I was kind of nervous about taking this class, because I'd heard that they were pretty hard. But I thought, "It's biking! How hard can it be? I just finished 16 weeks of bootcamp! How hard can it be?"
The answer, my friends, is HOLY JESUS HARD.
I should have clued in when I told the instructor I was new, and as he was helping me set up my bike, he was like, "Just try to finish the class ok? You'll feel like dying and that's okay, dial it back a bit if you need to, just to try to stay until the end."
I have so much more respect now for you bloggers (like Krista!) who do this all the time. You must have thighs of steel!
The class was an hour long and we did seven hills, all 5-7 minutes long. If you're new to spinning, hills are where you crank the resistance way up and then pedal standing up. In between the hills we lowered the resistance and did 'sprinting'. At the very end, just because we hadn't done enough already, we did HILL SPRINTING.
I probably didn't put my resistance as high as the instructor was calling out (it's hard to tell because there's no number, so he just tells you to dial the resistance up "a quarter turn!" or "a full turn!". I also (for the most part) pedalled slower than I was supposed to. But I'm happy to say I made it through the whole class. I did all the parts: I sprinted when I was supposed to, I stood up when I was supposed to, etc.
Also, the whole time I was doing the class I kept remembering that scene from Bridget Jones' Diary, where she gets off the bike and immediately falls on the floor. Haha! I was totally sure that was going to be me. (Luckily it wasn't.)
So, spinning. I did it. I might do it again. It's several hours later now and my legs still feel a little brick-like, and my ass feels like it was kicked by a very angry donkey. But I feel accomplished. And when I got home from the gym, I found the new Ikea catalogue waiting in my mailbox. I decided it was a congratulations card from the universe.
