Sitting in the back row since October, I am well aware of what I look like in the mirror, which is straight ahead. Typically, I get lost in the music and don’t look in the mirror.

On Saturday, I was late and got a bike on the side of the room. I didn’t take long to notice that I was blessed with a brutal view, of what I fondly call my menopausal sweet roll.

Yes, it is soft, and sensual and I have decided to love it, and yet, if I happen to love it to death, I will cry no tears.

I regard spinning class as fifty minutes of an altered state, which is what makes it so much fun.

I decided to focus on fun instead of the sweet roll.

Luckily, Trisha was the teacher and she was in fine form on Saturday. She has a microphone, but when she is “on”, she gets off her bike and loudly says things like, “If you are not hurting right now, you are not doing something right.” Trisha could coach football, because somehow, you end up wanting it to hurt, if just a little.

I took her little twenty minute “ab” class one day, and after nine minutes, and twenty-nine seconds, and the distinct feeling that I had dislocated an internal organ, I left.

But on the bike I am all hers. She tells one lie after another. One of her favorites is that you have five minutes to ride as fast as you can to make the ferry, and it usually takes six, so you better hurry. We listen because we don’t like to miss ferries. We don’t want to be last, and we are grateful that she has distracted us from the fact that five minutes can feel like a long time.

Ed, another favorite spinning instructor, is a master of rhythm. He is the only one over forty that I know of who actually mashes two songs together. The college set is big on this, and for intervals it works perfectly. Ed is all about form and following the beat of the music. Ed lies about the time. Five minutes is really seven. Six sets of thirty-second sprints morph into eight sets. Thankfully his sense of fun, and ability to pick music, dwarf his time lies.

Great music is absolutely essential. After Trisha has taken us up killer hills, we do a sprint at the end to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. On Saturday, it was during this song that I noticed sweat on the sweet roll. Yes. Yes. Galileo….Galileo….Galileo. Let it go…Let it go……

Mama Mia Mama Mia, spinning is fun.