It's not ALL about the bike...
I am warm, soft, calm. A beautiful song is playing. My body responds as the music shifts and changes. The song builds and with it the joy I’m feeling. When the beat eventually drops I speed up and a peaceful sensation spreads, its warmth filling me all the way up. I’m so full with feelings they spill over the edge and seep into the room itself. I am completely present. My mind is calm. My body is capable. No part of me wonders what I look like. It doesn’t occur to me to consider how I’m being perceived. This presence, the opportunity to be in my body without considering how they look to others, is a freedom and a gift I’d never have thought possible when I completed training as an indoor cycling instructor 4 years ago - almost to the day.
Today I’ll facilitate my final rides at Boom Cycle, the studio where I completed that indoor cycling training 4 years ago. The past few weeks have been full of the hardest feelings: sadness; fear; endless what ifs: middle of the night anxiety spirals, all entwined with the deepest grief. When I became sure of my decision to leave Boom I tried to make sense of all these feelings by visualising a Devil Wears Prada meme - the one where Andy is across the street as Miranda Priestly climbs out of an NYC cab and the two catch eyes. Andy has just left her job at whatever the fuck the fancy fashion magazine it is that Miranda presides over, she beams, visibly brighter and far less burdened than we’ve ever seen her before as she raises her hand to acknowledge her former boss. In the comparison I’m Andy, Boom is Miranda. In those first few days after the decision is made, thinking about this Devil Wears Prada visual encourages my overwhelmed brain to keep going, despite the overwhelming grief, and enables me to believe that relief is coming.
Spinning/Indoor cycling/Riding a bike that goes nowhere in a dark room accompanied by loud music, is something of a cult-ish phenomenon. It’s ridiculed to such an extent in popular culture that I find myself feeling silly for having so many feelings about it. It feels disproportionate to be this sad about a bloody bike. But of course, I know it’s not really about the bike (well at least it’s not ALL about the bike). In my classes, the gift of presence made possible through vulnerability and compassion, is both given and received by the bucketload. That’s where my grief has its origin. In the space I’ve created together with hundreds of riders over hundreds of classes for years now. For 45 minutes I am wholly present. I am moving through whatever I’m feeling on a given day and there is ALWAYS joy to be found. The precise texture of that joy twists and changes from ride to ride and the space held with a specific group can never be recreated. I’m going to miss the EXACT people who ride with me at the PRECISE classes they come to. I’m going to miss them and the space they create WITH and FOR me so much it feels like my heart is breaking.
When I started facilitating spin, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror when I arrived at the studio. I second guessed every bit of coaching I tried to offer the room and I crossed my fingers every time I opened the door for class hoping that no one would be sat on a “side bike” (the bikes arranged to face the instructor side on) as those bikes offered a view of my body that I found excruciatingly uncomfortable. The gulf between how I thought about my body, my wonderfully sensitive brain and my rides in those early days, and how I think of them now is so vast it’s unrecognisable. I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to grow and to heal in community with riders who’ve come back to ride with me time and time again. Some people who rode with me in my first months, still do.
I’ve talked a lot about my body image journey in the years I’ve been teaching and it’s something I’ll continue to talk about. Moving without any desire to lose weight AT ALL is STILL something that’s unusual. It might be argued that people talk about it less or at least have an awareness that “weight loss goals” are considered slightly “icky” but, aesthetic/health oriented goals are still very much the bricks from which the fitness industry is constructed. During my time at Boom I’ve worked to develop and lead a class which is built from completely different bricks. Cause' baby I could (and have) built a castle away from all the bricks diet culture threw at me (name that Tay influence!) Picking that castle up and taking her elsewhere makes me worry that I’m letting down riders who aren’t able to come along to the new castle (because she’s too far away etc etc). I spent most of the first week after announcing my decision feeling sad and frustrated at the sheer lack of options for radical babes who want to spin/move away from diet culture influences. I know how difficult I have found it to exist within an industry that repeatedly reasserts, in countless insidious ways, diet culture and classes which explicitly reject this are, sadly, still a tiny minority amongst the hundreds of spin classes taking place across our beautiful city on a given day.
I’m so proud of my work to radicalise spin. Indoor cycling is a style of movement that is most often associated with intensity, with complex choreography and has a “hardcore” image. It makes me so happy that riders tell their nervous friends that they can trust my classes to include them. It fills me with so much pride to see SO MANY girls, gays & theys riding to Muna and knowing that, in my class, there will be music that reflects their lives and their loves in abundance. In fact there will be so much of it, it’s not even worth acknowledging because it is just the norm. I’m proud of how I hold space. I’m proud of my body, my queerness, my soft belly, my joy, my ability to curate a fucking incredible playlist and to facilitate euphoria through combining movement and music. I’m proud of every moment I’ve spent present in my body on a bike. I’m proud that I’ve built something that people seek out again and again, tell their friends about and trust. I’m thrilled to be proving class by class that movement is something for everyone, something to be enjoyed and something to be reclaimed for ourselves.
I’m excited at the prospect of a new beginning. One with more creative freedom and the potential to realise my anti-diet approach in even more impactful ways. But BLOODY HELL saying goodbye feels impossible. Boom babes, ILYSM, always have, always will xox
From my LAST EVER Boom Cycle class which was SPARKLING!
To sign off, here is my final (non-themed!) Boom Cycle playlist, for your listening pleasure!