Blogging is so over. Blog commenting is where it's at.
Also, in case you were wondering, neither of them know that I blog. And neither came about because of a conversation about blogging. It was "if you liked that haircut/spinning class, check out my blog at ...."
Is spinning now some weird kind of workout, or are you following the advice of the Earl of Pembroke ("Out, ye jades, to work, go spin!")?
Spinning is riding a stationary bicycle while someone tells you what to do. I think.
4
It would be similar to a group of hamsters running in wheels in a confined space....with good music.
Tells you what to do?
"Okay, now pedal.'
"Pedal some more!"
"Keep pedaling!"
They tell you to vary your resistance, to sprint or not to sprint, to stand on the pedals or to sit on the seat, to stand up near straight or to stretch out with your hands on the end of the bars, to do upper body exercises for triceps or chest while you pedal by bending your elbows back or out, to "jump," that is, to change fairly quickly from one position to another (i.e. seated to standing with hands on the outside of the bars). The teacher also says motivational things, and sometimes gives you things to visualize (I find it easier to sprint when I'm imagining "breaking away" in a race, e.g.).
Would you summarize the reasons this is preferable to actually riding a bicycle?
Because when you're actually riding a bicycle, you don't to get fantasize about the running over the hypercaffeinated prick leading the class. Hating the motivational crap turns out to be an excellent motivator.
You're also much less likely to get rained on or run over by a car.
In the last couple months I've almost been run over by a car three times.
Once, however, a cop saw it and ticketed the guy. Bwahahaha.
13
I've dreaming of that happening. Chances are, though, that in DC the cyclist would somehow get the ticket.
It was the cop who sits at the speed trap at the top of my street. I saw him there again a couple days later and thanked him. He gave me a big grin.
14 - Tom has a story about that -- he got hit by a car and he ended up getting ticketed.
A while back I had a personal trainer who gave me her card with her website on it. Turns out she was one of the more persistent spammers at my newsgroup of choice.
In Davis, CA cops ticket cyclists, usually when they don't have a headlight on at night.
10: I don't know that one is preferable. They each have their advantages.
I think it would be hard in practice to get the kind of workout biking that you can in a spinning class unless you took your bike out to some alternately hilly and flat area where there weren't many cars or other obstacles--a spinning class is like biking on a race course. I live in nyc, obviously, and there's no place like that I could take a bike even if I owned one. Pedaling around the city might be some kind of exercise, but it wouldn't be anything like a spinning class. Given my low level of bike riding skill even if I had some place to do the kind of high intensity riding it would take to match a spinning class I wouldn't feel safe doing it, and even for people who are better cyclists than I, going as fast as you'd have to to match what you do in a spinning class is dangerous. People who bike a lot get hurt eventually. (This guy I dated for a bit who was a very avid cyclist and tried to get me to take it up ratified this belief of mine.) I am very uninterested in getting hurt. Finally some people (like me) find active instruction and group activities motivating.
The advantages of bicycling that I can see are that you get to be outside and you can use a bike to get somewhere.
Anyway, some people don't like the gym, and it all seems kind of soulless and robotic to them. But IME a lot of the people in the gym are in fact having a good time.
Whoa, I never heard of this "spinning" thing. I assumed it was a class on how to make yarn. My second guess would be a class on how to get the rims on your car wheels to move in pleasing patterns.
For a long time I thought spinning classes taught people how to ride in bike races: the gearing and techniques for high, easy, cadences. Then I learned it was an aerobics routine.