“Alright everyone, it’s time to pop out of the saddle. Get up and go!”
The elevated remix of a pop song began to crescendo. Our knees moved up and down. It was an odd sight, looking at our faint reflections in the mirror-covered wall facing us. The only light in the room came from the moon and the car headlights flashing on the ground below. Everything else was dark. Our moving reflections, shadows on the wall, bounced loosely in and out of unison with each other as we climbed up an invisible hill.
We looked like a cult of zombies; lifeless, sweaty creatures, our movements fractured and off. We moved forcefully yet went nowhere.
“Stay with the beat! Decrease your RPMs if you have to!”
It was dark, but she was looking straight at me, I could tell. I was new blood; she could smell me from the other side of the room — not literally smell me, hopefully. My resistance was low already and my tennis shoes pressed up against the rubber strap and then down on the pedal so forcefully my foot almost flailed out in the open air. I wasn’t staying with the beat. I couldn’t even find the beat anymore.
The tempo began to stall. “Keep your pace, but find your seat.”
My butt found its way back to the leather cushion shaped like a T-bone steak, just small enough to give me a permanent wedgie.
Taking a deep breath and lengthening my spine on the edge of my seat, I thought to myself, “Okay, then. This is spin class.”
—
“Pilot Cycle” classes are offered every day at various times in University of Portland’s Beauchamp Recreation Center. The cycling class is the only exercise course that the center offers in which students have to sign up online ahead of time.
I signed up earlier that afternoon, dropping the session into a virtual cart on the UP website and paying exactly $0 to attend. It felt like adding my name to the VIP list of a club I shouldn’t have been cool enough to get into.
Pulling on a pair of exercise leggings at 7:30 p.m., a knot began to tangle itself within my chest at the thought of this fitness debacle I had gotten myself into. Spin class was a foreign, scary concept for me. In that moment it felt equivalent to getting a tattoo on my wrist or cliff diving — I couldn’t figure out how painful it would be, so I just assumed the worst.
Students clad in spandex and exercise bras gathered around the two studios in the corner of the gym’s second floor. Some were waiting for a yoga class in the room on the left. Those attending “Pilot Cycle” were maneuvering large bikes into the room.
No one informed me that starting the class involved so much heavy lifting. I pressed all my weight down on the handles of a dated black-and-white exercise bike and wheeled it into the room, navigating through a sea of yoga-goers. I was self conscious while trying not to squish their bare feet with my hundred pound vehicle. Did they think I was stealing equipment?
I tried to ignore the stares I felt seeping into the back of my head as I pushed myself and the bike into the studio. I worked on positioning my seat keeping in mind WPO: Wedgie-Prevention Optimization.
We were a half-full class. The room was unanimously female, filled with girls in black and grey striped sports bras and dangerously tight ponytails positioned in the very middle of their heads.
The VIP status I had felt in signing up for the class was quickly squashed as two male cyclers with red sweatbands loosely placed on their foreheads popped in and asked if the class was full. The instructor said, “absolutely not,” and told them to come in and join us. The exclusive prissy nature of spin class that had been my vision of the course for so long was quickly starting to evaporate.
The lights turned off and we all started to pedal. Spin class was already a scary dark forest of doom; add literal darkness to the tree murals on the back wall and I felt like we were pedaling through a haunted jungle.
But the music was soothing even with its high tempo. It made each jolt of my legs down feel more intentional. I don’t know what it is about the hyperactive rhythm that accompanies any pop song placed carefully on a Spotify exercise playlist … It reaches a pulse that feels sanctimonious. It makes every physical activity you engage in while listening feel like dancing.
The tunes also gave me a chance to zone out, which is really the best way to get through a workout that’s setting your legs on fire: just think about something else.
I was thinking, “Who the hell came up with this thing?” Who thought to themselves, “You know what would be better than taking our bikes outside into the fresh air and riding around the block? Finding bikes that don’t actually go anywhere, collecting them all in one dark room and pedaling into oblivion!” Beautiful!
