Take Your Mom to Spin Class

8.5.23 Middle aged edition

Your beautiful daughter is home from her first year of college this summer, thrilled to be back in the land of gourmet salads and cutting edge workout classes! If there’s anything a girl can count on in Southern California, it’s the opportunity to overspend on avant-garde fitness and nutrition trends. Going to a workout class is a great way to get away from her parents, who are somehow always at home, (Like, don’t you guys ever leave the kitchen?) and around people her own age. She goes to the gym regularly, leaving the house wearing a sports bra and yoga pants which this generation of body-positive young women call “leggings and a top,” and that’s it. That’s all of the clothing on her body as she walks out the front door. (It’s fine. Everything is fine.) She has multiple variations of this outfit, most of them purchased with hundreds of your dollars. 

Her most recent preference in fitness classes is a spin class franchise called GritCycle™. Her good friend from high school loves GritCycling™ SO MUCH that she got a job there for the summer which is totally lit, because she gives your daughter guest passes. Last week your daughter informed you that she thinks you would “really like this one instructor, Tony.” He’s her favorite and “You should come with me sometime.”

before and after

You say yes enthusiastically. In fact, you sort of scream, “OF COURSE!” Because there’s nothing you love more than feeling relevant and hip. With that in mind, when the time comes to get ready for this class, you survey your meager collection of bicycle shorts and sports bras to find the ones that seem most in style. You’re in good shape. You are fit and not ashamed of your body. But you are also not excited about leaving the house with your ass hanging out like this, so you layer your husband’s oversized t-shirt on top of your cycle uniform. Which makes you wonder, “Am I really not ashamed of my body?” 

Needless to say, your daughter looks amazing and turns out to be wearing the unofficial-offical uniform of GritCycle™. The building is a living art exhibit of a female Lycra army. No matter your job or status, no matter your ethnicity or size, you women will wear this uniform. There are two young men mixed into the army. 

After checking in for your free (score!) first class, your daughter leads you to the sterile, white hallway with open shelves for your personal belongings. You put on the awkward cycling shoes with a chunk of plastic attached to the bottom at the ball of your feet. You try not to fall or slip as you make your way with her around a corner and into the room with all the stationary bikes lined up in metallic rows, ready to charge into battle. 

There are probably fifty bikes. But the visual repetition makes them feel like one hundred. Just so many bikes! They are arranged around the side and back walls like stadium seating. Two bikes sit up on a riser front and center where Tony and his sidekick will lead you. The room has no windows. The top half of the front wall is made of mirrors. 

In her explanation of the class beforehand, your daughter casually mentioned people cycling themselves sick from exhaustion. She told you she nearly puked at her first class. Her girlfriend who works here reports, “People puke all the time.” and it weirdly comes in waves. There will be days with no one getting sick, and then lots of people throwing up their matcha-boba or kombucha, or whatever the kids are drinking. 

Why would you willingly go to a barf-inducing, extravagantly priced class doing an exercise you could do along the beach for free? Good question. You would do it because your daughter asked you to do it. That is the only reason. Also, there is a little part of you that thinks you will enjoy the class. 

The instructor is a very muscular, friendly man in a gym-bro tank top. He’s got to be almost thirty because it would take over ten years to acquire as many tattoos as he has. He introduces himself to all of the new students, including you, one by one, by yelling a few things very close to each of your faces because it’s already too loud to hear what someone at a reasonable distance is saying. The music is on. The fans are on. Women are clomp, clomp, clomping in their weird, GritCycle™ shoes to their assigned bikes. 

You have to reserve a bike in advance and they always fill up. Your daughter, always thinking, has chosen two bikes in the far corner of the back row. Thank GOD! 

After your daughter adjusts your bike, and after Tony’s very kind, welcome spiel, you attempt to clip your weird, GritCycle™ shoes into the pedals. This takes a while. Nevertheless, you remain confident because you bike everywhere around town, everyday, all the time. You will be fine. Your pedaling muscles are in shape and you are an athlete. An almost-fifty year old, recreational athlete who spends a considerable amount of your workout time talking to your tennis partner between games, but still! An athlete. 

The class gets going when the lights go off completely and the music becomes seriously deafening. The songs all have a driving beat, of course, and you’ve even heard a couple of them before. Great! There is a lighting element to this experience --the lights go down, the lights come up-- giving the whole thing a club vibe. Black lights go off or come on sometimes. (Will they illuminate any residual organic matter from the barf?) Tony controls the lights which he coordinates with the music. When there’s a big beat drop, the lights change for dramatic effect. It works! It is dramatic. 

