Good Good Life

Guys, I'm in a seriously good mood today, especially considering I got my butt out of bed early enough to be OUT THE DOOR at 6:30.  This is miraculously early for me, folks. If my house were on fire before 5 am, I'd tell it to burn later so I could keep sleeping. I didn't even go to bed early last night to compensate. In fact, I was up later than usual, working on the latest quilting project (yes, I quilt...what of it?).  Isn't it cute?

Yesterday I didn't do a damn thing fitness-related. At least not physically. I did, however, take a look at the online classes I'm taking and I already finished the extra credit quiz for A&P, which doesn't even start until Tuesday. Booya! I'm aiming to be "that guy" in all these classes (A&P I&II with labs, Abnormal Psych, and Intro to Kinesiology)...you know that one, who wrecks the curve for everyone else? Yup. Totally.  Never been that guy (or girl as it were). I'm also going out of my way to make sure the profs know who I am, early on. My abnormal psych homework is done for the week too (I guess I should do the reading on that though...oops) and all my quizzes/exams/reports/homework assignments are in my Google calendar. In the next 6 weeks I have...

...10 writing assignments
...5 lab assignments
...2 term reports
...9 exams
...10 homework assigments
...18 discussion questions to answer
...8 quizzes
...and about a billion pages of reading to do.

Cripes, now that I put it in numbers, I might be a little over my head here. But I will prevail! I have my flashcards at my desk, my coloring book at home, and a new plan to be at the gym by 7 every morning. M/W I won't be able to work out, but I can go to group ex in the evenings those days. The evenings I'm going to plan on studying. Somewhere in there, I need to get some mileage in to train for this century too.  I may have bitten off more than I can chew here, I'm not sure. We'll see.

Oh, tomorrow morning I need to put together a warmup to show my mentor at the gym, so I can start teaching bootcamp/strength classes too.  (Un)fortunately, most of the classes I was able attend (and therefore teach) have been cancelled for the summer, so that limits my usefulness, even once I'm trained.

This song has been stuck in my head and on constant replay on my iTunes all morning, and I'm loving it:




I love it.

What's stuck in your head today?
How do you approach life, cannonball or toes first?

Scaling the Seven Seas

Ok, well not seas, peaks.  But you get it.

Last night was a fun (last minute) ride.  The profile was seven total hills, sort of lumped into 2ish hills.  Each one was meant to simulate the highest peak on a continent.  I picked music with a little bit of creative liberty (for example, Pitbull is from Brazil, so he got play during the South American peak...Final Countdown is by Europe, so they were played during the European peak).  Overall, I think it was a hit.  If I'd had more time to prepare, I could have done some more research about each peak, but then I would have just ended up talking more.  This profile is a modified version of one I got from a fellow instructor on pedal-on.com, so don't go thinking I'm the creative genius behind it 100% or anything.  I shortened it to fit 45 minutes, modified the cues to match my music a little better, and changed the music 100% from what he suggested.

I would have LOVED to have a projection screen for this ride, but instead we just had our imaginations.  Maybe that was better anyway. :-)

Tomorrow I'm going for a long ride outside, to start actually training for this century fiasco.  I rode from the auto shop to my house this morning and it felt WONDERFUL.  I can't wait get back out!

Letting Go

So after all that fuss about how I put music to my profiles, that last playlist was just...meh. Honestly, the whole ride was.  Well, no. I take that back.  The profile itself I loved.  The music was just ok.  I've been feeling disconnected with my music lately, which makes me really self-conscious when I'm teaching.

To that end, for Saturday's ride I decided to pick the top 10 or so songs off my personal workout list and make them work for Wednesday's profile.  I have never gotten more compliments on my music!  In fact, one woman specifically told me that was the best music she'd heard in a spin class in a long time!  Score!  

Disturbance in the Force

Playlists are kind of an artistic expression for me.  When I put them together, the method I use is sort of similar to how I put quilts together. There's sort of this intangible undercurrent that needs to flow smoothly between each song, and needs to stay laminar, or at least consistently turbulent.  I guess you could say the list needs to have harmony.  I think that's true of all art, which is why the piece we may view as peaceful and soothing today could be traumatic or at least obnoxious tomorrow - our definition of what's harmonious changes daily, since our experience of what the world is like changes daily.

