Spinning....

Week: 6

 

Today I did my first Indoor Cycling class, also called Spinning. I still have the goal of doing the Seattle to Portland bike ride next July, so this is a good first step towards getting some ‘saddle’ time.  For those who haven’t done Spinning, I can highly recommend it! 

 

It was a blast.  The instructor was very motivating, and provided great imagery.  I was a bit concerned as the first thing she said was “…as promised last time we did speed work, so this session we are going to tackle the hills……”  This meant a lot of high-resistant training and lots of standing up and trying to power to the top of these imaginary hills.

 

A few other things:  make sure if you’ve got a wide butt you get one of the wide seats.  There are a few bikes that have extra-wide seats.  I was able to get one and this made the hour long session tolerable.    Also, error on the side of the handlebars being too high.  Mine were too low and it was painful in my hands to support my upper body.  Finally bring a couple of extra towels.  I probably doubled my ‘normal’ sweat output in this session. 

 

At the end I was very exhausted, but felt super satisfied.  My trainer said few people actually go through their whole first session.  By the way Emily went right along with me during the session on her own bike.  I think she pushed 2x or 3x what I did, which was evident by the level of sweat below her bike which could’ve been measured by the cup-load.

 

Emily and I are going to do this regularly on Fridays.  I had such a good time I may try to get some more of these classes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays.