Tried 11 different saddles during my fitting before settling on a Fizik Kurve.
What happened to the promises of global warming? Younger daughter Carly turned 19 on April's Fools day. The day we brought her home from the hospital (some days you can never forget) was a beautiful Spring day… bright, sunny and in the 70s.
Today is April 6th and as I was pouring a cup of coffee I was seeing 20° F. The high for the day is predicted to only get to 50°F with 70% chance of rain. Today could be one of the warmest days we've had since October. Thank goodness for Indoor Cycling 🙂
Yesterday I had the privilege to interview sponsored elite level Triathlete Shawna Folts from Tempe AZ. You'll be interested to learn how she does much of her training indoors – at the Tempe Life Time Fitness, when she's not out on her VeloVie Veloce 100 Carbon Triathlon bike. I hope to have Shawna's Podcast up by the end of the week.
So as I sit and gaze longingly at my virgin VeloVie Vitesse 300 this morning, while editing our latest Audio Profile, I've resigned myself to the fact that it will be another week or so before my maiden bike ride… unless by some fluke that Sunday warms up.
I'm not aware of anything that would be more intense than riding a motorcycle through city streets, at speeds approaching 200MPH!
So if I was producing a video like the one below and it featured some very intense footage from last year's Isle Of Man TT road race, I'd want to use a soundtrack that communicated to the viewer exactly what what they were seeing.
This track from Within Temption was their choice – and our free track of the week.
Within Temptation — Faster may count at 62 RPM – but it's also one of those tracks where you can ignore the tempo and just go faster!
For some of you who may know my history, I raced motorcycles like these back in the 80's. Intense to be sure, but on a real race track, with nothing soild to hit if you fall. These guys (and yes there's a few gals who do this) are crazy. Riding at 180mph+, along roads with curbs, light poles and stone walls you can hit are IMO certifiably nuts… people die doing this… but it's very fun to watch.
UPDATE: App developer Dave Norfleet is available to answer your questions posted below as a comment.
Schwinn Master Trainer Julz Arney showed me an interesting iPhone app when we met at IHRSA. She's been using this app to build her class playlists and was really excited to show it to me.
I'm very tempted to use it (instead of Spotify) simply for the class count-down timer and numbers that are big enough to read with my 52 year old eyes!
Similar to ClassBuilder, MyFitnessDJpro is the creation of developer / Indoor Cycling Instructor David Norfleet.
David's app is available in two paid versions:
MyFitnessDJ – $0.99 includes the count-down timer and you can select from a catalog of cues.
MyFitnessDJpro – $9.99 gives you the option to create your own cues like what's shown here.
You can also select different background colors to help you instantly understand your intended intensity. If you want , you can add multiple cues to each track and insert them at specific times. It's very entertaining to watch each new cue you've added, pop up right when you've set it – which could be set a few seconds before your change, giving you advanced notice of what's coming next.
This feature could be very helpful when you're trying to communicate a new theme or training objective in your class. Repetition goes a long way toward understanding. Having a number of reminders (to reinforce a specific / new concept) could go a long way toward keeping your message clear, and on point, without feeling you need to bury everyone with details in the first 10 minutes of class.
The pro version also includes an email playlist function, that you could use to fire off your music to an interested participant. David has also included an option to purchase and download some of his favorite playlists, if you need some external music suggestions.
Very cool.
If you found ClassBuilder too complex, time consuming or confusing – and yet you would like to be able to quickly add some easy to read notes to your iTunes playlist, MyFitnessDJ could be worth a look.
How many of you have sung along to a favorite tune for years, in the safety of your car/shower or (God forbid) over the Instructor Mic, only to learn that you have some of the lyrics completely wrong?
Or looked at from the other direction; how many of you have felt a sense of contentment – once you've discovered the correct lyrics for a song – and your brain no longer needs to create sounds to fill the space where the newly discovered word fits?
I'll bet nearly every person in your class has a similar experience. That's why I'm thinking what follows could be something they would enjoy 🙂
If you're using Spotify, you may have seen all of the different desk top Apps that are available. Most of them are designed around discovering new music. When I fired up Spotify this morning I saw this new musiXmatch App that displays the lyrics Karaoke style for tracks playing on Spotify, along with rotating cover art.
This could be something cool you could add to your class if you have video and a method of connecting your computer or device.
WARNING – Many songs you may search for may have the lyrics, but haven't been timed to the actual song. MUSIXMATCH will then ask if you would like to be the first to sync the lyrics to the song, as you listen along. THIS IS VERY ADDICTIVE! I burned an hour this morning working my way through the whole David Bowie — The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (40th Anniversary Edition) [Remastered] both to see if my 40 year memory was correct and to add the sync if needed.
I'm going to experiment with this next week. I'm starting a new 6:00 AM class on Thursdays and my experience is that these early AM “A” types appreciate being mentally stimulated early in the morning.
Here's a fun video about MUSIXMATCH.
We've made some substantial changes to the back end of indoorcycleinstructor.com to accommodate our growth in members and site traffic.
Depending on where you live, we were back up last night around 6:00PM Central Time – the Internet is the most complex thing on the planet and it takes quite a long time for the changes we made to work their way around the world.
Can you see a difference in the time needed to load/access the site?
We were specifically focused on improving the experience for our Mac users running Safari browsers. If you're on a Mac please let me know if you see our pages loading faster.
Along the way I learned that the speed of your Internet browser (IE, Chrome, FireFox, Safari) has a huge impact on your online experience. Some browsers tend to display bit's and pieces quite quickly as the different parts of the page download and display. Others tend to wait until they have a large percentage of the data and then POW – you see everything at once.
Best I can tell, Google's Chrome is the over-all fastest. My experience with Chrome has me recommending it as a replacement for the two standard browsers found on computers; Internet Explorer on PC's or Safari on Mac's.
