Friday: Bike Class/ Swim

This morning, I hauled myself out of bed at 5:05 AM. Now, Todd Nordmeyer, my cycling coach, wants us all to be to class no later than 5:30 AM. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot get out of bed before 5:00 AM.

6:00 AM is the time that I strive to get out of bed, though this has not happened since the baby started sleeping through the night. Anytime before 6:00 AM, and I had better be catching a plane or the house had better be on fire. So, I was the last one to arrive at bike class, but I was reasonably on time.

I loaded my bike onto the trainer and biked for a solid hour and 30 minutes at approximately 115 watts. I wish I could tell you my calorie burn, but I forgot to look at the final tally. It was intense, however, and I was crazy hungry when I got home.

When you ride in Todd's class, it is really interesting, because you take your bike with you and hook it into Todd's master computer so that you all ride together and you can see what the other seven people in the class are doing. There is a huge screen at the front of the room and everyone's calorie output, watts, and mph are in front of the class. The first class I took with Todd was a beginner class and there were only three girls in the class, and a couple of them had never been on their bikes before. We rode, but Todd also taught us to change a tire and he also taught us about road riding, and we had a field trip. Todd babied us and I was wildly appreciative.

The class I am taking now is a base building class, which means we are trying to ride at 115 watts for most of the class. AND everyone, especially the men, seemed to be quite competitive throughout the class. I started riding at 5:45 and crawled off the bike at 7:15 AM.

I hurried home and unloaded my car and made a smoothie and loaded Ivan into the car for swim. At swim, we swam a great workout. I swam the masters workout, which was really exhausting after the bike class. Workout as follows:

• 500 swim/ 200 pull/ 200 kick/ 200 drill/ 200 swim
• 10 x 200 swim @ 4:00

Not much to the workout, right?, but a lot of good yardage and I stayed on interval throughout and swam with the masters swimmers. After picking up Ivan and getting home, I ate an avocado and some chips to take the edge off my ravenous hunger. When I put the baby down to nap, I got right into bed and had a monster nap.

Then we went to our first Christmas party of the season, to which we had to take Ivan. It was a reasonable night. There were no major meltdowns and only some light mess-making. I had my first peppermint bark of the season, and I now truly feel that Christmas is upon us.