So, anyway... About 6 months ago I was taking a spin class and was talking with the instructor about how I had gotten my spin certification a few months prior. It was just an offhand comment at the time while making chit-chat before class started. I had never done anything with the certification even though I should have started to try and teach classes as soon as possible to pay for the darn certification. But, I was scared and unsure of how good I would be in front of the class and just kept putting it off.
About a month ago the same spin instructor, Mike, asked me if I had talked to Katharine about subbing his spin class. I of course said no because I had no idea what he was talking about. He said that he was going out of town for work and needed people to sub his class. He asked me to give him my information and he would pass it on to Katharine. A couple of days later I was giving a mini-demo to Katharine and a week later I was teaching my first spin class. Funny how things work out, right? Even funnier is that I had about 2 weeks left to take the certification exam and renew my membership before I would have been forced to take the $300 class again to be certified.
Teaching the class was not as scary as I thought it was going to be. Less stressful than giving a speech. I'll post whatever my profiles are here, but they are by no means always going to have a point. I wanted my first two classes to have point since I was teaching a Tuesday night and a Thursday night class. So, Tuesday was hills and Thursday was a lot of jumps and sprints. Also, after taking spin classes for over 7 years, I finally invested in a pair of cycling shoes. I have bike shoes for my tri bike, but the cleats are different than what you need for the spin bikes. So, I just bought a separate pair of shoes and cleats specifically for spinning classes. Btw, if you take spin regularly, don't be like me and wait forever to invest in a pair of bike shoes for the spin class. You get so much more out of the session if you are wearing the right shoes because you can push and pull. In case you have looked for shoes before and were as confused as I was, this is what you'll need:
1) shoes with two holes, NOT three. They can be any shoes. They don't have to be 'spin' specific or mtn bike specific. They can be any kind that you like as long as they have only 2 holes.
2) cleats - 99% of all spin bikes work with the Shimano SM-SH52 SPD Cleat Sets. They look like this:
You can use the SH51, SH52, or SH56. I honestly don't know what the difference is between them. I think the SH52 is more for spin bikes and the 51 and 56 are more for mountain biking.
You can get all of these pieces at your local bike shop (LBS). The shoes will be anywhere from $50 to $200 but anything in the $70 to $100 is probably your best best. The cleats are around $20. You can install the cleats yourself, but obviously your LBS can do it too.
I'm set to sub another class next week. Once I get the playlist for that put together I'll post all three that I have in case anyone thinks they're good enough to use, feel free to use them.
On another note, I'm sad to say that I had to drop out of the Vineman Full distance race in July in California. I still want to do the race, but 1) the costs were getting to be too much and 2) it wasn't part of my plan for this year either.
So, let's talk about this.
1) The costs - I knew I would be paying around $400 r/t to get out there. But, all the flights I was looking at were hovering around $480 r/t. Not a huge difference, I know. Let's add in the hotel, car rental, food expenses while over there, and then the costs of shipping the bike. Which on top of being expensive, was going to be a total pain in the ass. There aren't any bike shipping companies that would ship my bike fully assembled. This means that I had to take my bike to a LBS, have them disassemble it and package it up for me. Then take it over to a UPS or FedEx and have them ship it to the bike shop affiliated with the race who would then send it over to the race site to be re-assembled. To get it back, I just have to take it to the company that was handling the bikes that were shipped in and they would take care of dis-assembling it, packing it back up and shipping it back. I mean, I had to pay for it all, but I didn't actually have to take it to the different places to get it shipped back. So, what does that add up to. Probably $35 to disassemble, $50 to package, $100 to ship, $35 to assemble there, $35 to disassemble again after the race, $50 to package again, $100 to ship back, and another $35 to reassemble. Grand total: $440. And, honestly, those estimates are generous. I had my bike put together before and it cost me about $80. After some thinking, I realized this race wasn't that important to me and I would rather save my money and put it into upgrading my bike or for a wedding/honeymoon.
2) Included in my thinking was the fact that I hadn't planned on doing this race. I set this year to be focused around Olympic and HIM distance tri's with some running races thrown in there. I wanted to work on my speed at the shorter distances and save my sanity for training for IMFL 2014. So, in the end I am back to my original plan. If you read my post a while back about finding the perfect training plan then you would probably be thinking right now "so what is going to happen with your training plan now?" Well, all that frustration over finding/putting together the perfect plan was useless. Hmmm, I shouldn't say useless. I did find a lot of good stuff and I'm still going to use the training plan that I've created, I'm just going to cut back on the number of weekly training sessions and the distance on the weekend.
As a #3) this wasn't really part of my reasoning but does make the decision to drop out easier is Daniel. He's finishing up a couple of more classes to get his MBA and he's been so busy with it. By not doing the race he doesn't have to worry about travelling with me when he may have a test to study for or a group project to work on; and I can also help out more around the house and spend more time with him when he does have free time because I won't be doing quite as much training. So, in the end it works out better for our relationship for me to not do this race. Even though he would have been supportive of it, it's one less thing to worry about when there is a lot on his mind right now.
Funny how things work out, right?
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