Doing the Hsinchu Hshuffle: 90′ of aerobic tedium

After Saturday’s disaster, I got on a plane Sunday morning and arrived at my hotel in Hsinchu 27 hours after I left my house in Massachusetts.  I managed to get some sleep on the flight across the pacific, but I felt a bit worn down.

I took an Ambien and got a good solid 6 hours of sleep, and woke up a minute before my alarm this morning.  I put on my workout clothes and headed down to the fitness center.  It was warm and very humid.  I was in for a sweat fest

Plan:

  1. 30′ bike
  2. 30′ treadmill
  3. 30′ elliptical

On the bike I setup for a “two hill” profile.  That was hard at the end and boring in the middle, but it elicited the desired HR response.  I moved over to an elliptical and tried in vain to get it set up.  The touch screen was very reluctant to acknowledge my touches.  I finally gave up on that and went over to the recumbent bikes and started up there.  Then I saw a treadmill open up over my shoulder and I lunged for it.  The treadmill had the same touch screen issues, but I was finally able to get it to a 1% grade and 5 mph for a gentle 30′ jog.  No issues there.

After that I went over and selected a different elliptical which also had a wonky touch screen, but I was finally able to get it set to the right level and time and set off on a 30 minute tour around the world.  This was basically a few minute long intervals with a few smaller “hills” and some flats.  Easy peasy and darn boring.

But the intent was to work on aerobic base, and this did the trick.  I ended up sweating so much that my shoes were making that squish-sqish noise while I did my ellipitcal thing.  When I got back to my room, I noticed that I had lines of suds trailing down my legs where the sweat had gotten stirred in with some residual laundry detergent.  Did I mention it was humid?

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Tomorrow:  I think I will do a 2 x 60′  (bike and elliptical).  More aerobic base work.