Awkward Turtle, Or: Calling My Bluff

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Just borrowing that one from Cardiogirl. Love the idea and bonus, I just found a new blog to get hooked on. :-)

Anyway.

I tried last night you guys, I really did. I actually don't really like walking up to people and asking them to come to my class. I hate it. It adds so much more pressure than it needs to, which makes me that much more prone to workout-induced stupidity, among other things.

About 15 minutes before class, I wandered around the weights area and talked to some women about coming to class. No dice. About 5 minutes after class was supposed to start, Liz walked by with a new member and I poked my head out the door to harass her. I ended up convincing him to come to my class...like, right then.

He was the only one who came.

Bless Deb's heart, she stayed too, so it wouldn't be completely awkward. I love that girl, she's so sweet. I should do something nice for her.

I had my mat set up at the front of the room as usual, and this guy decided  the best place for his mat was literally 6 inches from mine.

Awkward.

At least he smelled good. And I guess that's better than setting up camp in the back of the room like I smell funny (do I??) I ended up doing a half hour class so he could get back to signing his soul away to Executive, and it was...ok. I was thrown off because he was clearly very new to group ex, so I wanted it to be a positive experience...so my previous class plan got a little mushed up and I wound up paying a lot more attention to how much he was grunting than I probably should have. Oh well. I'm sore today, so I guess that's what matters.

Wednesday night I'm teaching strength again, before teaching the Zombie Ride. I'm super excited about the Zombie Ride. I've waited all year to revive this little gem. I'll be teaching it again on Saturday morning as well.

What's a Zombie Ride? Well, since you asked...

The premise is that the zombie apocalypse has come and we're all survivors. The problem is, we're all out of food and need to get to the grocery store (the only one that hasn't been looted into oblivion). Naturally, the roads are clogged and we're out of gas anyway, so we need to take our bikes. Now, the nature of the zombie virus is that it causes a slightly elevated metabolism, so the infecteds' heart rates are in the 75-80% (or 80-85, if you want to make it a strength ride) range. In order to get to the grocery store safely, we need to make sure our heart rates stay strictly within that range - if they go lower, the zombies will know we're uninfected and will eat us; if they go higher, they'll think we're infected but in the "dying" stage of the disease, and again...they'll come to eat us.

It's easy to have fun with this one - there's a big gang of zombies coming towards you, pick up the cadence; we need to take a detour through someone's yard, add resistance; they left the sprinklers on, add even more resistance. At the grocery store, take the resistance off, but pick up the cadence to 90-100 RPM to simulate running through and grabbing our supplies as quickly as possible. Then on the way home, make sure resistance is slightly higher than on the way back - this time we've got a load on our bikes, so we're slower.

Terrifying.

I'm super excited.