Spin, Baby, Spin

It's cold outside and I'm not fond of running in tights, so I'm back to taking spinning classes. No, not like this:



More like this:



The bikes have weighted wheels, which add momentum to the spin. There's a teacher who tells you what to do, hopefully pushing you harder than you'd do on your own.

Ann finds Spinning too dweeby for words. In Concord, apparently all of the Spinners are taut type-A women, scrawny of limb and of spirit, trying hard to push all of the femininity out of their sharpened bodies. I prefer to think of it as what Lance might be doing on the off-season.



Which reminds me of a story Gary told me. A British poet named John Betjeman was at a pub with some writer friends who were joshing him for his extreme reserve, noting the nearly complete absence of sex in his poems. He demurely accepted the leg-pulling, but the following week, he gigglingly said that he'd written something very dirty indeed. "In fact, it might be the dirtiest poem ever written," he suggested. Here it is:

I think that I should rather like
To be the seat upon a bike.

(I realize that anecdote works much better without a picture of a naked Lance Armstrong immediately preceding it, but it's too late now. Just try to imagine you hadn't seen the picture. It'll be more amusing.)

Now, obviously, spinning class depends a lot on the teacher. My favorite is Jack, a Broadway chorus boy who plays cheerful disco classics and often signs along. Earlier this week, we had a substitute, who was also good, more military in style ("8-Go!-7-Go!-6 and 5-Go!-4-Go!-3-Go!- 2 and 1") and quite challenging. Alas, the Thursday teacher really gets under my craw. I was hoping that after 2 months away, they'd have given the class to someone else. No such luck.

He's a New Age flake who uses the class as an opportunity to spread his get-in-touch-with-yourself malarky. He'll say things like "connect with the multi-layered experience," or "Don't do what I say; become the embodiment of the instructions" or "I want you to slowly, almost intimitately increase the resistance. Only everything is delivered in a skin-crawling reptilian drawl, so it sounds like this: " I waaant youuuu to slooooowly, almost iiiiiiiintimately increeeease the resistanccccce." Worse, he walks around the class, giving individual tips. Nothing useful, like "your shoulders are too rigid" or "spin faster, lazybones." No, he gives each of us a botched mantra, like "Become the texture of the wheel." He stands too close and you can feel his breath, which in this case is not a good thing.

And his music sucks, too. A long loop of droney throbs, including--really--a techno remix of the Flower Duet from Lakme.

I may have to just use the treadmill on Thursdays...