Surviving the spin

I recently embarked upon a program of self-improvement, which is a fancy way of saying “I joined the gym.” I did this not for my health, but because I realized a fundamental truth: when you are getting too fat for your stretchy yoga pants, you should probably do something about it.
I don’t have to tell any of my fellow couch potatoes that this is hard.
I mean, first of all, exercise involves sweating.
I want to get back into my stretchy yoga pants, but I prefer to do it without breaking a sweat. I glow. I do not sweat. So I spent a lot of time on Pinterest pinning things like “Fantastic 2 Minute Workout.”
Turns out more sweating and less glowing might be the key to thinner thighs. So one day, in a clearly insane moment that I will never repeat,
I agreed to take a spinning class with a friend. Spinning class is a form of torture used by non-couch-potatoes to trim their thighs. There is more sweat in that class than I have sweated in an entire lifetime of glowing. To me, it looks like hell on earth. And it is.
At first the instructor started us out slow. Unfortunately, he thought “slow” meant “go so fast that you can’t see your legs moving.” I wanted to raise my hand to tell him he made a mistake, but I was terrified that if I let go of the handles on my spinning bike, I’d fly over it and land on the person ahead of me.
Then we went “fast.” Someone was moaning and sobbing. Turns out, it was me. And then the instructor pointed to heaven and I thought, “Holy cow, I’m going to die.” Wrong. Apparently, the pointing meant “stand up.” Yeah. Not. Going. To. Happen.
But everyone else was doing it, so I bopped up and sat back down. I was worried because there was sweat on me in places I didn’t know could sweat. I started watching the clock out of desperation, hoping the class would end soon, but it was moving backwards.
And then suddenly, it was over. Everyone hopped off their bikes, mopping the sweat from their faces. I was stuck. I sat there and pretended to drink water while inside my head I was screaming, “Get off the bike!”
Once that happened, I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other and walk out. I could not make my legs go together, so I looked like a cowhand from a John Wayne movie.
And in the middle of all of this torture my friend turned to me and said cheerfully, “See? You survived.”
Barely. Just barely.