Kurt kicked my butt

and now it really hurts!

Jon and I started taking spinning classes in late December, along about the time of the first big DC blizzard. Jon did it because he had heard spinning was a good workout, and he had been looking to up his exercise level. I did it because I needed a new cross-training routine, and this was something we could do together.

We very quickly realized that some teachers are better (read: more demanding but also more organized) than others, and, somewhere along the way, I found Kurt. Kurt is clearly trains for road races and just adapts his outdoor routines to an indoor spinning environment. Once I got used to his class -- and he usually only teaches once a week at my local gym -- it was frankly hard to deal with other spinning classes. He varies his class depending on which system he wants us to focus on: a class is only hills or only sprints or whatever.

His hill class is killer, and last Saturday (when he was subbing for the regular Saturday instructor) he introduced a particularly grueling version of the hill class. I managed to get my run in the next day anyway, but I was hurting. So imagine how I felt this morning when I dragged my tired body into the gym at 5:45 am to discover that he wanted us to repeat the class from Saturday. In spite of my groan -- which Kurt found amusing -- we went ahead with that plan. I'll spare you the details of the workout, but it ends with the London Philharmonic's version of Led Zepplin's "Kashmir," all 8 minutes of it, which he plays loudly while we try to maintain our pace to a steeper and steeper hill and finally ending in a sprint at what Kurt calls "headwall resistance." I thought I was going to throw up, but I managed to stumble out of class and home.

And now I'm hurting. I skipped my weight training, but I'll drag myself out to run tomorrow with my dog. And I won't be listening to Led Zepplin for a while.