Ah well, it turned out that my dream of four spinning highs in a row was a fantasy too far. I’d not slept well on Tuesday night: despite not finishing freelance work until 2am, I woke up ravenous and bathed in sweat about 4:30 and stayed awake for at least an hour. Not a good foundation for a full day of grinding out a research publication!

Anyway, I started the spinning session in a mixture of hope and trepidation. The session was so full that even the old Schwinn bikes on the stage were being pressed into service. (Stewart thought riding one was like driving an old classic car.)

After about 15 minutes, my left lower left thigh (just above the knee) started grumbling. I swore at it sotto voce, rubbed in some analgesic cream, reduced the resistance and carried on: I’ve found such niggles often disappear after a few minutes and indeed this one did. However, it was replaced by my right thigh grumbling in the same way. This too responded to swearing and analgesic but about halfway through the session my right upper thigh and hip began moaning loudly. The only way to shut them up was to reduce the resistance to almost nothing.

So instead of an exercise high, I felt quite depressed. Rationally, I knew this was due to tiredness, self-inflicted pain and overblown expectations. Before this week, such exercise highs have come my way about once every 6 weeks, so 4 consecutive highs was asking far too much.

There were some good moments though:

• About 5 minutes into the session, we had been running on the pedals. I’d had my eyes closed so I could concentrate on my cadence and form, and so didn’t notice the rest of the class sitting down. Andy eventually called out ‘you can sit down now Bruce!’, much to everyone’s amusement. (I was laughing too.)
• Elly got to try some SPD bike shoes – she was buzzing slightly from the extra power they gave her.

So overall I’m happy about that session and looking forward to our next session – the Sunday Sundowner!

I’ve just ensured Lev’s full complement of lights is working:

• front: 2 scullies* on each handle-bar drop, a knog** on the front of the pannier rack, a skully and a blinder*** on the head-tube
• back: a blinder on the seat-post, 2 skullies and 2 knogs on the rear of the pannier rack
• helmet: 1 white no-brand flashing LED light dangling from the chin-strap and two red ‘no-brands’ on the rear chines.

So that’s 8 front lights and 7 rear lights. I’m pretty sure that they won’t all stop working at once and I’m damn sure no driver will have any excuse not to see me!

*skull-shaped LED lights powered by 2 CR2302 coin-batteries each. The LEDs are where the eyes would be. Skullies are either off, flashing or continually on.

*LED lights powered by 2 CR2302 coin-batteries each. Knogs are either off, slowly flashing, flash-flash-pause-(repeat), rapidly flashing or continually on.

***very bright LED lights, powered by USB-rechargable built-in batteries. Blinders are either off, slowly flashing, pattern-flashing, rapidly flashing or continually on. I plan to get a hub-dynamo and rectifier/accumulator to keep these lights and jPhone charged en-route.

OK, I’m still buzzing from tonight’s spinning, so this may be gibberish. However, I wanted to celebrate in words a chain of three highly enjoyable sessions.

Spinning the IT blues away 

• Elly and I did the Sunday Sundowner, naturally enough on Sunday 13th. The regular instructor, Martino, was away in Basel with some of the other instructors, taking part in a 12-hour spinning marathon, so his place was amply filled by Alan. (There’s some mug-shots here.) Because this class isn’t as fully-booked as others and we arrived at Lifescycle in plenty of time, we got our two favourite bikes (left end of the front row). These bikes’ resistance controls work well – around 3 full turns from zero resistance to ‘the pedals won’t move!’, so it’s easy to set resistance that’s appropriate to the current activity.We had a giggle moment when we both thought Alan said, about 45 minutes into the session, that we were on the final working track. We looked at each other, communicating ‘Is that it? We’ve not worked enough!’ However, there were 2 more tracks to go, so we bashed on to an enjoyably sweaty finish.
• We then did Andy’s Monday evening session. Andy was just back from the Basel bash: despite his claim to be wiped out from 6 continuous hours in a Swiss saddle, followed by an amount of socialising, he appeared to be more effervescent than ever. (If he wasn’t, then he’s a bloody good actor!) Again, we were on our favourite bikes and so the session sped by. Every track was a challenge – but an achievable challenge, rather than the clock-watching torture spinning can be. (That usually happens when I arrive late and so am in the wrong mood to start with.)
• Tonight was Josh and Zara’s sportive training session. This is usually very hard – I feel utterly drained by the time it’s over. However, tonight it was a refreshing change from today’s freelance work problems.* Despite arriving late, I was on a bike that had great resistance control**, and was in the mood to pump my frustration out through my pedals. OK, I know I’m nowhere near a match for the real roadents and triathletes who do this session, but it felt great to me. Again, everything felt just about achievable, and the mix of music, instruction and activities worked very well for me.