There are actually multiple accounts of how spin class originated. But one thing is indisputable among the “spinning” community. It all started with Johnny G. There are multiple accounts of Johnny Goldberg’s hamstring-oriented rise to exercise stardom (check the Los Angeles Times and The Independent).
One interesting tidbit: only those who are certified through Mad Dogg Athletics can use Spinning® to describe their classes. Indoor cycling or studio cycling should be used to describe all other programmes.
The class I was currently hurtling through was titled “Pilot Cycle” and the spin instructor, Rachael Aber, sitting in front of me and hardly drenching up any sweat in her all black exercise ensemble, was certified by Schwinn, just like all her fellow instructors.
Aber dispersed her awkward eye contact evenly across the room; just one of the many challenges that come with being a spin instructor — she’s the only one in the room who has to face everyone else.
“Sometimes, you see someone you partially know and you don’t know if you should wave and then they’re sweating and you’re sweating,” Aber said. “It’s just awkward.”
Meanwhile, my feet were falling from the grip of my not-so-tightly fastened pedals. Securing them inside those foot cages (which is certainly the most official technical term for them, the scientific term is footsie-thingy-madojers) was not on my pre-cycle checklist.
I looked up at my fellow cyclists. Some were keeping a pace that looked like 90 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) effortlessly, their upper body stayed in place as their legs revolved underneath. Some were going so fast they couldn’t keep a steady back and shoulders, their entire body rocking back and forth on the axis of their leather seats.
Everyone kept lighting up their small, red, rectangular screens on the bikes and checking their RPMs — which I couldn’t do because I had dragged in the dud bike that didn’t have a working screen. We had reached an endurance song in which we had to stay on the same pace throughout. The playlist was artfully produced. Each song signified a different routine, a different challenge we’d have to face.
Aber picks the songs herself. She says it’s part of what she loves about being a spin instructor. She compares the beats per minute in a particular song with the RPMs her cyclists need to meet in a given routine.
Music seems to be the backbone of a successful spin class. If our legs had been revolving in silence, my energy would have dropped off after the first fifteen minutes. Aber remembers a moment of panic in one of her previous classes when the port for the aux cord in the bike studio stopped working. She was frantic. She found a CD player in the gym with a CD inside titled “Debbie’s workout tracks.” It was a strange medley of intense rap and classical music.
“It was the weirdest mix of music and everyone was really not having it,” Aber said. “I had to improvise what we were doing. Like, okay, this is a sprint. It’s classical music, but we’re gonna sprint.”
Aber announced after a series of eight heart-pounding and butt-killing sprints that the class was almost over. I realized as I was turning up the nodule on my resistance, actually challenging the muscles in my legs to work even harder on these last few sets, that the class had somehow warped me into the space time continuum. In that hour of repetition in the dark, my legs moving in the same direction as everyone else’s, my head was still — with my legs flailing underneath my unmoving torso — but my mind wasn’t.
This is what makes spin class brilliant. It’s what makes Johnny G. the champion of 1980s and 90s fitness. He created an individual experience that you could share with a team.
Though our muddled reflections in a dark room may have looked similar, everything about our experiences was unique, from our resistance to our thoughts and the life of experiences we brought into that room with us. We were all titans for being there and we were all there for ourselves.
“Sunday Candy” by Donnie Trumpet and the Social Situation started to play as we hopped off of our bikes, reaching for our toes and stretching all the muscles in our hamstrings and calves. Some people checked their little red screens, looking to see how many calories they burned, though Aber says the bikes are wildly inaccurate in calculating this. The soulful song echoed comfortingly throughout the room: “You better come on in this house, 'Cause it's gonna rain. Rain down Zion, it's gonna rain.”
The lights came back on. It was a good Tuesday night.
See Living Editor Rachel Rippetoe's previous fitness review here.