That said, picking a list that's "harmonious" is a pretty vague way to put it.  The process is a little more concrete than that.  I put together my profile first, always.  The point of Spin is the exercise - the music is a means to an end.  The profile arrangement is another discussion entirely (and frankly, right now I do a lot of borrowing on those).  Once I have the profile decided, I pull songs that roughly match the lengths of the segments (for example, this week each hill is a 6-3-6-3, so I pulled a bunch of 3-, 4-, and 5-minute songs, thinking I could combine them in a way that they'd just about line up with cue changes).  I don't put them in order right away - I just skim my iTunes library and see what catches my eye.  Once I've either skimmed the whole list or hit a point where I feel like I have enough songs to grab from, I go to the playlist and start ordering.  I look primarily for song length, trying to line up song breaks with cues as best I can (that doesn't always happen smoothly, so it's not crucial).  I'll then play through the playlist, sampling the transitions (first and last 10 seconds of each song and how it flows into the next song). It's a pretty iterative process, and on occasion I'll hear one song and think of another that's not on the list, and pull it in too.   I move stuff around to make the transitions right, then listen to the whole list at least once or twice through before calling it good enough. I check for volume levels, making note of what songs might get loud fast (our gym requires headphones for Spin classes, so this is critical) and what songs might need bass/treble adjustments.  I usually also include a few songs that didn't quite make the cut but that gel with the rest of the playlist well enough, at the end of the list, just in case I feel like making changes during class. Finally, if I'm happy with it all, I export the list for later use, just in case iTunes does what it does...again.  :-)


All this to say, I had a playlist yesterday that had a lot of songs I liked, but that didn't play well together.  It would have been ok.  I like to have a profile and a playlist on hand every time I go to the gym, just in case...you never know when the bat symbol is gonna fly, right?  Kidding.  Seriously though, I always have a ride in the back of my mind, just in case.  Last night, if I'd needed to teach, I could have used this playlist (well, sort of...it turns out iTunes had kindly erased the whole thing on me, just because) but it wasn't...right.  It didn't feel good.  There was, as the title states, a Disturbance in the Force.  Fortunately, iTunes did what it does sometimes and deleted my playlist for me (I had it written down elsewhere, don't worry) so I started from scratch and came up with what I think is a winner.  Without further ado, I present to you the musical accompaniment for tonight's ride, "Just Two Hills":

See  you there!

Maybe not the best decision I've ever made...

Tonight I decided to go full stupid and go to back to back group ex classes.  Monday nights are "Tony's night" in spin, and I've only ever heard stories about his workouts.  Tonight I managed to actually make it to his class, but not before attending what turned out to be "circuit night" at bootcamp.  Oy.  Good news though!  I survived!  That makes the rest of the week an easy slide on into the weekend, since Monday is the hardest day for back to backs.

Tomorrow night is another spin, with Christina (my mentor, who I adore).  We're doing some periodization right now, and last week was the last week of endurance...so my aerobic base is built and ready to be strengthened!  Hooyah!  It's funny, I'm starting to find that I'm actually having a hard time *not* controlling my heartrate anymore.  Tonight's spin was rough.  A lot of jumps, and pretty much the whole time was out of the saddle.  But I compulsively kept my heartrate around 80% the whole time, letting it slip up to 85% only during jumps.  During recoveries, I was shocked to find I was back down to below 60% within a minute, without even trying.  Before I got certified to instruct (in November), I'd never paid any attention to my heart rate or what it was doing while I was working out.  I can honestly say I will *never* train without a monitor again!  I may workout without one from time to time, but as far as actual *training* goes, I'm a believer. 

In any case, I'm off my soap box.  I have a strength profile I'm stoked about, and I'm building a playlist around the theme "pick your battles".  I'm looking for any kind of music that's focused on fighting a battle...so far this is how it looks:
This Is War - 30 Seconds To Mars
Bulletproof - La Roux
Uprising - Muse
Don't Give Up - Chicane
This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race - Fall Out Boy
Take On Me - Reel Big Fish
Eye of the Tiger - Survivor
Maneater - Nelly Furtado
Fighter - Christina Aguilera
Battle Without Honor Or Humanity - Tomoyasu Hotei
Top Gun Techno
We Will Rock You - Queen
We Are The Champions - Queen
Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Mashup Green Day vs. Oasis
Red Warrior - The Last Samurai


I won't lie...I love every song on there, but I'm not crazy about the order.  I'm also not convinced Maneater belongs on this list, but it filled the time with the appropriate tempo.   Thoughts?  What's your favorite "battle" song?  What takes you into the fight screaming your head off?  Lately, my favorite has been 30 Second to Mars' Hurricane (with Kanye West), but that's sort of a personal song, not really one for class. Do you have songs like that?