Diary of a Yogi: One more spin class and my hip flexers will call it quits

I started doing one spin class a week a few months ago. I felt I needed to mix up my fitness schedule mostly because I could not find any suitable yoga classes for Tuesday evenings.

Being scared to go into a new class on my own, I talked Leba (a friend I've had from my WSC days but now goes to Results) into going with me. I'm trying the "Leba" nick name. It's short for Lebanese which suits him well given the ethnic tree tattoo under his right pit.

The first couple of weeks we had a different instructor for every class. There was Mike, who I kept having to imagine in a particularly painful bondage video just to make me feel better about the pain he was inflicting on me. There was trail girl who loved telling us about the scenery, hills, and all that crunchy granola crap one sees when you bike outside instead of in a dark, humid room in the back corner of the gym. There was also sing-along-karaoke latino queen. This guy had quite a collection of thumpy latin music he loved to sing along to, the ENTIRE class. Only later did I find out the reason Leba chuckled at the beginning of class is that he was reminiscing about the time the latin queen pulled out all the moves on him and still got shot down. Ouch.

The constant change in instructors made the class interesting so we kept going back. After a few weeks Mike returned regularly but managed to give each class a unique feel. Sometimes we do stamina, other times we do strength, every time I feel like my legs are going to give out on me as I walk to the locker room.

Have I lost any weight from this? I should probably lay off the chocolate truffles and cookies to notice a difference. Do I feel that my legs are stronger? Not really since it takes days to recovers and I'm still doing yoga and trying to pick up running again so they're just wet noodles most of the time. Is it fun? Absolutely.

We've now gotten into the routine were we check on each other Monday morning, I call the gym and reserve a set of bikes, and we meet up in class. We have to make sure to call a day ahead because bikes #13 and 14 go quickly. They're primo real estate in spin being in the back row directly under the only fan in the room. A few weeks ago we were stuck with bikes off to the side and proceeded to sweat buckets worth of liquid. It was so hot, and we were so sweaty, it was hard to keep from slipping off the handle bars. In retrospect it would've been easier to get that sexy glean on has when covered in sweat by just drenching ourselves with a bottle of water. We walked out thinking that was the hardest class we'd had so far.

Then this week we went back for more, and pondered why every class feels harder than the last one. Let's hope it eventually get easier.