Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

I only got a membership for a gym so I could work on my swimming, right? So wouldn’t it be just my luck for the pool to be closed for an entire quarter of my membership? Well, la-de-fricken-da, it is. So, instead of just going to chill in the lane next to the old guy with the flippers or the middle-aged man who can swim circles around me with his perfect form, I’ve been hitting the machinery.

Usually, unfamiliar machines make me nervous and especially when I don’t want to look like that newb reading the instructions on the machines before I do my rows or tricep presses. Also, the machines all have those adjuster knobs for the seat or the pad or the rest and it just becomes a major hassle to readjust when I do a circuit and someone cuts in. Today, I actually sat on one of my favorite machines for leg curls and awkwardly adjusted knobs until it sort of fit me. Then, I spent another five minutes searching for a mysterious third knob that I never actually found. Instead, I slunk away from the group of muscle heads who’d surrounded my machine group, fully aware that they had seen my failure.

Guess no leg curls today: I worked on arms because I knew I’d signed up for a spinning class and didn’t want to burn out instantly. Good thing I planned ahead, because I burned out almost instantaneously anyways. Yay for a sedentary lifestyle. So when I went to sign up for the class I was talking to the guys at the front desk and I asked them how it was as a class.

Guy 1: “So easy. Like simple.”

Me: “Oh. So it’s easy then? I’ve heard otherwise. Hmm.”

Guy 2: “Yeah. You’ll be fine. Except you’ll probably feel horrible by the end. Like exhausted and just plain sore. Actually, it’s really a difficult class.”

Me: “… Right…”

So I walked away from that conversation extremely confused as to the difficulty level I was getting myself into and I didn’t even know the length of time it took.

I showed up a few minutes early for the class, mostly so I could get acclimated with the weird-ass bikes they use and introduce myself to the instructor. She was wearing hardcore cycling shoes and looked like she never stopped biking. Ever. Off go the lights in the room and class gets right under way. She had some awesome music blasting, pretty much the exact playlist I would have chosen myself and she kept talking to us through one of those microphone headphones. I couldn’t help but laugh as she attempted to get us pumped up for some pain.

“Okay. We’re going up a hill now. Push. Push.” I don’t know what type of “hill” she was taking us biking on, but I can say that I would have never chosen to go biking on that hill. I would have sat at the bottom of the hill, one foot planted on the ground and the other on the pedal of my bike, and looked up at the winding mountain road and just said, “Screw this.”

Good thing these hills were imaginary because I would have just veered off course and headed home if we were actually road-biking. By the end of the second song I was already gasping and I actually saw sweat glistening on my legs. WTF. I do not sweat. Like ever. And if by the tiniest of chances that I do sweat, it damn well isn’t on my knees.

We get to an Alanis Morissette song and the instructor is going all out trying to motivate us. She telling us “come on, listen to the song. She’s angry. Get ANGRY.” I start laughing through my pain, imagining Patches O’Houlihan from Dodgeball instructing my class.

At this point, I start rethinking my decision to take this class. I’m mentally calculating the songs it will take to play out a half hour class and then I realize it might be an hour-long class. My legs are in so much agony that I have stopped feeling the sharp pain in my ass from the hard bike seat that started the moment my cheek touched the thin leather. I can tell you right now that I have since started feeling the biting pain of jostling around for an hour on a bicycle seat.