Deaf Girly and the spinning class

It's January.

I spent most of Christmas eating chocolate. For every meal of the day. Including midnight feasts and snack times. I also spent a very small amount of Christmas doing exercise. I worked my biceps by opening the fridge, my glutes by getting on and off the sofa and my abs by leaning back to pat my stomach after a big meal. *raises eyebrow*

So naturally, I am joining the nation in a Get Fit for 2015 crusade.

This for me means going to the gym. And more specifically going to classes where I am trapped in a room for 45 minutes and cannot leave or slack off without being yelled at by an amazingly perky skinny – clearly didn't eat chocolate for every meal over Christmas – instructor.

I've covered the subject of exercise on my blog regularly over the years. I covered my experience of training for my first running race, my experience of a gym that didn't want to let me workout unaccompanied because it thought my deafness was a health and safety risk, and I have covered some of my more amusing Zumba classes.

More recently, I talked about how hard it is for me to hear in exercise classes and how I always wonder what I am actually getting out of them.

But yesterday, I forced myself to go to an evening spinning class. I got there half an hour early and took my time getting changed, before wandering into the studio to find the equivalent of a German sun lounger battle occurring. Ever spin bike was taken by towels, water bottles and clothing, but not a person was there.

'Ah-ha,' I thought, I will know this for next time, before taking my place behind a pillar on a bike that looked like it had done several rounds of the Tour de France.

The lycra-clad instructor arrived shortly afterwards, turned off the lights, turned up the music, turned on a disco ball (yes really) and started yelling into a microphone attached to her face.

From behind the pillar, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Although in all honesty, I am not sure that from in front of the pillar I would have had a better idea.

Very briefly, I considered requesting the eviction of a person on one of the bikes situated in a more convenient place for lipreading, but given that it had been reserved more than 40 minutes earlier, and I seemed to be invading some sort of spinning clique, I thought better of it.

So instead, I decided to focus on the person next to me and copy what she did.

Except for the duration of the first song, she was reading BBC news on her phone while paying no attention to whatever the hell the instructor was yelling about.

In short, it was the most odd 45 minutes of my week so far. And I have absolutely no idea if it did anything for my fitness whatsoever. Although I was quite red in the face when I came out, but that could have been from the sheer humiliation of the whole situation.

It got me thinking though, is there a loop system I could give the instructor so I could have a direct pick up to what she was saying? If I had that, plus I managed to get my towel on a bike to reserve it two days before the class was scheduled I might have a hope of actually doing a spinning class, rather than just cycling like a lunatic in a room full of strangers.

But my fitness quest is not going to stop there. I am also going to ask FJM to force me to get better at running. So I can do this. On my own. Outside. For free. Without anyone reserving anything with their towel, or a mad instructor screaming incomprehensible instructions into a microphone.

So keep a look out for a mad looking deaf girl running while clutching an egg timer (read all about the time I actually did run with an egg timer here) and the very lovely (and good at running) FJM jogging along next to her.

Coming soon to a park near you!

*beams