Breaking a Sweat: Spinning 101



Spinning?  Not quite.


Spinning - when I first heard this term several years ago I didn't even know what it meant.  When I learned that it was a term for an indoor cycling class, I turned up my nose.  Who wants to sit on a stationary bike in a hot, sweaty room going absolutely nowhere?  I tried it once out of curiosity and never went back.  Not for me, I thought.

But now that my foot hurts and my back hurts and any high impact type exercise is currently not an option, I decided to give it another try.  It's a popular class - you have to sign up 24 hours in advance to take it and it fills up quickly.  So maybe I missed something the last time - maybe this time I would catch the spinning bug like all those other suckers I see madly pedalling away every time I peer into the mysterious darkened room at the gym.


I was also motivated by the fact that one of my friends, a fellow parent from our elementary school, has been going to this class religiously for quite a while and frequently encourages me to come back and try it again.  It always helps to have a buddy in these classes - especially when you don't know what you're doing.  When I arrived she showed me her spinning shoes, which look like regular sneakers but with a special little metal piece on the bottom that  attaches to the pedal and somehow maximizes your spinning potential.  I suddenly felt out of my element but was determined to try it.



 The instructor helpfully adjusted my seat for me and proclaimed my seat position to be "I-1" which I am now supposed to remember for all eternity so that my seat can always be in the exact right position when I spin.  I glanced around to get a feel for the demographics in the room.  The thing that really struck me was how many men were in the class - and none of them were under the age of 70.  The guy next to me is a gym regular - everyone knows this guy.  I've heard that he's at least 80 years old and he is the fittest older man I have ever met - I can't even bring myself to call him elderly.  Anyone who goes to this gym knows this guy - he wears biker shorts and fitted shirts and has a huge smile on his face at all times.  He is the antithesis of the stereotypical grumpy old man.  He greeted me with a big hello and told me how much I was going to enjoy the class.  That was enough for me!  I started pedaling right away.

Once you start spinning you really can't stop.  It's not like a regular bike, where you can pause and the pedals stop spinning and the wheels keep rolling.  You are literally trapped on this bike, feet tightly strapped onto the pedals (in my case at least since I don't have those fancy spinning shoes), the wheels spinning, spinning, spinning relentlessly - hence the name of the class I guess.  There's a little knob that you turn that controls the resistance and there are no settings on this knob.  It's all subjective - you decide what feels like an "eight" to you (this is a slight incline I think) and the instructor tells you when to crank it up to a 9, 10, 11, whatever - depending on the intensity.  I was sweating profusely and thinking to myself that I'd been on the bike for quite a while already, but then I glanced at my watch and saw that eight minutes had gone by.  EIGHT MINUTES?  That's it?  I'm gonna die, I thought.  It was about then that I found out that the class was a full hour, not the 45 minutes advertised on the gym schedule.

Long story short, I made it through the class.  The banter between the old guys kept things lively and the instructor was very enthusiastic and played good music.  I could have killed her when she added an extra couple of sprints at the end, but all in all, not a bad experience.  Now I might not be able to move tomorrow when I get out of bed, but I'll deal with that if it happens. 

So am I a spinner or not?  I guess I could see myself doing the class once a week.  I have a crazy notion that I might try a sprint triathlon sometime next year, so at the very least this will get my cycling endurance going.  Now I just have to fix my foot so I can run again.  The Hot Chocolate 5K in December awaits!!