Tales of Spinning and Running

Other than the errand runs I’ve been doing lately, here are a couple of workouts that happened in the past week. In terms of energy expenditure, calorie burn, and sweat rate, my back up workout to running in recent weeks has been the spinning bike. Because it has a heavy flywheel, you can feel yourself working even when you don’t increase the tension. Let me tell you about the self propelled workout I had last week. I pedaled on an easy tension for 10 minutes as a warm up, then for one minute I increased the tension slightly and pedaled while sitting, another minute I increased the tension more to do stand up pedaling, then one minute on easy tension for recovery. I kept repeating those intervals until I reached an hour. To say the least, it was an exhausting workout. Some days I would do two minutes of stand ups with one minute recovery. All that while reading the newspaper. Since my watch has an interval timer, I change positions or increase/decrease the tension of the pedals when I hear the warning beeps.

Last Saturday morning I was back running with the AREC winter group. I was slightly concerned of having tired legs because of the spinning workout I mentioned above which I did the day before. That concern faded into the background when I was able to run alongside Rich S. from start to finish on an 8 miler. He told me about his and wife Colleen’s recent trip to Machu Picchu in Peru, and I had a lot of questions for him about the place. So for the first half of the run, Rich told me about how to get there, where they stayed, the hiking and climbing they did, the tourist season, and people who lived on reed islands on a river. It was very enlightening to learn about another culture. The second half of the run was spent talking about plans for retirement. We are both the same age and he had planned on retiring when he reached 55 (as did I when the stock market was soaring in the 90’s and mid 2000’s). He remains on track with his plan which is very admirable. In my case, I will have to wait a little longer. I told him my emergency plan was to retire in the Philippines if my nest egg will not suffice if I stay in the U.S.

With everything that we talked about, the 8 miles passed rather quickly and almost effortlessly. Rich - my lungs, legs, and ankles thank you and your stories for a nice leisurely run. The 8 miles would have been much harder without your company.

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