The Sweatlab....

Tonight was the first night of Sweatlab! I will be doing this every Friday night for the next few months. (Yes, I have no life therefore I can do this on a Friday night, haha. Wait a second! Triathlon IS my life. Tee hee.)

Okay, back to Sweatlab. What is it? Well, it's a bike trainer session that one of the triathlon coaches, Ross, puts on. There are eight of us on Friday nights. Jeff and Danielle (who's garage we are in), Ross, Lisa, Serge, David, John (who missed last night, tsk, tsk) and yours truly. There are a few experienced Ironman triathletes there, then a group of us who've just completed our first. It's a great group of people though, very upbeat and fun!

Ross uses 'CompuTrainer' so we are all on our individual trainers which records our cadence, heart rate and power output. This goes into the computer and is put up on a BIG screen so all can see! Rats! No slacking off for Susi!! Not only can they see how much I'm dying, but there at the top of all of our stats is the profile of the course AND a little bike race so you can see who's in the lead. Soo not fair!! haha.

I believe there are a bunch of different course profiles you can put in there, even Ironman Canada! (Hopefully we won't be doing that one till next year!) So, it goes like this. Ross loads up a course profile. We all get hooked up to HRM and get bikes in trainer and start pedaling. As you pedal along the trainer increases or decreases the resistance depending on the course elevation. So it kind of mimics riding outside. You even change gears like you would outside. I thought this was pretty cool.

At least I thought it was pretty cool, until I got to the first hill. OOMPFF! Hey now! Who the heck is holding on to my rear tire? I...can't....pedal.... Okay, so it wasn't that bad, but damn, it was HARD! My heartrate skyrocketed. haha. As soon as I crested the hill my legs were a spinnin. It was really neat.

At about 15 minutes in to the workout I was soaking in sweat. I hadn't worked or sweat that hard since before IMC, I'm sure of it, haha. Ross had us do some intervals sporadically too. We were to look at what our average power output was, then double it for the interval!! The first interval was 5 minutes. I think I can safely say there was no one in that garage that wasn't ready to hurl after that one, haha. All that was going through my head was 'Holy Hannah he's trying to kill us!'. Well, that and my Million Dollar Man mantra - 'faster, better stronger'. (If I could have let out a hooyah, I would have...but I was desperately gasping for air!)

We did a long recovery after that...I was really glad I was on a hill for my recovery. Riiiiight. We also did some 1 minute intervals and 30 second intervals. The workout was amazing! I felt great although I had a really low power output. Will be discussing that with both Ross and IronGreg. This is something that will be a key goal this year. To be more powerful and efficient on my bike!

The total length of the workout was about 1 hour 10 minutes. We will be working our way up to 2 hour workouts in the next coming weeks and then continue increasing our time. We'll also be doing bricks afterwards. It's going to be a lot of hard work, but great prep for Ironman Coeur d'Alene, which Jeff, Lisa, Serge, Ross and I are all signed up for.

After the workout I went out for sushi.....mmmmm...sushi. A great end to a great workout!