Why I decided to take up Spinervals 32 Day Challenge 12/28/11

After seeing the ad in spinning room, I did NewLeaf testing on the bike on the first time in May 2010. I had done resting and treadmill testing when I went on the extreme diet in 2009 (another entry in the future). At that point, I got hooked up with Greg and I decided to sign up with My Coach program. Greg gives me custom cardio and weight workout, and we meet once a month, regularly schedule the testing, post it on the Internet, and I download to Garmin and make it beep if not following the program and upload for Greg to view (sample by fit4life). The image above is the trend of Cardio point.

I am highlighting 1/17/11 data because all year long, Greg was shaking heads why I cannot duplicate the results the rest of the year. He thought I was overtraining, hence big rest week, more base building, or maybe longer warm up, more intense and shorter exercises, more cross training on treadmill. We tried everything. Now it all makes sense. What did I do during the winter break? Lots of indoor cycling including Spinervals. I kept buying more Spinervals DVD’s and I had to stop myself when the weather became better for riding outside. When I came out of off-season and joined a friendly 20-mile group ride on 2/10, the group lead mentioned that I was very strong. I remember sending Coach Troy a message thanking for his program.

So when I heard about Spinervals 32 Day Challenge, I thought it was very interesting, but I didn’t know if I should make enough investment to qualify as an official finisher. Besides I discussed with Bruce, the new trainer who took over, that for off-season, he is not going to let me ride hard. Basically what I needed was rest. But I thought, well, maybe I will just ignore his program one day to start the challenge. If I don’t start, I do not have an option to go on, right? I happen to have an appointment with him on Day 2 and confessed that I am thinking about getting into this challenge. Of course, Bruce was not pleased. His argument was that he is local and Coach Troy is not. He gave me an hour weigh training, mainly working on upper body and we parted.

Although that is true, what I did with My Coach and Spinervals 32 Day Challenge are not that different. Bruce and I met physically, maybe once a month for testing. He has so many clients, he barely reads my email, and forgets what we discussed about the upcoming program. I never thought he is checking out my uploaded data let alone reading all the comments I leave for him (for that matter, Greg, too). Mind you, Coach Troy doesn’t always, always respond to my messages and react on what I send. But you know, at important points, he does and one thing my local trainers didn’t do over the Internet and what Coach Troy is good at is encouragement. Just one click on “like” on posted workout assures me that Coach is actually taking the time to acknowledge my completed workout. Funny thing is that after that meeting, Bruce programmed another month ahead of cardio program, hard workout and even changed the already posted workout into harder workouts. I kept uploading Challenge workout data, ignoring what he programmed until Day 10 and then stopped uploading altogether. He has not contacted me at all. I am not sure he noticed or not.

Maybe I should not blame Bruce. His knowledge about cycling is close to none. He seems to be knowledgeable about lifting weights, weight loss, supplements and eating clean a lot, but he doesn’t know endurance sports. Therefore the weight program he gave me was for an hour. I told him that once school starts, I am not going to be able to take that much time in weights. Exactly the point Susan Thomas brought up about my yesterday’s entry about StrEndurance.
Coach Troy “recognizes that we are doing other training as well and so weight training should be kept short and sweet, no wasted time.”

So altogether, I decided to redirect my fitness budget. With this kind of technology time, we do not have to settle with mediocre training just because it is locally available. That is when I decided investing in more Spinervals DVD’s. After all, Coach Troy only charges once and it is not a monthly recurring fee!

Coach predicted that social aspect of this challenge to be a big factor in his first announcement of the challenge. “We are held accountable to your team members. We will get some positive feedback and motivation from me and other Challenge participants, too.” About half way through the challenge, I accumulated such good friends from the challenge and started to feel that I actually miss them when the challenge is over. When Alex Barnett posted yesterday “Today I didn't want to workout I put it off all day. Then I logged on seen that all you got your workouts done. I almost felt like I would be letting you guys down.” I thought it was really HIM making himself accountable, but at the same time I realized, boy, how powerful this group has become.

Super 6 is applied to my TP account and I am getting myself organized. However it is going to have to be more flexible 6 weeks than this challenge for several reasons. I will write about it along with my goals for 2012 very soon.