   

  There was another amusing moment about half-way through when Josh shouted out ‘Are you with us?’. I guess he didn’t get the response he was hoping for: as far as I could hear, he said ‘that was rubbish’, yelled out again and got a much more enthusiastic response. (I don’t think that spinning or Lifescycle are in any way cults – this occasional exhortation is used to put spinners into a mood where they will test themselves as much as they can for their own benefit. The instructors don’t get paid more if we finish feeling happy, except that we’re more likely to come back next time. And since a session costs only £5, I’m sure the instructors won’t ever get Mararishi-rich on their earnings from Lifescycle.)

  * Wrestling with font issues, Quark-utter-shite-DTP-software-Express, my XServe’s dying power supply and needing to install QuankAbcess on my TiBook. (It’s half the speed of the XServe, with far less RAM – but its power supply isn’t dying [yet]! Oh, and then there was the fun of swapping authorisation for my copy of Quank from the XServe to the TiBook. The final joke was that this bout of freelance work will net me no more than £30. It should have taken under an hour but ended up taking over six hours and preventing me from doing a lot of other things.
  ** It’s at the back, in the right-hand corner. I think it’s bike 4.

  BTW, Josh, I was fine when you asked – I’d just slowed to crunch down a glucose tablet.

   

  I finished feeling very buzzed – perhaps I wasn’t working hard enough! However, I prefer to think I got it just right. I felt empowered when cycling home. I couldn’t accelerate up Orchard Brae but the rest of the 4-mile cycle zipped by in about 17 minutes or so.

So that’s three great sessions – with accompanying exercise highs – on three successive days. Prior to this week, such highs have come about once every 6 to 8 weeks. So I wonder whether tomorrow’s session (the final consecutive-day session for this week) will be the end or whether both Elly and I can come away glowing again. Here’s hoping for the latter!

Sacrilege?
It’s possible that my favourite CD ever is the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible. It’s certainly one of my most-palyed pieces of music. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a stark, desperately painful glimpse into the depression and and metal illness that caused a young man (he was 27 – almost 20 years younger than me) to disappear, probably into suicide. For me, to listen to it is to feel simultaneously guilty for all of the complacency and luxury I’ve become used to, to relive catharsis from my own history and to realise that however ill I may have been, these episodes were nothing to what this bloke went through. It’s also, to me, bloody great music.

So I began wondering about a spinning session to the whole of this record. Obviously this will never happen, because spinning generally works by having contrasts and changes in the music, but if it did it might go something like this:
(Warning – there’s some swearing in the lyrics.)

1. Yes
   Warm-up, followed by medium-paced seated climb
2. Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit’sworldwouldfallapart
   Seated sprint during verses, slow out of the saddle against very heavy resistance during choruses
3. Of walking abortion
   medium-paced seated climb during verses, slow out of the saddle against very heavy resistance during choruses
4. She is suffering
   very slow push against heavy resistance during verses, medium-pace against less resistance during choruses
5. Archives of pain
   medium pace out of saddle during verses, sprint out of saddle during choruses
6. Revol
   start slow for introduction, then ramp up during the verses, then sprint during choruses
7. 4st 7lb
   medium-paced out of saddle all the way through
8. Mausoleum
   faster-than-medium-pace in saddle during verses, same pace out of saddle during chorusesFaster would be here but I’m saving it to the end
9. This is yesterday
   slow in the saddle against heavy resistance (rising to very heavy by the end of the song)
10. Die in the summertime
    medium-fast out of saddle against moderate resistance during verses, against heavy resistance during choruses
11. The intense humming of evil 
    (Apologies for the advert at the beginning of the video)
    The tempo of this song is very slow, so it would have to be a seated climb with cadence at twice tempo
12. PCP
    The calm before the storm: standing but jogging, despite the faster tempo
13. Faster
    (Lyrics are here.)
    4 straight minutes of sprinting out of the saddle (hand position 3), giving it everything, letting the physical demands of spinning turn the emotional destruction in this song into a positive, glowing climax.

