Thick as a Brick

In my tireless efforts to push the very envelope of interval workouts into uncharted territory I will blast Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick directly into my brain while riding an upright bike synchronizing my cadence against the song's varied rhythms. Sure, they laugh at me at the institute, mock my theories... say I'm mad.

The bastards.

Do they have the courage, the nerve to attempt what I'm about to hazard?

No.

I type this through sweat stained glasses hardly noticing the salty blur, getting you word on how it went.

I'm on an upright, manual setting, level 7, cue the song, close my eyes and go...

Ahhhh the easy, rolling jangle of the acoustic guitar as I'm greeted with the iconic opening:

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper - your deafness a SHOUT.

I let the lyrics flow into my mind and the rhythm work on me. The imagery of the poem builds

And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away
In the tidal destruction, the moral melee.
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the newfangled way.

Wow. I'll fight the urge to bore you with what the various couplets invoked in me but I found things to consider inside the song. That's the point of my goofy experiments anyway, to try and find music (which I'm finding increasingly essential to gym cardio work) and some sort of workout where you can get lost in it. Or I could go to Bubbles Zumba class I guess but for me this is fun too.

There were some, uh, dated moments in the song. Excessive use of the organ and a drum solo for crying out loud. The middle of this forty-three minute monster was the toughest, trying to pick out a cadence when it got excessively 'experimental' and keep my concentration on the tune. But when it came back around to the lyrics it was easier, there are parts where I hammered the pedals fairly hard with a cadence around 120 but most of it boiled down to a kind of marching beat where I was around 90.

I'm getting kind of delusional on the bike, whistling some of the flute parts and fighting the urge to put my left foot on my right knee in the classic Ian Anderson pose. I'm pretty deep into the song which is mostly music at this point, waiting for it to come around to the final set of lyrics. Eyes closed, swaying, humming and muttering. It's not that bad and I'm trying hard to keep the cadence to the beat so I was pretty disappointed with the heart chart which looks much more like a tempo workout than an interval one.

It looks like intervals might require more regimen in a gym setting. I was trying to see if I could be caught unawares of the next 'hill' its gradient (cadence) and duration. I was attempting to inject some randomness into an interval workout. This one didn't work that way - still 69% maxHR for forty-three minutes and a bunch of fun was fine by me. It was a good workout :-)

So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men don't know how it feels...

...to be thick as a brick.

Oh this is gonna be a nail biter! :-)