It’s Tour Time!

The tour is here, the tour is here!!!!

I do have a confession, I do not actually watch nor care much about the tour.  I do like that it brings some life into my classes.  It’s hard to keep things interesting when we only have a few moves: run / sprint / climb / recover.  Stand or sit.  That’s it.  So adding an element of competition brings my class to life.

I printed up some flyers with the dates I’d be teaching BEFORE I accepted to teach Monday night’s class.  I debated doing a tour ride or not.  I never write new classes when I sub AND it wasn’t listed on my tour flyer.  But I thought I could maybe recruit some folks by adding it in.  I pulled up a profile from last year and grabbed my decorations.  Let me say I am SO happy I did, I walked in and one of my regulars yelled “YAY! We get a tour ride today”.  So it’s a very good thing I did it.  Before I go into the ride I have to say that we have ghetto bikes.  There is absolutely no feedback on them so there’s no real way to compete on them.  It’s all in our heads.

Anyway…they were broken into 2 groups (I put colored stickers on their bikes) and for extra funzies this year I added a 1 minute instrumental song before the last song.  Before class I had chosen a team captain for each team and told the captains the rules.  During the 1 minute song I had everyone recover while I explained the team captain rules.  The captains raised their hands as I introduced them.  The last song was 5 min, 30 sec.  And a climb.  I was in charge of the rolling resistance.  The captain’s job was to take off when ready.  If they took off before the other captain AND held it to the end their team won.  Once they took off the entire class had to try to catch them.  If they couldn’t hold it to the end the other team won. 

Y’all, the winner took off early while we were on a 10!!!  Max resistance and he bolted for it.  I actually felt like an announcer, he caught me by surprise and I couldn’t hide it, yelling with excitement into the mic!  We kept rolling, legs on fire and he held it to the end.  As I awarded him a small little trophy and announced him the winner the class all cheered.  Post class he normally heads out, this time he stayed and was discussing his tactics and how well it worked.  One of his teammates commented to me that he was so glad they won because they had fewer people on their team putting them at a disadvantage.  Ha!  I didn’t have the heart to tell him there is no drafting on indoor bikes, nor do we have any feedback metrics on those bikes to know who really wins, number of teammates really doesn’t matter in this case.  I told that same guy that he’s on my list of team captains in a later ride and he got all excited.  They get so competitive on these rides, it just cracks me up 🙂

I do love my class, but Tour time brings it out even more-so!

I used Stage 17 of 2014’s tour for the ride:

Artist	Song Name	Song Length	Workout	Tour Profile
The Killers	All These Things That I’ve Done	5:02	Warm-Up
Switchfoot	Mess of Me	3:28	Standing runs or pickups on chorus
Mumford and Sons	Little Lion Man	4:05	Booty-Backs
Bruce Springsteen	Born to Run	4:30	Fast run. Dig deep to hit it hard!	Flat and Fast
Bon Jovi	Raise Your Hands	4:18	Standing Run	Very slight incline
Cinderella	Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)	5:39	Climb	Hill!
Led Zeppelin	Rock and Roll	3:41	Run Down	Down
Guns ‘n Roses	Sympathy For The Devil	6:17	Big Hill	Bigger, steeper hill
Foo Fighters	The Last Song	3:20	Run Down	Down
Shinedown	Second Chance	3:42	Steep Hill	Hill!
Dropkick Murphy’s	Captain Kelly’s Kitchen	2:48	Fastest downhill of the day	Down
Kid Rock	Only God Knows	5:27	Climb to the end	Hill!
The Killers	Romeo and Juliet	5:28	Cool-down
Elton John	Tiny Dancer	6:16	Stretching