Rain

Texas needs rain, so I really can’t complain that my Thursday morning ride was rained out this morning. I am anxious enough about being “ready” for the big ride in April that I didn’t dare to skip a day of training entirely. So, I reserved a bike in a spinning class at the gym where we’re members.

Now, I’m no stranger to this gym. Three days a week, I go in around 7AM and work my tail off lifting weights, doing sit ups (240 yesterday!) and rolling around on the stability balls. And Stephen was pretty surprised to see that I’ve logged about 100 more miles than he has throughout this training season on the “real” bike. So, I’m no slouch.

But I was completely unprepared for the level of exertion the spinning class demanded! It was billed as a “Spin-Core” class which means that we’d spend 45 minutes on the bike and then 15 minutes doing core exercises. I was actually bemoaning “only” 45 minutes on the bike – how boring.

I got a little orientation to the bikes and to the class and then the sadist – er, instructor got on her bike and started coaching. After a 5 minute warm up she started telling us to “add a gear” about every minute to simulate a hill. No biggie…it’s just that this “hill” was about 5 minutes UP. At the top she allowed us to drop a gear or two to simulate going downhill– but there’s no such thing as coasting on these bikes. If you stop pedaling, the pedals keep spinning and you have two options: fall off (I didn’t like that option) or start pedaling again. So, I kept pedaling and the next thing I knew she was telling us to start up another hill.

About 15 minutes into the class we had our first set of “position 3” intervals where we stood as we pedaled for 1-2 minutes and then sat back down on the saddle for 1 minute. I did two intervals and had to sit the remaining 3. For the last 10 minutes of the class, it was stand for 45 seconds, sit for 15 seconds, with one minute of rest in between intervals. I did one of those. I figured since I was no longer just perspiring, but had sweat dripping from my face onto my hands, I was working plenty hard. I offered up a heartfelt prayer of thanks when the 45 minutes were up. The instructor estimated that we’d gone about 18 miles. That’s about 1.5 times as fast as I usually go.

The core stuff at the end was a walk in the park. The only move she did that I couldn’t keep up on was the ball pass. That one’s pretty tough and I’ll get better at it over a couple weeks.

One of the men in the class told me that I had to come back and take another class tomorrow and one on Saturday because “if you don’t, you’ll never come back.” That’s a chance I’ll just have to take, I think.