Working Out With The Alarm

Working Out With The Alarm

This is sort of a follow-up to my post a month ago about my attending City Cycle Seattle for spin classes. And not. In a way. It is also about smoke alarms.

Let me explain. Sort of.

Well, I have been going regularly to the 5:30 am classes and it is a challenge. Sure, getting up in the morning is tough, but that’s not really my personal barrier to overcome.

What I am finding by going regularly to spin class is that when I have to think about the rhythm, I can not keep it. I’m sure some of my former band-mates would say it was always a challenge for me, but that’s for a different time. Another issue I face is that I have never been particularly fast or strong. This means my legs just won’t go at the speed or power everybody else is – well, I’m assuming because I have my eyes closed most of the time what with it being so early in the morning.

So there I am, most mornings at 5:30, barely awake, and as out of shape as I am in, struggling to keep up with … well, just struggling.

Today? Oh, man, today was difficult, and for a different reason.

When we remodeled our house (a lengthy series of posts I neglected to do) one of the things done was to connect the smoke detectors to the house’s electrical wiring. This means if one of the smoke detectors is triggered, all of them would be. This is a great feature in a multi-story house like ours. If a fire breaks out in a room upstairs it could be a while before the downstairs smoke detector goes off waking whoever is sleeping in the downstairs bedrooms.

Yeah, it’s great, until one of them gets a low battery at 2:30 in the morning.

So all the smoke alarms start going off at a ridiculous time, startling if not outright scaring everybody. I immediately determine it is a low battery issue and start (figuratively) ripping the alarms off the ceiling. That means going into each bedroom upstairs where Tevye and Grace are sleeping. If they somehow managed to sleep through that first barrage of beeps they were fully awake when I burst in to take down the smoke alarm.

Finding each of the eight different connected smoke alarms was more of a challenge than you might think, and not because of the hour and elevated sense of panic. And of course getting them down was difficult because of the adrenaline running through me, as well as not having the luxury of finding, then taking the step ladder around to each smoke alarm. I had to be acting fast to find and disconnect them from the ceiling so I wound up having to stand on my toes to do so.

Even more bothersome was how after being disconnected from the house wiring and having the battery taken out one or two of them would STILL chirp.

I don’t know what time it was when I finally got back in bed. Laura dealt with Tevye and Xavier while I got Grace back to sleep. Getting back to bed of course did not mean getting back to sleep right away.

Fast forward not too much later. There I am in spin class and before I even get on the bike my calves are sore and I’m tired – more so than usual.

There I am, tired and sore, already unable to keep the rhythm and coordination of the class, but I don’t stop. Today was tough, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t sweat nearly as much as I usually do, mostly because my body just wouldn’t move. It was frustrating.

Back at it tomorrow.