Cycling Epiphany #24

I love indoor cycling or spinning, which is my preferred term. I like the idea of spinning in place, spinning spinster, hamster wheel, and other funny and inevitable metaphors that it suggests. However I adore spinning, it is my salvation, or at least one of them. It saves me from my overburdened mind by letting my body completely exhaust itself cardiovascularly. And as I tend toward morbid thoughts, it boosts my neurotransmitter levels and gives me a little dopamine, I think. I prefer to exercise to exhaustion than take anti-depressants any day.

The other day, I was spinning rapidly and happily in place at my gym as the music blasted us into MTV videos of our untethered imaginations and our very tethered bodies. The instructor put on one awesome R & B classic after the next, including Freak Show by the Bar Kays and Super Freak by Rick James. Freaks are a very marketable and fun concept. The "freak" in mainstream funk pop in the 80s was a theme--remember the Mary Jane Girls and Vanity 6 and all other Prince spin off groups that sang about loving being sex objects while wearing lingerie? ha ha. Those were fun times indeed.

Suddenly the music changed to Ike and Tina's version of Proud Mary during which we had to ride uphill during the slow parts and then spin very fast during the ecstatic chorus. I started thinking about Ike and Tina--we remember Tina Turner, always, and since that biopic What's Love Got to Do With It, we can't think about her in any other context as the Phoenix that rose from the ashes of a horrifyingly abusive marriage. As I thought about the fact that Ike's baritone bits in the beginning are inextricable from the fullness of this particular song, I felt a bit sad. Ike is the poster child battering husband-ass-hole. Yet, when Tina comes back with her love--her authentic passion and enjoyment of singing the song, I realized that some people, maybe most people, can survive anything. You can help but to sing along to this song--it's so joyous and energetic. We were all singing and dancing on our bikes. Tina is Proud Mary and you can hear it in her voice.

Perfectly, the instructor ended our class with the somber, yet rich ballad, What's Love Got to Do With It. Fitting song for a good ride for the body and in the mind.