Friday’s trainer workout was difficult. I had already ridden on Thursday, so my legs were feeling a little tired on Friday. Even so, I needed exercise. The weather was shitty. The trainer was my only option.

I was going to do an hour-long workout of fairly steady spinning. Instead, I started off with a cadence of 90 rpm in a moderate-effort gear. I did that for 10 minutes. Then, I shifted into a harder gear and pedaled at a somewhat varying cadence of 88 to 100 rpm. That was hard. After the five-minute interval, I dropped it down into a really easy gear and kept the cadence around 70 or 80 rpm and spent the next five minutes regaining my breath and lowering my heart and respiration rates to much more bearable levels. I repeated the moderate, 10-minute interval; the hard, five-minute interval; and the easy, five-minute interval twice more.

The last hard, five-minute interval was a little too much for me. I had to stop pedaling for 20 seconds about halfway through; then, I resumed the hard effort to finish the interval. Wow. It. Hurt. So. Bad. During the last half of that interval, I suddenly heard some motivational voices pop into my head. The first was Gilad from the butt-kicking, strength-training videos I did last winter. “You can do it! This last interval is going to change your muscle!” Then, suddenly, another familiar thing popped into my head: “WINNING!”

It’s amazing what our minds ponder in the midst of suffering.