Bad news, my daughter stayed home from school sick on Tuesday. Good news, instead of being at drop-off, I was home to take an 8am class live.

During my month off from running in December, I did a lot of cycling on the Peloton.

It’s a good workout, which I hadn’t done a lot of the past couple of years on account of all the running I’ve been doing.

Sometimes I work the bike in as part of the training, and maybe I’ll do that this year as I train for Chicago, but I got out of the habit more recently.

So it was nice to get back to it, and it was nice that I was able to do something that made me work hard at a time when I otherwise would have only done some strength training, if that.

What I liked best about it, though, was doing live classes.

If you’re unfamiliar with Peloton, you can take either classes that are pre-recorded, where you see who else is taking the same class at the same time as you, but you’ve all started at different times so everyone is at a different stage of the ride.

Or you can take a live class, say at 8am on a Tuesday, which I did this week (and another immediately afterwards at 8:30, as you can see in the picture above), and at that time everyone you’re looking at on the leaderboard started at the same time and you’re all at the same point in the class and it’s happening right now!

If you’ve never seen the Peloton screen before, that’s the leaderboard on the right, and the instructor doing some pre-class shoutouts for Peloton members hitting cycling milestones.

I like that. Not for the competitive atmosphere, which admittedly sometimes kicks in. Just knowing that we’re all at the same part of the ride - we’re struggling through together! (or coasting through together!), all high-fiving at the same exact part of the ride - and that’s a cool community aspect of it.

And it made me think I would probably enjoy being in studio for a live class.

The other thing that made me think I would enjoy that is Kathy - she’s done it twice - once was at the very beginning of 2024 (she did a ride and a strength class), and then again when she (very excitingly) got into the popular Thanksgiving morning class just a couple of months ago. She came back from the Thanksgiving class gushing about it and telling me I should do it.

And I agreed.

So I don’t know if I’ll take a cycling class, or a strength class, or a tread class (or maybe all of them over the course of the year?), but I think it’s fair to say this is an achievable goal in one way or another.

If I had my choice, I would do a tread class on my birthday.

That seems doable since my birthday is on a Monday and they have a lot of live offerings on a Monday.

The tricky part, I think, is that not every live class has people in-studio, and there’s obviously no guarantee I’ll be able to get in on that particular day.

The birthday is nice because they’d have a reason to shout me out, which would be fun. Otherwise I’d have to try to line up a milestone run (or strength workout) in order to draw their attention to my name. And with this most likely happening while I’m training for Chicago I don’t want to force in unnecessary workouts.

But if I’m flexible enough this summer I should be able to find something that works.