Do I have the energy for this today? My thoughts aren’t fully awake as I routinely park my car outside the spin studio and yawn. I know the energy will surface once class starts, but will it always feel this hard to start?
But here I am, the lights are off, and I’m sweating profusely. My lungs feel like they might burst from my rapid breaths that I worry could be considered paradoxical, with my body moving in unexplainable ways.
As I move to the music around me, my heartbeat feels like it’s aligning with the person on either side of me. I close my eyes, hoping to lose myself in the moment, when a vision of a desert replaces my reflection in the mirror in front of me. It’s vast. . . with nothing but camel-colored sand in sight. It extends eternally to the horizon, as the wind gently brushes against my cheek, playing with my hair like a nurturing parent. I breathe in the heat, suddenly seeing someone small standing in front of me. She’s a toddler, probably no older than two or three years old. I watch her look up at me as the wind whips her hair across her face, the dust from the sand clouding her. A white line drawn in the sand separates us, and I can’t reach her, but I want to.
As I look closer, she resembles my niece, but then I realize she’s me—a child blurred in my memory, so much so that I feel like I’ve only seen her in camcorder home videos and photo albums that are now falling apart. We lock eyes, and I feel drawn to her—the need to cross that line for her suddenly urgent.
I’m brought back to reality when the spin class instructor says, “This song is for you and you alone. You have to choose how far you’re going to go.”
The first spin class where I experienced this heightened level of awareness was after losing my dog. He was that special “practice child” that you get in your early twenties who helps you navigate finding yourself as an adult. He was my best friend, so when he was gone, I had a huge lack of happy hormones. After he passed, I forced myself to go to a spin class. Endorphins rushed in as I acknowledged the riders fighting their own battles with me, replacing my sadness with glorious relief knowing I wasn’t alone. In the dark, I was able to face the heaviness of my situation and push past it. If I ever start to feel the beat slipping away from me, I can look at the rider in front of me and watch their legs move, providing confidence the collective room will carry me to the end of the ride.
In another one of my recent rides, I came into the low-lit room feeling heavy, for some reason, this is a pattern for how I show up—contemplating the hardships of my life just before class. The news that relatives of mine were getting divorced had just been relayed to me days prior, and the devastation of it was making me feel fragile, broken, and unmotivated. I thought I’d use that spin class as a distraction, but during the last third of the class, I found my body releasing the emotion and replacing it with impractical peace. Just when class was almost over, my body gave everything it had for one last push, and my mental state turned to one of clarity. I was able to look at the emotions locked inside me, dead in the eye, and liberate them, allowing the riders surrounding me to carry the weight with me. Thousands of pedal revolutions in the dark left me feeling like I had left a therapist’s office rather than a gym without ever uttering a word.
Spin classes have rebirthed purpose into my hard days and long weeks. While the ground keeps shifting beneath me, the thing that holds me up is the pedals and the people surrounding me in the dark, continuing to move their legs in unison with mine.
Here’s how I push away the thoughts of resistance each week:
- I no longer worry about whether I’ll be the fastest or strongest rider in the class. When I park my car, I breathe deeply, knowing I get to move my body in a way that feels refreshing, and that’s enough.
- I make a point to talk to at least one person after class to further my connection to this space, making me excited to come back. Moving in sync during a class breaks that barrier, so I know I can at least talk about the choreography with someone who rode near me and further potential friendships.
- I get out of my head and into my body. When you tell yourself you can’t do something, your brain communicates that to your body, and you physically won’t be able to. When you say positive things to yourself, your body can carry you so much farther than you might believe deep down.
I headed back into the black room this week, and three oversized candles lined the front of the instructor’s bike. The lights were already low as she began to blow out each one, encasing the room in total darkness. Feeling of birthdays past came to the surface with the extinguished wicks producing a wistful smell that reminds me to celebrate that I’m alive, on this earth, in this moment. There she was again—the vision of the little girl, of me—behind closed eyes. Looking at her sweet, rosy cheeks and long eyelashes, I can see that I’m still her, just with a lot more life lived.
“This is your last push,” the instructor relayed over the mic. “Run.”
I no longer thought about all the things I allowed to hold me back. I could see myself sprinting across that line in the sand without a second thought, picking up that little helpless, scared, vulnerable version of myself and spinning her around. There’s no way I wouldn’t choose her every time. It’s in these dark moments that I’m able to confront who I am, and she is glorious.
