WEIGHTING FOR GODOT: Life Lessons from a Spin Class. (An essay on expectations, exercise and existentialism)
Churches. Gyms. Two places I grew up being deeply suspicious of. I found both in the least likely space for me - a spin class…
There’s a sense that some places are just not for you.
I think this whenever I see a tattoo studio.
Tattoos. Once the reserve of dock workers, pirates, criminals and freak shows, now the accessory for Rebecca from St Andrews, sporting The Proclaimers lyrics on her collarbone. After all, why wouldn’t you want an indelible reminder of the song that transcends all language barriers to mean ‘the wedding reception is about to finish’. (I mean traditionally the swallow tattoo signified that the sailor had completed 5000 nautical miles, so I suppose there’s not been the seismic cultural shift we first think. Maybe, at the very least, only 4000 miles worth.)
Yes, tattoos are ubiquitous now, but the parlours themselves - the interior design, the artists - remain a bastion of counterculture, in all their baroque gothic dinginess. I think about this whenever I see a young clean-cut girl with something like a dreamcatcher on her wrist, perhaps to commemorate her late grandmother. In order to get this image of twee sentimentality to memorialise a woman called Gladys, she had to submit herself to a liberally-pierced goth who looks like she’d sacrifice a stoat to welcome Scorpio season. The sweet grieving teenager, with her pink Pinterest mood boards, fights back her tears - partly because her skin burns, partly because she’s mourning - as she thinks of Nanny Gladys. To distract herself from her clumsy tears, she elects to fixate on the Baphomet statue holding the price-list for nipple piercings. She spies them over the shoulder of the hole-punched Wednesday Addams, whose hands artfully sketch feathers hanging from a mandala into the unblemished wrist. The tattooist’s skilful hands proudly sport F U C K, written letter by letter, on each knuckle. It’s what Nan would have wanted…
Simply put, some places carry the legacy of being exclusive or culturally-prescriptive spaces in their design, despite having opened up their audience beyond their initial market.
KEEP OUT
Growing up, I was academic and creative. If social narrative and the Mean Girls canteen taught me anything, it’s that that placed me in direct opposition to being sporty or athletic. I thought of this dichotomy not just as the natural order of things, but a comfortable mutual exclusivity. I didn’t have to try in PE because I was taking extra-curricular poetry classes, and that’s just how these things work.
Trying sport or physical challenge was as ridiculous and impossible a notion as, say, a fish waking up with the desire to be a balloon; February training to be a scaffolder; concrete wanting to dance. Why would a fish entertain failing at flying when it can swim so well?! Why would February train in building something brutally and practically when it’s so good at frosting plants to death so poetically?! Why would concrete want to return to the dizzying fluidity of its youth for the sake of choreography, when it has set so splendidly into its purpose of unglamorous stillness?!
To me, fitness spaces had always been olfactory bin-fires of testosterone, Avicii remixes, and slogans in fonts that I’d only ever seen in ‘everything-must-go’ sales or the military. And these scents and soundtracks and fonts served only to confirm my assumptions - that they were spaces of overstimulation, restriction, punishment and accusation. I think I’ll stick with my nice-smelling books, cynicism and stillness thank you, I thought. Why get grime under my fingernails when I could get grime under my frontal lobe instead?
Churches and religious buildings held a similarly unapproachable position in my mind and life. I was raised in a secular household and attended a secular school. Religion was not a part of my life, and so my life, in turn, was not a part of it. And what happens when we don’t feel a part of something? We fear it, we judge it, we deny it, we reject it - we reject the invite that it didn’t even extend to us.
Few spaces have ever felt more like they were designed to rebut me than churches or gyms. Their architecture. Their rules. Their disdain for the alternative. Their affection for punishment and unwinnable games.
I SPIN, THEREFORE, I AM
I am irreligious. I am not athletic.
These were two statements I’d have considered supporting walls in the architecture of my identity. They were impossible to take out or adjust in order to make the interior open-plan, without making the entire edifice structurally precarious.
But this is where language fails us.
In English we only have ‘I am’. The same phrase to express one’s name as one’s mood. That’s a lot of pressure to put on three letters.
(Same goes for ‘wow’, actually. Three letters that can mean anything from ‘wow, look, the Northern Lights!’, to, ‘wow, she actually said that to you?’ Three letters, contained therein, the full range of bathos.)
Whilst ‘wow’ can hold the sublime and the ridiculous, ‘I am’ can hold the permanent and the temporary - often ambiguously.
For example:
I am Amy Matthews. (My being. My identity. My name. My ancestry.)
I am peckish. I am thinking about getting a haircut. I am cold. I am warm. I am cold again.
