View From The Middle: I Can Stop At Any Time

I'm thinking that my friend Mark may be no better than the local drug pusher. At least that's how it feels on a Sunday morning, when I wake up at 7:45 a.m. and haul ass to get to an 8 a.m. spin class. I used to think of a brisk half-hour walk as exercise but, thanks to Mark, those days are long gone.

Spinning, for the uninitiated, is the term used for a group exercise class that takes place entirely on stationary bicycles. There are a couple dozen bikes, an instructor (who serves as leader, motivator, and deejay), mirrors, music, and sweat. The bikes all have "speedometers" and "odometers" so you can track your pace and mileage. They also have "resistance knobs" which you're commanded to manipulate throughout your ride. Less resistance emulates a flat-road ride; more resistance, a hill.

I don't like biking. I don't like sweating. I don't really like exercising at all. I don't like having to be somewhere at a specific time, and I certainly don't like having to stay there until someone else has decided I'm finished. Yet I am so completely addicted to this particular experience that often my first thought of the morning ... the very first thing that pops into my head as I open my eyes is: "Ooooh! I get to spin today!"

Mark opened his spin studio about two years ago and had asked me to help write his Web site. He'd prefer to not pay me in cash, he said, but rather in classes. I agreed, knowing full well I would never take a single class. I thought that, maybe, if the studio became successful, we could revisit the idea of money. In the meantime, I just considered it as helping out a friend.

Then I saw my neighbor, a former size 12, in her skinny jeans. "How'd you get your butt to look like that?" I asked her. "I spin five days a week. You should come with me one day," she said.

Oh, Mark, with your First-Class-Is-Free enticement. You have dealers all over this town now, don't you?

It took me a full year to amass the courage to show up. My first time, I didn't even last 30 minutes. I heard things clicking (in me, not the bike) and I could barely breathe. Six miles in, I dismounted and left. But a few days later, I tried again. My goal was to simply make it five minutes longer than I had the time before. To my surprise, I made it the full hour.

Now, nine months later, I physically crave these classes, even though some days I still take it mile by mile, song by song. Once I get past the first seven minutes, I start to experience the high. That sweet place where I'm thinking that there is nothing — NOTHING — better than this.

To me, it feels like dancing. Better, actually, because you're all secured onto a bike and don't run the risk of falling over.

Well, at least I'm secured. Early on, I heard that bike shoes, the ones that clip right onto the pedals, make your workout more efficient. I'm all for efficient (which, to me, means easier) so I bought some shoes. Then a heart monitor. So, now I show up with all my gear: shoes, monitor, a cushioned seat cover (which makes my keister happy), a towel to mop up sweat, and a bottle of water so I don't die.

One discovery I've made is something I've suspected about myself forever. With the right music playing, I can get through practically anything. All it takes is one perfect song at just the right moment and what seemed like drudgery a second ago now feels like pure bliss. It happened last Sunday when Mark played Paul McCartney's "Magneto and Titanium Man," but there have been others: "All The Young Dudes," "Take It Easy," Simon and Garfunkel's "America." When your right song emerges, it becomes wind at your back.

One day, weeks ago, I was spinning in a crowded room, 15 miles under my belt (which, for me, signals that the end is near) and we were told this would be our last hill. That's always good news, so I began to feel a little lighter. And the Beatles were playing "Hey Jude," which is not one of my all-time favorite Beatles songs, but certainly a pleasant enough one. So we're all slogging through this last hill and right when the Na Na's start, I began to get choked up for some reason. I looked around me and everyone seemed to be pedaling completely in sync, and at first I wasn't sure if I was hearing things, but it sounded like someone behind me was singing along.

Her voice was like an angel's, and then someone else started to sing, and before long half the room was climbing this impossible hill singing "Hey Jude" at the tops of their lungs until the hill got so steep and the effort so great that we didn't have enough air to voice words at all anymore.

Well, that was about as ecstatic an experience as I'd ever had in a public place, and when the class was over I tried to savor that feeling of unity and tenderness that had spontaneously erupted in that room. But it faded. As feelings often do. And so I show up to spin, again and again, like a crack-cocaine addict looking for another fix of heaven.