We arrived home around 3:30 PM Sunday and I had no desire to hop aboard our Peloton. We relaxed, pretty much did nothing, and retired early.
Monday I had planned to get the bug remains off our car and pick up our mail. It had been on hold for two weeks. However we settled into watching some of the programs our direcTV PVR recorded over the last two weeks. Monday was another lazy day. We picked a few tomatoes and strawberries and gobbled the strawberries. TV & fresh strawberries, a fantastic combination if you like strawberries. I did take a Jennifer Jacobs 30 min 70’s rock ride and I tore it up! But with our cycle’s calibration as hard as I pushed, I fell far short of my 30 minute personal best on Chanda’s Peloton: 277 kj “home”, 318 kj at chanda’s. That’s almost 15% difference!
Today, Tuesday, I took Jenn Sherman’s 45 minute 70’s Rock Ride “on demand”. There were 63 riders taking the class at the same time. “I’m going to take this class easy,” I thought. About five minutes into the ride, I noticed a guy in the 50-60 age group who was just ahead of me. Game On! Push a bit harder and I’ll zip right on by. There is one big problem with passing someone on the leader board. Once you pass someone, that someone will want to pass your back. A race ensues. Sometimes I’d open the gap, sometimes the gap would narrow. This was not the easy laid back ride I had planned. It was hard work maintaining a lead. Also displayed on the leader board is a rider’s personal best output that many minutes into a ride. I was working hard to maintain my lead with this 50 something rider. I noticed that the difference between my output on this ride and my best output at this point in a 45 minute ride was widening. I was beating Mr. 50 Something, but I was loosing to myself. With the ride over, I was ahead of Mr. 50 by 7 to 10 kj. It’s not much, but enough. However I lost to myself by a whopping 75 kj, 486 vs 411. That’s over 18%.
Now, because I set 30, 45, and 60 minute personal bests on Chanda’s “easy” Peloton, I will have to work long and hard to make up a 15% to 18% difference in output. I could recalibrate our Peloton, but that would render all my prior rides moot comparison wise. Instead I’ve chosen to segregate rides on Chanda’s cycle, keep them as a point of reference, but to track improvement on our Peloton separately. This way my performance plots will be consistent for our Peloton. I’ll use the personal bests from Chanda’s as a goal to work toward. There is hope. Last year all my rides on Chanda’s cycle were below today’s effort.
My progress is slow, but it is progress! Some days I take consecutive rides. The lower data points are undoubtedly from a third or fourth ride in sequence. It might be instructive to add rides at Chanda’s as an overlay with trend line. Spin classes differ significantly in structure. Some will emphasize hard pushes with long recovery others emphasize steady high output. This leads to massive variation in class total output and the scatter plot’s variation you see below.
45 Min Performance Plot, no “Chanda” data
