Wednesday, January 14, 2009

What's that smell?

So I pussed out on another ride outdoors last night. Was planning on getting in about an hour's worth of easy spinning with the TNT crew but with the temperature quickly dropping we decided to cancel the ride. Jenn and I did pick up a trainer for her to use here at the house on the cold nights and days when we don't want to be outdoors. In the process I also picked up a copy of the Spinerval's 5.0 Mental Toughness.

This episode is geared towards developing the mental toughness to maintain a steady hard effort over a period of time. The video is about 1.5 hours long and uses sets of steady state intervals the entire time. It started out fairly easy and I was just spinning along on the rollers. Then I started to sweat.

The problem wasn't that I was starting to sweat but I wasn't wearing a shirt and my armpits were starting to reek. I had a running dialouge in my head on which smelled worse, the dead fish from Saturday's ride or me. That is were the "mental toughness" training began. The intervals began to get longer and longer and I began to stink more and more. It was now mentally tough to just breath the stench. Then the jerk "Coach Troy" of the video asked us to get off our bikes and do isometric squats for a minute and a half. This required us to squat to a sitting position and put our hands up behind our heads. I haven't felt that kind of burn in my legs in a long time. It f-in hurt! I was only about to hold the first one for about a minute ten. The second one I was able to fight through and hold for the entire minute and a half. Then it was back on the bike for more steady state stuff.

The workout was a good one. Not a lot of power was required from my legs but it definitely was tough at times to keep the cadence soooo high and not slowing down because I felt that my heart was beating too rapidly. Might do the same workout Thursday night since it will be colder then than last night. But for now, I am off to take another shower as I feel dirty just remembering how stank I was last night.

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