The spin I'm in

Twice a week, I play out my own scene from LA Story.

However, there's no one as charming as a tuba-playing Sara McDowel involved with this story. Instead, it's me and a small peloton of older ladies, some of whom are uncomfortably poured into lycra outfits.

And what it is that we do?

We sit on stationary bikes and we pedal for 60 minutes.

At the end of those sixty minutes, I am exactly where I started. And how about that guy next to me who spent the whole hour working three times as hard as everyone else? Well, he's exactly where he started, too.

In the midst of all of this stationary activity, we climb hills. Hills that defy the laws of physics. Don't one of those Newton law thingies say that whatever goes up must come back down? So why it is that I can spend a full hour climbing a hill, yet I never get to ring the register on all of that potential energy? Is there a spin class in another universe where the anti-Metrospective spends sixty minutes going downhill?

There's an instructor in front of the class, of course. (She faces the rest of us, but no one ever worries about a collision.) As far as I can tell, this person's sole purpose is to find the most discouraging pop music ever created and to play it during the most strenuous part of class.

Instructors, here's a thought: how about less brooding Coldplay and more back-when-he-was-black Michael Jackson? The ultimate spin soundtrack would sound like your favorite cover band: the entire class should be full of songs you forgot you loved.

Well, for this week at least, I've had enough of this nonsense: tomorrow I'm going to run in place.