Monday Night Spinning

Can a spin class really replace Monday Night Football? No, but it can try.

On a typical Monday night in the fall or winter, I can be found sprawled out on my couch with my laptop open and pinned against my groin, with an order of Buffalo wings and three extra sides of blue cheese never further than an arm’s length away. I’m watching Monday Night Football, I’m cursing some backup left tackle for missing a block, and I’m tracking my weekly fantasy football score with an unsightly, nervous tick.

Seventeen Mondays a year, that’s the routine. Twenty-one, if you consider the preseason, which for whatever sick reason, I tend to watch with even greater interest and zeal. I rarely fall asleep before midnight on those 21 Mondays, and when I finally do get to bed, it’s usually with great doses of anxiety and frustration. It’s a sloth-like, hideous existence, really.

That Monday night routine has probably taken five or six years off my life.

And yet, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Spring and summer Monday nights are a bit different, though. The New York City weather, the daylight savings time, the girls in the sundresses—there’s a contagious energy in the air that makes you want to be anywhere but on that couch with the remote control.

So, you explore. You brave the crowds and go to rooftop bars. You venture above 14th street. You put on shorts and a snug Penny Hardaway Orlando Magic jersey and play basketball on pavement like you’re 15 years old. You do shit you wouldn’t even consider thinking about in the winter months.

Which is how I ended up on a stationary bike at a luxury spin class studio.

Yes, a luxury spin class studio.

I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting myself into or even how it all really happened, but somehow, I was $35 in the hole, at a place called SoulCycle on Manhattan’s West Side Highway, and in a dark room filled with lit candles and forty lululemon-clad women, all of whom could have easily been extras in Sex and the City 3: The Next Generation or the hot wife to the token fat schlub in a CBS sitcom. Drunk on the good weather, I figured this would make for a nice little check box on one of those “Time Out New York: Things to do this Summer” issues.

And then the class started, and I couldn’t hang. The instructor was a super positive guy in spandex shorts named Daniel, and he just kicked my ass up and down. While the 40-year-old mother of two next to me was blissfully humming along to Florence and the Machines, I was gasping for air, hanging on to the handlebars for dear life. As the Lohan and Hilton doppelgangers behind me were somehow incorporating stripper-like dance moves into their “jumps”, I was crying inside.

Forty-five minutes later, I was hooked. I had never sweat like that before. Not during suicide runs in high school basketball practice, not in the sauna with the naked old men at the gym, and not during the most heated of Monday night fantasy football clashes. Buffalo wings on Monday nights were good. This was better.

♦◊♦

I went the following Monday.

Then, the Monday after that.

Slowly but surely, I became a regular. Mondays with Daniel. It was like Tuesdays with Morrie, without the old stinker dying at the end.

I’d recognize the other people in the class and exchange nods when entering the studio. We’d laugh afterwards about a song choice or a particularly difficult “hill.” This was my neighborhood bar; my book club. I went shopping for the first time—maybe, ever—and bought all the bizarre cycling clothes I always thought were strictly for fitness freaks and posers. I’d look forward to my Monday night “rides” all week long.

I started shedding pounds. Perhaps even more rewarding than the weight loss, though, was the fact that I began enjoying pop music again. John Legend’s version of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”? I was on that shit months ago. Selena Gomez? I mean, she’s alright. But she’s no Jessie J. (Note: The last time I downloaded a song was 2005. That song was “Let Me Love You” by Mario, obviously.)

I was an evangelist for Soul Cycle, spreading the gospel of spin class to anyone who’d listen without punching me in the face for sounding like a total douche. More than a few times, my girlfriend had to pull me aside, whispering something along the lines of, “Enough already…It’s kinda weird.”

Oliver Platt was once in my class. I told him I liked him in Simon Birch. He smiled. Matthew Broderick and I talked about the Mets in the locker room. I think the girl from the taxi cabs who reviews all the restaurants in Northern New Jersey might have been in my class once, too. Or, at least a woman who looked like the girl from the taxi cabs who reviews the restaurants in Northern New Jersey was in my class.

I never thought I’d ever become that guy. When I get emails from my friends who are running marathons, my immediate reaction is never, “Hey, good for them!” Rather, I usually roll my eyes and think, “How indulgent.” I watch those P90X infomercials with utter disgust.

But this spin class stuff…this I’m all about. I’m “that guy” and then some.

And if the current NFL Lockout somehow costs us the start of the NFL season? It’ll be horrible. It’ll be one of the worst things imaginable, really. I sincerely feel it will change the way American men live, breathe, and operate in this country from August through February. I don’t think we, as a country, are realizing just how low the morale of our nation will sink without football on Sundays.

Me? Well, I’ll obviously be devastated.

But for 45 minutes each week?

I’ll be all right.

—Photo lululemon athletica/Flickr