This multi-use can muddy the waters of each meaning. It allows the inelasticity of (A) to leak into the fluidity of (B) - (‘I am tired, currently’ becomes ‘Oh God, why am I such a lazy person’).
And sometimes the flux of (B) can wreak havoc with the stubbornness of (A) - (I am a writer. Right, so if I am not currently writing something, does that mean my entire identity is called into question? Am I only a writer when I’m writing?!).
More usefully, Spanish has both ‘yo soy’ and ‘estoy’ to mean ‘I am’. The former for permanent or intrinsic qualities, and the latter for changing states and temporary conditions. This feels infinitely wiser.
Soy Británica - I am British.
Estoy cerca de la avispa - I am near the wasp.*
*Wow,[**] I’ve really borrowed from the Duo Lingo school of sentences that no one in their right mind need ever use.
** A more pathetic use of wow.
Language shapes the way we see ourselves, but perhaps nothing influences our self image quite as much as our earliest compliments. As a child, whatever we were congratulated for can quickly become the trait in ourselves that we nail to the mast as our entire personality.
I was always complimented for being ‘so sensible’, being ‘so mature for my age’, being academic. Positive reinforcement means we just start believing those things, and when we deviate from the self-fulfilling behaviours of how others see us, we hear things like ‘that’s unlike you’ or ‘I didn’t know that was your thing’. And like water on a curious and adventurous ember, those comments - whether from ourselves or others - extinguish any bravery we might have had to spill out of how we have self-defined.
For me, ‘you’re clever’, ‘you’re creative’ meant, (erroneously) by default, ‘you are not sporty’. Before you know it, you’re saying these things out loud. Then you’re positioning yourself as (proudly) in opposition to them. With every action that affirms this, with every declaration of ‘I am’ and ‘I am not’, the ink is drying, the concrete is setting.
Then randomly, one day in November 2024, I had a craving to try something new and totally out of my comfort zone. I am terrified of drugs, so a spin class it was…
THE ALTAR
I was struck by the format of the class. Rows of bikes facing one single bike that faced the rows. The single bike at the front was on a three-tiered raised platform and lit with a spotlight. Candles punctuated the steps up to the instructor's bike, and a control pad sound board stood beside the bike like a pulpit.
‘Take a pew’ I thought to myself.
The instructor positioned herself on the raised bike at the front, lit, whilst we sat in the comfortable anonymity of darkness, save for the aquarium-blue lit headphones that we each sported.
My limited times in churches growing up were chiefly for Christmas carol services or weddings. My prevailing memory was the stony cold smell and the gel-like shapes of coloured light on the floor, where sun had squeezed itself through the stained glass and puddled on the floor. I liked that bit.
As the class begins, we are invited to close down our eyes.
As we open them again to begin class, the lights reflect our pacing and activity. During hill-climbs, the lights are sunny and warm; during high resistance they are red and devilish; during buoyant choreography they are pink and playful; during sprints they strobe wildly!
As the swallow on the arm of the sailor and The Proclaimers script on the clavicle of a cheugy girl speak to the same-but-different 5000 miles, the dancing light refracted through St Christopher finds kinship with the neon strobe of a sweaty spin class: for both prisms, their congregation have their eyes closed for the most part…
ORDER OF CEREMONY & THE SERMON
The instructor mounts her bike.
“Safety first - tuck laces in, make sure your bike is secure, and if anyone has any injuries or anything I should know about, give me a little wave and I’ll come over now…”
If that isn’t just the most wise and ancient scripture! Prioritise safety before venturing further. It’s what Maslow, air stewards and armoured knights can all agree on. And if you’re injured, we make adjustments and we seek help from others.
“Technique comes first, then our next priority is to keep riding to the beat, then choreography, then up the resistance…”
If that isn’t a wonderful way to navigate every day! Learn the technical basics. Then try and keep up with life’s rhythms. And if that feels doable, then we throw in some flair. Then we challenge ourselves. Some days we only have it in the tank for the basics. Some days we give it everything.
“Set an intention for class today. Our mantra for the week is…”
You can have both an individual goal and be mindful of a collective aim. The two can coexist, and indeed, should. The harmony of individualism and community - rare and beautiful and vital.
“And a modified version of this is…”
Depending on how one feels on the day, modify to make it easier or harder. If you’re feeling strong, up the resistance! Cycle harder! Text the girl you fancy. If you’re feeling exhausted today, just ride it out! Sack off the choreo! Sod the emails, eat cereal for dinner.
“Coming up next is your active recovery”
We can get our breath back whilst still moving our legs. We can heal from heartache whilst dating. We can celebrate our friend’s promotion as we move our rejection email to junk.