Like I say, fantasy and probably sacrilege!

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=420901831314393

(Because today felt something like a resurgence, because I’m going to England tomorrow and because the lyrics to this post’s music deserve to be read, here they are.)

Today was our last spin session before heading to Worcester. I’d slept slightly better last night and had an achievable amount of must-do tasks today. We’d decided to spin today to take the final opportunity before 5 days of enforced eating and sprout-induced flatulence with very little cycling to take the edge off. (We’ll be staying at my brother’s house, about 5 miles from our parents. The journey involves a quite serious hill.)

The session itself was, as far as I could tell, a repeat of Wednesday’s session but oh, what a difference! Instead of hating it and stopping to swear at my recalcitrant legs, I could keep going – even retaining some reserve for the final push. The jumps and climbs seemed to work, while my bike’s resistance control attenuated well: a quarter-turn increased the resistance by the right amount to move from sitting to running rather than stopping me dead. There were some old spin favourites (such as Underworld’s Always loved a film and Born slippy [of Trainspotting fame]), a snippet of Stairway to heaven* and other staples I can’t yet identify. The rock section (I think the first track is AC:DC’s Thunderstruck) towards the end had me up on the pedals, almost running, and the end section was something to aspire to, rather than Wednesday’s unachievable torture. My knees, thighs and buttocks hardly complained too, while my shoulders didn’t even grumble when running. It wasn’t a classic exercise high, more a coming back up from the depths, but it was noticeable that both Elly and I could joke and laugh on the way home.
*Thank goodness not a cover-version!

So the glitch may be over and I’m looking forward to Hogmanay’s two-hour session.

Oh and Andy, what is the ‘concorde’ music?

The bike-filled studio we know, sweat in and love was transformed yesterday by lots of little people. Some of them were standard-model humans, filled with the usual blood and guts, but others had lots more cotton wool. The latter treated us ‘A Laddie and His Wonderful Lamp’. This puppet show was basically the familiar story of Aladdin and the lamp, but set in Edinburgh! Characters included A Laddie, his younger brother, Abonahzer, Princess Street, Mrs MacRamsbottom, Genie the lamp, and, of course, Stinky the dog.

Just in case you don’t know the story, Abonahzer is a wicked megalomanic with a desire to rule the world. But to do this, he needs the power of a lamp which is safely kept in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle. We then meet Princes Street and A Laddie, who Abonahzer inveigles to retrieve the lamp.

After Mrs Ramsbottom spends a while lambasting her name, much to the audience’s delight (we never grow up, do we?), A Laddie duly finds the map but refuses to hand it over until Abonahzer helps him climb out of the dungeon. In a fit of pique, Abonahzer slams the door on him. But all is not lost – the lamp has a genie who grants A Laddie some wishes. A Laddie also finds his long-lost younger brother in the dungeons – a search he’d postponed first to chat up Princess Street and then to help Abonahzer.

The genie helps A Laddie and his brother escape from the castle, Abonahzer gets his come-uppance and A Laddie and Princess Street walk off hand in hand.

An uplifting story for Christmas, followed by a parade of characters who hadn’t had staring roles but who needed to be seen. All with an audio-visual accompaniment, songs that demanded audience participation and a whole lot of jokes and fun! I know the audience enjoyed it, especially the wee (human) lad who was bouncing in the wings to the music. You might see (if I can upload the jPhone video) that I was bouncing too. Well done to the puppeteers for staging this show and then putting the Lifescycle studio back to normal for the following morning’s Saturday Surge and Saturday Shake-up.

My spinning history
According to Wikipedia’s article on hybrid storage devices, a significant proportion of wear arises during the spin-up and spin-down processes. The same could be said of hybrid humans such as me. (I’m an Austrian/Australian hybrid.)

