Lemonade

This season has been quite the roller coaster. I've had some of the best workouts of my life, but I've also had minor setback after minor setback. I think my boy Obi Wan totally nails what bounce back feels like:

Lately, though, I've been playing around with optimism. It's new to me. I hate getting hurt, I hate getting sick, I hate having to run fifty-four miles instead of the seventy-five I'd planned for the week or having to hit 6:50 pace instead of 6:40 pace or whatever. So when I woke up on Thursday and my big toe hurt so much it was hard to walk, I was surprised I didn't freak out.

Oh, I went through the standard denial stage, laced up my running shoes, headed out the door, and spent four minutes and thirty seconds arguing with myself over whether or not it made sense to continue my planned ten mile run. And then I was like, "wait a second, why?" What would this run do for me that eighty minutes of cross-training wouldn't? And if I hurt myself more, wouldn't I be pretty pissed if I couldn't run the B.A.A 5K? If I back off now, I might be fine by Saturday.

So I jogged back to my apartment, changed into a short-sleeved running shirt, and hopped on the elliptical in my apartment's tiny gym. It was a new elliptical. And it was Satan's very own elliptical, straight out of hell, the most evil elliptical I have ever laid eyes on. On the lowest resistance, at the lowest height, my heart rate was over 160, which was not sustainable for eighty minutes and not good for a Thursday. So I switched over to the bike. But the bike was also new. And it was a recumbent bike. And I couldn't get my heart rate over 110 on it. So I went back and forth and back and forth wondering what the hell my apartment manager was thinking switching out totally good machines for Hell's Gym. For eighty minutes.

The next day, I decided to make lemonade. I signed up for a free spin class at Flywheel. It'd be fun and different!

I showed up totally clueless and the instructor showed me how to get on the bike and adjusted it to my height. It was a 45 minute "endurance" ride, although in retrospect it was more like an interval workout, and I'm not sure where the "endurance" part comes from. But I digress. It was definitely a good workout.

Probably a little too good. I'm not supposed to work hard on Fridays. But in a dark spinning studio with a super intense guy next to you decked out in full cycling gear and dance music blasting at 180 BPM and some lady telling you what resistance and RPM to hit and the Torq Board, the goddamn Torq Board, it's a little hard not to get carried away. The Torq Board is a leaderboard that lists your "power" which, from what I can tell, is pretty much a made up number based on your RPM and resistance. So basically, it encourages everyone to hammer the workout and race the whole thing rather than actually listening to the instructor.

I signed up to have my pseudonym (HurtRunner) show up on that board. Terrible idea. I followed the workout exactly, hitting the max RPM and resistance recommended by the instructor each time, and I was still behind three other girls and seven guys! Afterward, I got to see all of the arbitrary stats about my workout in my profile:

Whatever the hell any of this means...

It was fun, though. It really was. If I had to do it again I'd keep my name off the board and take it easier, because I worked way too hard for a Friday. During Saturday's long tempo my glutes and hammies were screaming at me the whole time. A great replacement for a Wednesday or Saturday workout, for sure, but not for a Friday easy run.

And now I'm running again :)