“This is your recovery track”
3 minutes to hydrate and rest. 3 minutes to towel down the sweat on your face. 3 hours to numb out to Gilmore Girls episodes. A whole Sunday to sit in the park and read.
THE CONGREGATION
The shift we’ve seen to individualism in the last century or so has meant we use the word community more (in the context of labels and social sub-sects), yet we feel it and find it less. Community exists more in digital spaces or as an abstract labelling device.
In a spin class, I love that I am completely concentrating on what I’m doing, and yet feel part of a team. If I do find myself watching someone in front of me or beside me, it’s because I’m inspired by them and their ability. I think ‘oo, one day I’ll be able to go that fast’, or ‘wow look at what she can do with her balance’. I find myself in awe of my anonymous teammates. This is a lovely energy to carry outside of the room. It makes me more likely to trade in envy for inspiration.
Also the shift from observing what the body can do instead of what it looks like feels RADICAL. I look at my body or my neighbour’s body and every shape and size is represented, every ability on display - all incredible and all there to simply move. At the end of class, we clap ourselves and each other. As we should always do.
Speaking of bodies…
IF BREAD BE THE BODY OF CHRIST, CHRIST MAKES ME SLEEPY
Around October last year, bread started to give me carb crashes like I’d never experienced. The kind of ‘andddddd asleep’ you see in a hypnotism act. Whilst touring, this was unsustainable, so I cut it out. As someone who has done a lot of work to unlearn the poisonous tenets of millennial diet culture, I’m not an advocate for cutting out whole food groups. But whilst on the road, it was not feasible for me to need to nap after every sandwich. This coincided with the time I started spin classes. The result? Relatively conspicuous weight loss. There’s a cruel irony in being my smallest when for the first time in my life I felt that I didn’t need to be. I want to go back to 14-year-old me and yell ‘stop eating rice crackers, you hate them - just find movement you like doing and it’ll happen by accident!’
I say ‘millennial diet culture’, but diet culture is not millennial - it’s more ancient than that. And it’s as recurring and contagious and welcome as herpes. We’re in the throes of it now. It’s the age of Ozempic. 90s fashion is back and so is the heroin chic of the bodies that wore it the first time round. It’s no coincidence that ‘thicc’ bodies, BBLs and body positivity are out of fashion at the same time as the disturbing phoenix-like rise of white supremacy and old-school misogyny, but hey, that’s for a different article.
All this is to say, it is now (rightfully) controversial to comment on someone’s weight loss. We have learned that weight loss does not mean healthier. In fact it could mean illness - mental or physical. This progressive shift does however make for uncharted social territory.
In the time lapsed between our last meeting and seeing him again, a friend of mine had lost four stone. I blurted “oh, wow, you’ve… had a haircut”. Which on reflection, was like returning to the Arabian Desert for the first time since 1990, standing on the doorstep of Dubai and going ‘wow, have you guys done something different with the sand’. (In my defence, he had also had a haircut…)
I had attempted a progressive and modern verbal act within the architecture of something far older and deep rooted, and it came out a bit pathetic and a bit funny - like getting a mandala for your nan in a tattoo parlour that looks like a sex dungeon.
My experience of people commenting on weight loss is that they sit in one of the following five camps on a spectrum:
The unfiltered: “Jesus you’re tiny!”
The euphemistic: “You look… amazing.”
The ‘have your low-cal cake and eat it’: “I know you’re not supposed to say this, but you’ve lost a lot of weight, you look great. You always looked great obviously, but yeah.”
The ‘I’ve done the reading’: “Hi, how are you feeling?”
The unobservant or uninterested: “Hi.”
I feel more peaceful about receiving any of the five versions of reaction because all versions are completely unaffecting. The shift I have made, from reluctantly and joylessly exercising, to moving my body from a place of total fun and learning, has been life changing. It’s totally unaffected by external opinions, trends, comments and pressures. And importantly, sustainable.
HOLY TRINITY: MOVEMENT, MADONNA & MONKS
My spin class is also 45 minutes of my day where I don’t look at my phone. In fact I find it easier to look at it less as a result. Even down to things like where I’d usually pathologically check the time on my phone (and then get distracted by an email that comes in or end up scrolling), now I will emulate the spin class format of using a song to measure time.
In spin, we don’t say ‘right, let’s sprint for 3 minutes’, we’d say ‘right, this is your sprint track’, and time ceases to be numerical and instead becomes a Madonna single.
