First Indoor Cycling Class of the winter!

Last night I hit the first class of my prepaid 17 of Pete Gladden's indoor cycling clinics as I promised I would do with money I won from Fat Rabbit.

This year the name has changed from New Vision Cycling to Excel in Cycling and the location is also different (still far, but I think it is a little more convenient for me!). Everytime I have had the opportunity to train with Pete, he has never disappointed me. These workouts include music which is choreographed to the cycling, video footage on the big screen and led by Pete with a variety of drills to help people become more proficient cyclists.

As I drove down to Akron I nibbled on some pretzels as I was sort of hungry and figured I needed something in my belly. You see I have gotten into the habbit of keeping a ziploc bagful of pretzels in my car all the time these days. It is so often I leave a workout or find myself on the road just dying for something to eat. Don't fear as now my pretzels save me!

I hopped on my trainer just around 6:20 to start warming up. It did not take long before the sweat started to form and start the disturbing puddle which would be under my bicycle by the end of class.

As I started class I knew it may be rough. I was somewhat drained from the amount of training I had put in over the last few days.

We started with spin ups. You start in a very easy gear and based upon your group you have a cadence you must hit. I seeded myself in the B/C group. So I started at 100-105 rpm for a minute and bumped it up by 5 rpm each minute to 125 and then went back down each descending minute. We rested for 3 minutes and repeated the pyramid starting 5 higher.

We did one leg drills between around 50 rpm at a hard gear making sure our pedal stroke was very even.

We did an 8 minute (which will build to 20) overgear drill. (Pedaling with about as much resistance as you can handle at a particular cadence) For some reason I like these as I think I have always been somewhat of a gear masher.

One drill we did alternating increments of big ring (work) / little ring (recovery)where I would try to get above 100 at a hard gear as we alternated 5 sec on 55 seconds recovery, 10/50, 15/45 and so on up to 50/10. I stopped at 30/30 and repeated that 3 times as I was whooped. After a recovery we repeated.

I ate some cliff blocks-the cran razz flavor as my tank was empty. Mmmm, these are delicious little gummy things!

Then in the main set, we did these sprint things. My low end was supposed to be 100 rpm (for 40 seconds) by my group and my high end was 120 rpm (for 20 seconds) We did 10 of those.

Then we did a cooldown and I hopped my sore butt off my bike at 8:30. Oh my sweat pile was big and nasty and I was so tired! My bike lingo stinks but I wanted to get it down so I can remember what we did so I can try to practice this on my own. I grabbed a gearing sheet. I vow to learn my gears this year...finally!