding sounded like a gimmick.

What changed my mind was the seat. Most of the bikes I had looked at ask you to sit on a narrow saddle and lean forward with your weight on your wrists. My wrists are sixty-eight years old too. The BARWING has a backrest, the seat adjusts through eight height positions and two angles, and the listing describes three postures for how you sit. I am not going to pretend I understood all of that before it arrived. What I understood was that I could sit upright with something behind me, and on the mornings when my knee is loud, sitting upright is the difference between riding and not riding.

It came in a box that Gene carried in from the porch in two trips. The frame is steel, the bike weighs about forty pounds, and it went together in under an hour with the instructions flat on the carpet beside me. There is a console display at the top of the handlebars for keeping track of what you have done. The first thing I noticed was how quiet it is. There is no whirring and no clunk, nothing that carries through a one-story house. Gene watched the evening news in the next room and never once asked me to turn it down.

I started at level three of the sixteen. Ten minutes the first morning, and my knee told me about it that afternoon, so I stayed at ten minutes for a week before I added five. That is the part I want to be honest about. The bike did not fix anything on day one and I would not trust a machine that claimed to. What it did was make the practice small enough that I kept doing it. By the end of April I was riding twenty minutes most mornings at level five, and by June I could get up off the floor without using the coffee table.

The bike did not fix anything on day one. What it did was make the practice small enough that I kept doing it.

The folding part turned out not to be a gimmick, just not for the reason I expected. I do not fold it up between sessions. I fold it when the grandchildren come for a weekend and the exercise room becomes the place we put the air mattress. Thirty seconds and it stands against the wall and the room is a room again. If you live in a smaller house than mine, or in an apartment, that is not a small thing.

The resistance is magnetic, sixteen levels of it, and it moves in clear steps rather than one long slide, so you know exactly where you are from one morning to the next. It runs on a belt drive rather than a chain, which is why it stays quiet, and the footstraps adjust so my feet stay where I put them. The bike is rated to 350 pounds. Gene tried it twice, decided he prefers his walking route, and that is fine. It is not a piece of equipment that needs company.

There are things I do not love. The seat pad is firm, and the first week my sit bones had opinions. It eased off, and a folded towel would have solved it sooner if I had thought of it. The console is plain and does not do anything clever, which for me is the point and for someone else may be a disappointment. And the bike is heavy enough that carrying it up a flight of stairs would be a two-person job. Mine lives on one floor, so it never comes up.

The other change surprised me. Standing up from a chair got easier. Not because the bike trains balance, it does not, but because standing up takes leg strength and leg strength is what I was building twenty minutes at a time. My neighbor and I walk outdoors again now that the ice is gone. I am slower on that driveway than I used to be. I am also not afraid of it.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to check with your doctor first, because I did, and because I am not qualified to give you anything but my own experience. I would tell you that twenty minutes you actually do beats an hour you plan and skip. I would tell you to start two resistance levels lower than you think you need, because the point of the first month is not fitness, it is showing up. And I would tell you that a machine with a backrest and a seat you can set to eight heights is worth more to a person with a bad knee than a machine with a screen full of numbers.

I would also tell you what nobody told me. The hardest part is not the riding. It is walking into the room on a morning when nothing hurts and you would rather not. The BARWING is folded in the corner right now. My coffee is going cold. I have about twenty minutes before Gene wants to leave for the store, and that is the whole sales pitch I have in me.