I’ve started doing the same at home. If I know something needs to be in the oven for 12 minutes, I queue up 12 mins worth of music. Suddenly, I'm not ‘killing time’, I'm listening to music. I consider this spiritual practice. In the 15th Century, a churchwarden and scribe, Robert Reynes, brewed ink from scratch and didn’t have a way of telling the time, so he would recite the 50th Psalm through once to know when to take the ink off the boil. These commonalities of practice or behaviour across time make the complexities of the human experience feel refreshingly shared and simple. ‘Like a Virgin’ or the Virgin Mary, 5000 nautical miles or 500 Scottish ones, we find ourselves predisposed to the eccentricities of being a human being, in every iteration of what it is to be - from yo soy to estoy.
LET’S GET (META)PHYSICAL
My way in to exercise was wanting to learn. To anyone reading this who may have a niggling curiosity about trying something but the space or activity feels exclusionary to you, I ardently recommend thinking about what your motivator or passion is in another area of your life and then see how that might be applied to germinate that curiosity into actually trying it. I love learning new things, so I approached spin from a place of learning, not fitness. Suddenly it was digestible, intriguing and less intimidating.
So much of my alienation from fitness spaces and spiritual spaces was completely founded on ill-informed assumptions and internal and external expectations of myself. So let’s return to those slippery ‘I am’s for a second:
I am irreligious. I am not athletic.
Well. I couldn’t put my thoughts on this any better than David Eagleman does with one of the most economically perspective-shifting sentences I’ve ever read: “She could no longer live in the rigid architecture of her youthful choices” (Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, 2009).
So those ‘I am’ statements feel like a supporting wall? Ripping them out might destabilise the edifice. Good! We’re made of electricity, not bricks and mortar. Electricity can be grounded expansively and spaciously.
So let’s try again.
I am.
I am curious. I am someone who tries things. I am a quick learner. I am strong. I am fit. I am enthusiastic. I am open to new ways of moving. I am open to new ways of thinking.
There. That feels better.
THE COOL DOWN
I’m excited to meet all the versions of me that I can’t currently envision, because 6 months ago I couldn't have imagined being someone who sets 6am alarms to move for joy, and that exercise would be for feeling bigger not getting smaller. Maybe in 6 months time I’ll have a tattoo! Something meaningful or something frivolous. Maybe both: maybe just ‘wow’ in a nice font.
Before I finish, a quick foray into Tim Minchin’s occasional address at The University of Western Australia from 2013:
“I’m sorry, you pasty, pale, smoking philosophy grads, arching your eyebrows into a Cartesian curve as you watch the Human Movement mob winding their way through the miniature traffic cones of their existence: you are wrong and they are right. Well, you’re half right – you think, therefore you are… but also: you jog, therefore you sleep well, therefore you’re not overwhelmed by existential angst. You can’t be Kant, and you don’t want to be.
Play a sport, do yoga, pump iron, run… whatever… but take care of your body. You’re going to need it. Most of you mob are going to live to nearly a hundred, and even the poorest of you will achieve a level of wealth that most humans throughout history could not have dreamed of. And this long, luxurious life ahead of you is going to make you depressed! But don’t despair! There is an inverse correlation between depression and exercise. Do it. Run, my beautiful intellectuals, run.”
The sentiment and the lesson is perfect.
BUT. Respectfully, for me, Tim, running can absolutely get in the bin.
FOR ME. Note that qualifier. I know recovering addicts whose lives have been saved by running. I know people who run daily. I know people who run for joy. I’m delighted for them. It is not for me. And that’s okay. We all need to find our own gym-thing.
Find your own gym. Find your own church. Because we need both.
A judgemental bearded man in the sky with a penchant for sado-masochism who demands to be worshipped is no God of mine, but a sarcastic, wise, guiding God who has time for science and magic in equal measure, who appears in my friends and in morning light, and who plants dock leaves next to nettles - she’s a God I could get behind.
The power of reframing is not to be underestimated. It helps us find peace in our body and our mind in a time where the state of the world wants to drain us of both.
Reframing is the antidote to the constraints of expectation:
What’s a puffer fish if not a fish that dreamt hard enough that it might be a balloon?
What’s the wintery strangler of plant life that is February, if not nature’s scaffolder for Spring’s new bulbs?
What is concrete if not a reliable dance partner and dramaturg for light and shadow?
I have fallen in love with exercise. Thank God.
LINKS & RECS:
This essay is also a love letter to Tribe. Check them out in Edinburgh & London.
I quoted David Eagleman’s Sum. Shout out to pals, Ben & Cesca, for their kind gifting of the book. I’m passing on the rec to you, dear reader. In fact Ben also
has his own wonderful Substack - have a read.
My nod to the 15th Century scribe, Robert Reyes, was gleaned from Mary Wellesley’s wonderful book, Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers, 2021.
In a wonderful moment of synchronicity, the day I started this article, I walked into a bookshop and a poetry collection called Spin called to me on a shelf. It’s a stunning collection from Laurie Bolger. Why not order it from your local indie bookshop?
