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Thursday, December 08, 2005

Dancing

I was going to write a post about the beauty of 2o-degree weather when this damp, gray, slurping muck is the alternative, but Tim beat me to it. Still, I watch the winter melt temporarily around me and I remember that life creates beauty where it will - snowbanks dressed in mud; the late-morning sunrise slipping through a blur of precipitation; flattened blades of grass that haven't seen light since mid-October.

I tried out O.V.'s recommended one-hour ride on the trainer today. Pretty effective. Back when I was more of a gym rat than a snow bunny, I used to attend spin class religiously on Tuesday nights. Plowing through those intervals today reminded me of my favorite spin instructor, Nick, who was constantly prompting us to turn our dials to "thick mud" setting. "You're out on the trail!" he'd yell. "You're riding in thick mud and it's raining! Let's see you ride in the rain!" And we'd all grind into the pedals, but of course, we weren't kidding anyone. We were all riding in a climate-controlled gym, listening to empty-calorie techno music and staring at a neonn-splashed mural of a mountain landscape. How could we be anything but disconnected, thinking about our day at work and mulling whether to have salad or salmon for dinner. I'm happy to keep riding outside, even if that means mud and rain and the unavoidable chill of 35 degrees and soggy.

3 comments:

  1. gawdamn stud.


    ...62 degrees, dry, and a fruit smoothy halfway through 5 hours.

    and yet, there is a wisp ... a slivering shiver of 'what am i missing?'

    ...

    what am i thinking? screw you crazy-ass frontiersfolk! i'm stayin' softy mcNeverSnow.

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  2. Gotta love spin class. My instructors have never been much for visualization, except for one six-foot-something Amazon with an orange tan, bleached hair, inch-long hot pink claws, and ten pounds (give or take) of gold jewelry. She wanted us to visualize riding up a hill towing a red wagon behind us, which we progressively filled with our friends, our grandmothers, and at least two small puppies, as well as lunch for all these individuals including the puppies. Of course, this same instructor was the one who didn't believe in turning the fans on, the one who thought MAXIMUM was the only volume setting available to her for her Pink CD. I think we were all too scared to think about puppies. I know when I turned my resistance knob up it wasn't because I was towing an extra puppy, it was because I was scared NOT to turn the knob because she would scream at me if she saw me not turning it! I skip class on her days now.

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  3. "Pink CD?"

    jaysus.

    there's just no response to that.

    aaag...makes my face scrunch up quite unattractively to think about such a thing.
    m

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