Today was my first spinniversary: my first ever spin was on Monday 19th December 2011. I started going to just this session each week. However in April 2012, I moved up to 2 sessions a week (Andy’s Monday and Wednesday evening sessions). Elly joined me for the Wednesday sessions: her first ever spin was on 18th April and she now usually spins on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday evenings. Currently I spin on four contiguous evenings:

• Martin’s ‘Sunday sundowner’
• Andy’s ‘Monday for all – Never give up your dreams’, followed by Fi’s Hatha Yoga session
• Josh and Zara’s ‘Sportif Starter’
• Andy’s ‘Big Wednesday’.

Spinning has become ‘my’ sport, more than swimming ever was*: it’s helped me through the months when my shoulder was in screaming pain, it’s got me fitter, given me enough stamina to take on a 70-mile sportif and has had me enjoying cycling to music in no danger from traffic. It’s even helped me wash more: after an hour in the saddle, sweating out all the nasties, even my history of pongy sulphur-chemistry can’t prevent me from longing for a bath or shower!
*I once represented Worcestershire at breast-stroke but that was way back in my teens. I don’t recall finishing last in that event but I certainly was way behind the winner. Since my left shoulder has become so badly inflexible, front-crawl, backstroke and butterfly are nearly impossible. Even breaststroke is difficult just now.

Pride goes before…
So I hoped that today’s session, which would be Christmas-themed, would be a throbbing climax to the week’s physical exertions and my first year of spinning. However, it didn’t turn out that way. For the past three or four weeks, I’ve not slept a full night: I can’t get to sleep until at least 2 am, then more often than not wake up in the middle of the night, ravenous and drenched with sweat. I do get back to sleep again but am often awake long before 6 am. Also, I’m stressed to high levels by coursework – to be submitted on 11 January, so I’m not looking forward to much of a break – for my current module (I can’t tell you how much I hate Access!) and needing to find time to work on a paper on my research. And to top it all, I’ve been nursing a cold.

… a fall!
So by this evening, I was utterly drained and probably should have stayed at home, relaxing with a good book or some bad sci-fi. But I wanted, oh, how I wanted, tonight to be one of those spin-sessions where it all just flows, where the music and pedalling combine to take me to that higher, excited, exalted place of sober inebriation. This happens about every 6 weeks – when it does, the feeling of joy and achievement just can’t be beaten. Anyway, I guess I had set myself up for disappointment: the session seemed to last forever and the last 20 minutes were just torture. (It didn’t help that I was on a ‘binary bike’ – one where the resistance goes from zero to ‘I can’t even budge the pedals’ in a small fraction of a turn of the control knob. Worse, the resistance wasn’t constant: moving the control to the same place changed the resistance differently each time. Elly was suffering too: she’s working her wotsits off, doing both a practical job (setting up Revenue Scotland) and a policy job (Scotland’s financial strategy) at the same time.

Picking myself back up again
Despite this, I’m going to continue spinning: I’m sure this was just a temporary glitch. The Lifescycle folk, both instructors and spinners, are encouraging and caring and make sport fun. There’s a place for me there, which I’ve never felt before about any sort of sport or exercise, in the same room as triathletes and national-standard cyclists. One of these days I’ll be able to dance on the pedals as fast as the other spinners and spinnerettes. And after all, everyone’s sweat is equally wet and well-earned. Even if I never raise my average road-speed above 15 mph, spinning will help me maintain this level and achieve greater distances with heavier loads, and I’m still intending to mark my retirement by cycling to India. Who’s coming with me?

The marks for this term’s first coursework in my information systems engineering module were released yesterday. The headline is I scored 91%. The ugly details are:

• requirements
• my submission
• my mark breakdown
• lecturer’s overall comments
• my marks so far (86% of available marks).

I’m amused by my mismanagment of expectations. I’d enquired when the marks would be released and was told that release was imminent. The lecturer also said ‘I can say, Bruce, that yours was of exceptionally high quality and was the best in class….(as they say at Crufts).’ So I started fantacising about receiving a D5 (95 to 100%) and was then momentarily disappointed to receive a slightly lower mark.

In truth, I’m not happy with some of my submission and so expected a lower mark: the ‘software development methods’ section, in particular, is thin. (I believe that the ‘history’ paragraphs wouldn’t be in a real proposal but were included in the requirements to test our understanding of agile software development.)

to teach your children!

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!