I love to watch the Tour de France on TV every July. The drama! The metaphor for the human condition! The scenery! I totally get why folks like to spandex up and ride bicycles for miles and miles outside in the fresh air, but cycling as a sport is something that I prefer to participate in as a spectator.
I do like ride my beach cruiser around the neighborhood. Sometimes I’m going somewhere that is just a little too far to walk, or the parking situation is too much trouble. But serious outdoor bike riding is not for me. The two big reasons why are: 1) the ground is hard; and 2) cars.
I do like to ride bicycles inside.
I first tried indoor cycling about 16 years ago. I have never been a cardio person and cycling is super challenging for me. The great part back in those days was that there really wasn’t anyway for anyone to know if you weren’t keeping up. I could just dial the resistance down or slow my pace or both when I started to feel like my lungs were on fire and my heart was going to explode. I still got stronger as time went along and could maintain an increasingly greater levels of effort but I certainly wasn’t ever keeping up with the class.
I credit indoor cycling classes for helping me discover the beauty of morning workouts. I think that it’s a great way to start a morning workout habit because you don’t necessarily need to be fully awake to do it. I mean, there’s not a lot of coordination or balance involved. And usually the room is pretty dark. You can get half-way through your workout before you realize what’s happening.
My current cycling routine is Wednesday mornings at 5:45am and Saturday mornings at 8am with Rachel. There is a great camaraderie in her class and once I had started showing up regularly, I was warmly welcomed into the tribe. Which is great and all except it’s not like the old days when no one really knew what you were doing. These bikes light up! Blue = easy, green = moderate, yellow = hard and red = breathless. So everyone can tell who is keeping up. Fortunately, everyone is very supportive and we really just judge each other on whether or not you show up.
Rachel’s class is very different from other instructors. She has us grind it out at various moderate-to-hard (green and yellow) intensities for long stretches with occasional bursts of red sprinkled in (last Saturday was 28 minutes straight through before any recovery, then repeat). It’s a different kind of mind game to hold pace for those long stretches. I’ll tell you, I still remember the first time I kept up on a six minute hard hill. Something clicked over somewhere around the four minute mark. I don’t know how to describe it, but all of a sudden I wasn’t just surviving anymore. I’ve been a Rachel groupie ever since.
I will tell you all about Rachel’s Great Cycle Challenge of 2018 in a future post.