Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Ah life, why do we say it gets in the way when all we have is life? Is it because it is nicer than saying my family gets in the way? Or because they might fire you if you say my job gets in the way? OK, I digress and that is my good story for such a long gap in posts.

I went out of town for almost two weeks, between leaving for work, then a personal trip out to San Diego over the weekend, then back to South Florida for more work on the project and then home. I felt like the George Carlin routine about stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac So, I packed for two weeks, left some stuff at work so I could go across country for the weekend, then come back and get reunited with my stuff!

I did Graeme's first Cyclo-Spin in my hotel. Kind of sucked as the bandwidth was really low. An hour workout turned into 1 hour 45 minutes! But, it was awesome and I got my workout in. Things were really busy and crazy and I finally got back to town and got into a makeup class for my Computrainer class last Friday morning.

It was a cool class because instead of watching the screen and keeping your watts on track, it was a blind test where you had to ride for 20 minutes at what you thought was 65% of max, then 20 minutes at 75% of max, and then 10 minutes at 95% of max. I was under all 3 times but not by much. Several other folks went over 75% on the first test. There were two women and 4 men in that class. Both of us females were almost spot on in all 3 while the men tended to go too hard. Our coach said women are often better at this than men. Not sure why the gender tendency but I told him in the beginning I thought I would be good at that test. I have ridden all my life until about 18 months ago not using anything other than a cycling computer with distance, time, etc. I never even used a heart rate monitor. I can tell you if I my heart rate is up there- because I can't talk to you! Anyway, it was fun and different.

Last weekend was more cross training (yard sale and reverse ditch digging) so I finally got to put fenders and a rack on my commuter bike late Sunday night. Whew, that single speed got a lot heavier! I commuted to work on Monday and was pleased I kept up the same general average mph to work even with a heavier bike. I had another Computrainer class last night and had a blast pushing hard on some intervals. Hip flexors are telling me today that it worked! And I finally brought my ball chair into work so I can have people wonder what the heck that is. http://www.isokineticsinc.com/category/ex_ball_chairs

Hopefully there is a nice long ride in our beautiful Florida weather coming up this weekend.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Ellen...I am writing because I used to live in Orlando and ride with the BOBbies! I now live and work in Austin, TX for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. We are currently forming a team for RAGBRAI of next year and was wondering if I could get some information to you all if some of the ladies might be interested?? My email is colleen.wilson@livestrong.org

Thanks....sorry i couldn't find an email address on the BOBbies website!!

Judith said...

siHey Ellen, I had a frined who coached men and womens basketball and he said the challenge with the men was to hold them back as they just wanted to go too hard all of the time and the women had to be constantly encouraged and they would perform verywell.....he said there was a huge difference in the way to motivate each of the sexes, interesting and I guess is refelected in the difference between men and women on the computrainer as you mentioned....