Spinning tonight
Every now and then, a spinning session is leaves me feeling happy – an exercise high that lasts. It helps when I arrive in plenty of time, so I’m not rushing to set up the bike and can do loosen my legs before the proper warm-up. It also helps to have had a constructive day before the session. This morning I did a load of long-overdue filing, the end-of-week alternative-location TimeMachine backup of our working macs, wrapped and boxed a lot of things to send to Worcester and wrote up some notes from the Centre for Social Informatics get-together on Friday. And much as I hate to admit it, getting a lift to spinning means I’m not panicked from slaloming around the low-lying manhole-covers that litter Ferry Road.

Tonight was another of Martin’s ‘Sunday Sundowners’, with the music changed to include some requests. The class has grown a bit – there were 6 folk the first time we went but it’s grown to 10 tonight.

I appreciate the pattern of 3- to 5- minute workpieces interspersed with 30 to 60 seconds of recovery. (I prefer the Ski Sunday theme for the recovery periods.) The workpieces start with a relatively challenging baseline for 60 seconds or so, before increasing the intensity (by increasing cadence, resistance or getting into a more challenging stance – sometimes all three). Then the intensity might get harder, or go back to baseline, before another increased-intensity minute.

Because I know that in a recovery period is never more than 5 minutes away, I can put more into each workpiece. Also, I enjoyed a lot of tonight’s music – the right tempos to pound the pedals without fearing falling over when running.

The only glitch tonight was due to me misinterpreting Martin’s comment that there were just two tracks to go – I thought both of those would be workpieces rather than being one workpiece followed by a warm-down, so I didn’t quite put everything into the first of these two. Ah well, it meant I was capable of speech not long after we finished!