business time

Thursday: Spin Class (50 min); 4 X 8 min hill repeats w/ 8 adds -- 2 min in saddle; 6 standing.

Oh, how I love spin class. I think I am beginning to understand why my mother gets up at five am three days a week to go to aerobics class. Once you have a class you really like, and an instructor who challenges you, you start bonding with the regulars in the class, and that makes you look forward to it even more. It also provides a certain guilt-inducing edge - like, "but if I don't go, they'll ask me where I was... and I'll have to say I skipped because I was working... and that's lame."

I think yesterday should be a lesson for me though - I nearly didn't go because I was so stressed. (And you usually start thinking about skipping because there's a class later that you like, but "later" does not usually resolve the problem of "I have a lot to do". In fact, by the time you hit "later" you're probably going to have more to do *and* by then you'll be tired.) Anyway, I made myself get up and go. No one missed me. I got no emails. And then I ended up working until 11:30 (also lame), so "later" would definitely not have happened. Lessons learned (as I tell myself): The hour won't make a difference. Get up. Get it done.

Anyway, the class was terrific. The hill repeats are great for me to do in a group, because I push myself much harder surrounded by other people, but I also allow myself to back off because the instructor tells me too. The repeats were killers - to stand for six minutes and add consecutively every minute, hurts. Luckily Kim plays great music. One the hill, she played this song, "Business Time", which is hilarious -my brother sent it to me so I'd heard it before, but if you haven't, you have to look it up on Youtube. By that last hill , I had my wheel clamped down so tight that my quads were burning and I would have barely heard a F16 if it had been in the room with us, but it was still pretty funny.

We finished off with a flat sprint to classical music, increasing our cadence every time an instrument was added. Then I jumped off and hopped on the treadmill for a quick transition run - it felt good, but at that point I was getting stressed about work so I only ran for five minutes then cooled down, stretched briefly and ran back to work, only to find that no one had missed me at all. Go figure.

In other equipment news - I used a very old, very classy pair of shoes that I've had since 1999. I barely wear them because they're orange and brown with bright blue insides, which I object to on moral grounds. However, I wanted to test the theory that my clips were bothering my left knee. Low and behold the knee feels absolutely great this morning. I think new bike shoes may be in order (I'm sorry to be a wanton consumer of bike shoes, but I can't wear orange and brown ankle boot bike shoes to a race - I just can't). The expert (aka my sister) has recommended some with velcro straps to make the transitions easier. I'm already adding them to my wish list. Kim also raised my bike handle bars a notch and now my lower back feels so so much better.

In order to fund this new triathlon obsession of mine, I'm happy to report to my readers (all two of them), that I did not spent a single cent between last Saturday night and the following Friday morning. I feel that I have to share this with someone since I don't know that that has happened to me since I was approximately eleven.