The Spin Class And Other Egocentricities, by Brian Oliu

The Spin Class and Other Egocentricities

Cycling is so not us.  The act of self-propulsion is something that we haven’t been too keen on:  give us a mechanism where the energy we put into it is multiplied exponentially.  Why walk when we can skateboard?  Why bike when we can press a gas pedal?  The fact that the Segway exists should be enough evidence that human beings, when given the alternative, are of the shortcutting variety.

I never learned how to ride a bicycle:  our driveway was gravel and the road was certainly not apt for practice.  My mother would take me to the Three Bridges School parking lot to try out life as a motorist, but I never saw the point.  I could not get from point A to B utilizing my newfound vehicle because of the roads, and the idea of pedaling around in a circle seemed useless to me.

My relationship with the bicycle changed when I moved to Belgium in college to study abroad when I was 20 years old.  Many of my friends opted to rent or purchase bicycles in order to get from our housing to class.  When it was revealed that I had never learned how to chariot these two-wheeled devil-machines, it became a personal goal of my acquaintances to teach me how to ride.  Of course, by this time I understood the concept of gravity and that if I fell off the bike it would cause me pain, so it was impossible for me to give it a proper try.  Furthermore, since the bicycles were rentals, they would often fall apart or go askew even with the most savvy of riders.  Eventually, my friends gave up their quest and I happily walked everywhere.  They joined me a few months later when the chains on their bikes broke or a local threw their mode of transport into the river than ran through the town.

After a foot injury last year that robbed me of my beneficial yet tumultuous relationship with running, I was forced to look for other mechanisms of which I could begrudgingly slog through so I could eat BBQ pork sandwiches and feel only 80% guilty post-consumption.  My first experiment was with the Stairmaster, a horrific device invented by a man who once had a dream where he was exercising on the moon.  For those who have been on a Stairmaster this does not make any sense.  Granted, the majority of us have never been on the moon, but I’m certain we all have vivid memories of astronauts skipping along the dusty surface, jumping higher than can be imaginable on earth.  We all remember the rich kid whose parents rented a moon bounce for their eighth birthday party.  Maybe we were so inspired by weightlessness we went to Space Camp, or, at the very least, ate astronaut ice cream despite our brains and mouths telling us that this, tragically, is a terrible, terrible experience.  Gravity is sparse in space!  This will be fun!

This is not fun.  The first thing you notice is gravity:  the floor slowly begins to sink from underneath your feet—the one thing we trust the most has become unstable.  You must bring the earth up to greet your body, as if for once you have control of the ground beneath your feet.  You are Atlas in reverse.  You will do this for 30 minutes, though probably much, much less.  The Stairmaster is the worst.  My foot hated me—probably due to the fact that I was confusing the hell out of it with this bizarre quicksand simulation.  I knew what I had to do:  look the bicycle in its velocipedic arrogance and join a spin class.

Whereas the bicycle is distinctly European, (it was inspired by Karl Drais’ Laufmaschine and later perfected by les Français—the Brits and Americans referred to the Laufmaschine as the “dandy horse”, a pejorative if I’ve ever heard one) the concept of indoor cycling is certainly American.  Developed in the 1980s by Jonathan Goldberg and trademarked by his company Mad Dogg Athletics, Inc., Spinning takes everything positive about cycling — the ability to get from one place to another quickly, the creation of renewable energy, being at one with your surroundings and the open road –and makes it stationary and insufferable.

The key to spinning is the classroom structure—the stationary bikes face the front of the room where the instructor faces outward and barks commands at the students.  Like a true educator, there is direction:  turn resistance up, move from the sitting position to the standing position, take a drink of water.  And, like a good educator, there is motivation, although it comes in many forms.  Of course the universal motivator when dealing with exercise is music:  the instructor serves as DJ.  Sadly, the DJing skills of the spinning instructor are on par with the DJing skills of the Tuesday Night Trivia Guy—music that they perceive to be spectacularly awesome but serve only as interstitial music between questions (e.g. What is the Capital of Lichtenstein?  Why the fuck am I on this bike?) and occasionally singing along in an attempt to demonstrate the pure joy they are getting out of this situation.

I am not one to talk about power trips while in control of others:  I teach college English and often spend time explaining my theories on various eccentricities to a captive audience (like Spin Class, for example!) but there is an art to doing it—a semblance of synthesis and gentle understanding.  The instructor is perceived to be an expert in the field of moving pedals super fast with his or her feet and has the documentation to prove it:  they subscribe to Spinning Instructor News (an actual magazine) and have read the Spinning Instructor Manual (an actual manual) and have learned “how to teach bike setup and safety, craft unforgettable class ride profiles, develop strong coaching skills, incorporate heart rate training, and use techniques to enhance the mind/body connection” (an actual quote from said actual manual).  They do these things so that we don’t have to—that we can learn something from them.  Granted, that something seems to be a moot point after one’s first spin class:  we know how to position our seats and handlebars to a point where they are comfortable (but never too comfortable), we know how to add resistance, we know what positions one, two, and three mean.  So what is it that we learn?

The issue here is with the final bullet point in the manual:  instructors have learned techniques to enhance the mind/body connection.  On a bike ride through the city, we interact with the world around us—we are presented with what exists.  We are truly traveling:  to toil—an activity that covers all of the activities performed during our movement through space.  Jim Toweill, in his review of The Personal Vehicle claims that the personal vehicle (including bikes, he points out) is destroying our brains at an alarming rate:  the fact that we can travel anywhere at anytime and are not forced to sit at home all day means that when we do choose to sit at home all day, we feel the need to be constantly stimulated, and at a rapid pace.  This is true when simulating travel as well—while we remain stationary in a room with the lights turned out, we need something else keeping us distracted from the absurdity of expelling motion towards nothing productive; nothing that will better the world first-hand.

This is what the instructor provides—a guided imagery Tour de France.  In a recent session, the instructor told us to visualize the hill that we are climbing:  to see the top and to look past it.  Mountains as metaphor!  This was interspersed with other quips such as “It only hurts if you tell yourself it hurts,” and “You are the one in control of your future, only you.”  In addition, we are told to picture the top of the mountain as a mirror—to see our bodies coming closer and closer—to observe ourselves as if we are to crash into our reflection, to exist in this world of self-importance.  It’s dumb as rocks.

But it also works somehow.  And when he tells us to picture ourselves riding along an amalgamation of our fears and stresses and to blow past them in a pedaling rage, I picture a dark figure representing women, money, and health problems.  When he says to picture riding next to someone who has passed on, I am riding along with my grandfather in the hills outside of Barcelona.  I have created all of this.  I am a God.

And that’s a problem.  I start thinking about sex and jetskis and text messaging and buying a new pair of shoes and sex and making totally sick three-pointers and time travel and sex.  We have all had the wind in our hair and imagined something false and created, but this whole process is too much.  Whereas the Spinner is a bastardized form of a 19^th Century German vision, the motivation to remain on the Spinner is a bastardized form of a 19^th Century German vision:  what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?  Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? Like the dream that spawned the Stairmaster, you are exercising on the moon:  isolated and alone.  Your legs are creating their own orbit—all things circle around you.

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