Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Attacked by a yogurt container

Tuesday's are the big exercise day of the week lately. Maybe that will change once I'm on a formal program with Greg, but a morning run, and a spin class are big for me. Plus the unforseen adventure with yogurt. No kidding. Some of you may need to be warned about the hazards of blowing hot coffee out of nostrils.

The run was essentially a repeat of last Thursday. My thinking was that spin class was rumoured to be a 20 minute time trial. I'd never done one of those and had no idea what to expect. I seriously asked if I should bring a bucket. So I figured go easy on the running this week, and pick it up next week. I did 7 minutes warmup walk, 6 x 3 min run/2 min walk, and another 7 minutes or so cool down. I can't really do much longer without arriving at work after 8 am. This was on the path on the top of the hill just south of the Bow Waters Canoe Club. You get quite a nice view of the city from there, and the dawn sky was beautiful. Yes, yes, I'm getting to the yogurt. Patience.

It's not a good idea for me to eat right before exercise, so typically I have some fruit and juice for breakfast, then head off to swim or run. That's not enough to keep me going till lunch, so I've started taking some granola. You can't really eat that dry, so I started taking these small yogurt containers to mix with the granola. I've opened a million of these foil topped containers without untoward incident, sometimes under adverse circumstances we need not go into now. So today, I peel back the foil, and fwooof, a spray of yogurt ends up on the desk, my hands, my sweater, and one tiny spot on my glasses. I'm just a bit keyed up these days, what with a new job and wanting to make a good impression, and all the cobwebs being blown out of my brain with exercise. So I twitched backward in my chair, and came within a hairsbreadth of toppling over my gym bag that hadn't been tucked under my desk yet. (I was hungry, so SUE me!) and if I'd fallen over it and tried to recover, odds were even I'd have banged my head on the office window, or trying to avoid that, crash through it and topple out of a second story window, probably with the chair coming after me. If I lived the ambulance attendants would probably pee all over me cause they'd be laughing so hard. But it all worked out ok, I used a kleenex to mop up, and carried on. I don't think anyone else in the office even knew. How little they know what they got themselves into when they hired me.

At one point, via MSM, Susi was filling me in on what could be expected this evening, and from there we got onto fluid management, and what's the worst that could happen overdoing it during the time trial. Given the incident with the yogurt, you can't be totally surprised when my version of what's the worst that could happen ended up with an electrical fire.

But spin class was good, once I figured out why my computer cadence wasn't working. Somehow the two tiny wires had become disconnected. I'll maybe have to redo how I've got them routed. The idea for this was to spin consistently for 20 minutes at the max pace you can maintain. I've never done this before so I had no idea how hard to push. I settled for maintaining 90 rpm in a middle gear on the small chain ring, and keep heart rate just below my aerobic max. That worked out pretty well. Just at the end I was beginning to feel a bit of a burn in my calves. There was also some of the famous one legged pedalling drills to help us warm up. I still can't go a minute with those yet.

I'm also getting more comfy on the bike, and getting better at spinning. Practice practice practice!

3 comments:

  1. dude, we MUST be related...i thought only incidents like that happen to me!!

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  2. OMG - Yogurt gets me every time....its like the little containers of high pressrued salad dressing on the planes - you open them ever so carefully only to be speckle sprayed in the stuff .... Are we all from the same planet? It usre as hell ain;t this one!!LOL

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  3. Keith...I just love your writing!!

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