Being active is something I enjoy.  I haven’t always liked it – there was a time when the thought of “working out” would have never crossed my mind.  But as my love of all things fitness grew, I started wanting to try new kinds of exercise.

A couple years ago, I thought spinning would be a great thing to try.  My university offered spin classes and there was one on Sundays that fit my schedule.

Perfect, I’ll sign up for this!  It was a ninety minute class and all the others were sixty minutes, but I figured, what’s another half hour?

Oh, so naive.

I found the spinning “classroom” in the basement of the old, smelly gym building.  It was dark, stinky, stuffy and had one fan in the room for at least thirty bikes.

No one else was there yet, not even the instructor.

That’s okay, I’m a bit early, I’ll just stretch a bit.

Five minutes after the class was scheduled to start, the instructor showed up.  He was dressed in head to toe spandex and was carrying a clipboard.

“And you are?”

He checks me off the list and I see a bunch of other names. 

“We’ll wait a few more minutes for the others to arrive, but in the mean time, we’ll get you set up on a bike.”

Another five minutes later, I’m sitting on my bike in the front row, directly in front of the instructor.  I was close enough to the guy his sweat could have blown off him and hit me in the face.  A little too close.

“Let’s just get started and the others can jump in as they get here.”

Three minutes in, I was getting tired.  The guy was yelling at me – yes, me – because no one else was there.  In fact, no one else ever showed up.

It was me and a spandexed, sweaty spinning instructor in a stinky basement room.  As part of trying something new for a workout, I always tell myself if I don’t like it and it’s not for me, I can just leave. 

If I just stop cycling and leave the room, will the teacher notice?

Well, YES!  He might notice if the only other person on a bike gets up and walks out.  My legs were burning.  My lungs were desperate for air and my heart was accusing me of an impending death.  I was experiencing the worst exercise moment of my life.  All the while, Mr. Sweaty Spandex was yelling “GO! GO! GO!” to the beat of Walking On the Sunshine.  Not only was my body killing me, my ears were being assaulted with terrible music.

I wanted to leave.  He cut the “class” short at sixty minutes (surely if we went 90 minutes, I wouldn’t be alive to type this right now).  I walked home on legs that felt like Jello and kept replaying those sixty minutes in my mind. 

Did that really just happen?  Did I just go to a group spinning class with no one else, only to have the class lead by an overly enthusiastic guy in a rainbow bright onesie? 

I decided I wasn’t ever going back.  Not ever.  I didn’t care if I never got my money back – it wasn’t happening!

Lucky for me, they ended up cancelling the class because of lack of attendance.  Sounded perfectly reasonable to me.

So did that experience scare me off of spinning altogether?  Nope.  This past year I decided I needed to try it again to see if I liked it in a more, umm, normal spinning setting.  And I did!  I’ve done a few classes and I would do it again.

I suppose there’s a moral to my worst fitness experience story: don’t give up on something because it didn’t go exactly as planned.  And one-on-one spinning classes are not a good thing.