You are a straight A student, so you spend a lot of time making sure you are on the right foot for the choreography. This is ridiculous. It absolutely does not matter which foot goes down on which beat. Just keep going. You spend a few seconds every song looking around the room to see if you are on track and also to make eye contact with another cyclist --to feel accepted, or at least encouraged. No one looks back. No one looks at anyone. You start to judge these people. “Why would people come in here when there is Outside?” “Why would people come to this class when there are stationary bikes you can ride in your own home where you pick the music and it’s free?” “Maybe I’m more self-disciplined than these people.” you think smugly. “Maybe they don’t know how to play a fun sport like tennis.” That must be it. 

Your daughter is moving as gracefully as a dancer, which she is. She knows what’s coming next and she knows the words to the songs and gets pumped when each new song starts. 

Twice, in between songs you stare down your daughter so you can encourage each other in some way, maybe exchange smiles. She is only three feet away from you and yet it’s hard to get her attention because of the loud music and the darkness. You eventually do a makeshift hi-five with her. This is not part of the culture, and she grimaces a little but humors you anyway, and you are thankful. 

At one point you are ready to go harder, to push yourself. So you stand up, lifting your butt off the seat and giving the left pedal a big push which dislodges your fancy, wGC™ shoe. Miraculously, you do not eat shit. You somehow stay upright but your right leg is being pumped involuntarily up and down very quickly and your left foot is on the floor. Finally your still-attached right leg stops the pedals from rotating so you can get your left foot back in the saddle! You try seven or eight times to reattach your wGC™ shoe to the pedal. It isn’t working. Your daughter isn’t looking at you. It’s dark. No one would hear you if you screamed. You think, “Well, I guess I’ll just sit here still for the rest of class with only one foot attached.” How you finally get your shoe back in the holster is a mystery. It’s probably something to do with your GenX nihilism. But it finally happens and you continue to spin. 

You sweat more than you have ever sweat inside a building in your life. You pace yourself and don’t go as hard as your daughter. You don’t throw up. You are doing a great job! You finish the class and the music goes back to being just Regular Loud instead of Holy Shit Loud. Your ears are ringing. People begin to file out of the big room back into the hallway even while Tony is giving his ending speech. This seems rude to you. No one talks to each other (with one exception of two obvious friends.) No small talk, no chit chat. Most people are looking at their phones now, and leaving the building. 

You understand the appeal of this workout to the children, the gen Zs, the zoomers. They are doing something healthy for their body, but in (what, to you, seems like) a not super-healthy environment. There’s no human connection --no interpersonal communication. There’s no team spirit. There’s no… soul! Not even a little bit. No one in there could identify anyone else from the class in a line up. You can’t imagine making friends at this place, or meeting a love interest. 

These thoughts confirm that you are the most grumpy of the Olds, and you are VERY AWARE of how grumpy AND how old you are. If Brene Brown has taught you anything, it is that belonging is an important part of being human. These cycle people come here and they belong to something. It’s not nearly as deep or as meaningful (in your opinion) as things you belong to, but that’s because you are wise and know how to make lasagna from scratch without a recipe. You’ve been around the block on many different bikes. You know what’s good, and you understand that fashion, dance crazes, and swear words come in and out of vogue very quickly. This spin faze is the same as step aerobics or aerial gymnastics, pilates or pickleball. It’s an exercising tale as old as time, and that’s okay. 

Feeling old is also okay. If this little foray into the lives of children raised by the internet and social media bought you some street cred with your daughter, that is wonderful. It has also helped you understand her better. You don’t have to enjoy what she loves, Mom. She is maturing light years every month and, as this little field trip has made abundantly clear, you are not evolving at that rate. You thought you could still feel that young, until her coming home again reminded you: It’s 2023 and your daughter needs you to be yourself. She needs you and your mature, aged self just as much as you need her youth and vitality. 

It’s very possible that you’ve missed an important, albeit subtle element that makes the class much more fulfilling than what you’ve just experienced. After all, it was really dark in there and you didn’t even have your glasses on! 

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Our son graduated, blah blah blah. The real news is HIS TENNIS TEAM WON the Southern CA section CIF Championships! the high school division playoffs. Pretty incredible!

At graduation. W his doubles partner Mateo (undefeated all season) and coach Medina

Read this article in the local paper about their accomplishment because it’s just about the proudest I’ve ever been.

Jeff has been upping his clarinet game since the 2020 lock down. It’s not his primary instrument, but in June he played a concert with the Long Beach symphony in the principal clarinet chair. !! This is like a pro athlete playing a different position. It’s amazing!

Here’s a really cute commercial with him playing flute (ALSO not his primary instrument!)

I’m the head JV girls tennis coach this season, so I thought I’d better get this newsletter out before try-outs on Monday. I! Am! Excited!

Thanks for reading and Happy Birthday to me <3

love, Nonni-Pants

PS: I absolutely recommend “The Barbie Movie” for anyone who would like to laugh and feel happy.