Spinning fun…

Last night was my first spin session at =PR= led by Margie Shapiro. Wow…was it ever hard! But I felt so good after! (Good that I finished, perhaps?) The class was to start at 6:00 and it was recommended to arrive 5 minutes early to set up. I left home about 5:20 and breezed over in about 15 minutes! The door was still locked but Margie showed up right after I did and other people started arriving shortly after.

There were 10 people in the room, including Margie. Her husband who is training for his first half Ironman was there on his brand new bike as well as her brother. There were two other new people (besides me) to the sessions, everyone else was quite familiar. We were arranged into an oval with everyone facing in, and there was loud music playing – it was fun!

Now, I’ve done spinning at home and even own a few Spinervals DVDs (though I’ve never actually used them (they were free) but I am now inspired to do so!) and have done some of the types of things we did last night. But I am pretty certain I’ve never worked quite that hard! It is pretty motivating to keep it up/keep trying when there are 9 other people in the room! I’ll be motivated in the future to do some of the Team Z spin classes once I’m officially back on the team!

After a 10 minute warm up we did 15 minutes of 1-legged drills of 45 seconds per leg alternating back and forth. Then we had 2 minutes of easy spinning before we moved on to the main set, which we did twice: 3 minutes of high cadence on an easy gear (trying to maintain an RPM of 120) followed by 1 minute easy then 3 minutes of low cadence on a hard gear (trying to maintain an RPM of 40-50 – each time working on a specific part of the pedal stroke) followed by another minute of easy. We then went on to 5 minutes of high cadence on a slightly harder gear than before, trying to get to 120 but as high as we could. Twice during this there were 5 second ‘bursts’ of speed. Holy cow! After this we had I think 3 sets of 30 second speed ups (or something where we increased cadence every 10 seconds) followed by 30 seconds of easy spin. After the final one (because I can’t remember how many we did…maybe it was 5 sets?) we had a warm down. Again…Wow!

I can’t wait till next Tuesday!

And going back to Sunday’s ride with Carol and Pam…it did NOT happen due to the drizzly and somewhat chilly weather. Carol and I were prepared with our EK jackets and everything! I spun at home for 1.5 hours followed by 1 whole mile on the treadmill. Carol and Pam were heading to a spin class and also were going to treadmill after. As Es --- IRONMAN said in her comment to my last post, I should just wear the damn jacket! (OK, I added ‘damn’…)

Happy Training!

PS – Here’s a link to a recent “Washington Post” article on =PR=!