#107: a dark room, sandy smoothies & a dubstep edit

review of an expensive spin class

thank you for the warm welcome back. i had forgotten that i don’t do this for the lonely chamber of self satisfaction, but rather the raucous jamboree of external validation. to mix things up: here is a review.

spoiler: pictured perhaps the most expensive and simultaneously grossest smoothie i’ve ever had <3

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i went to a spin gym called psycle and this is what happened

so i heard health is wealth? but so far it’s just making me poorer and it seems like you need wealth to start with too. hence: a month free trial on class pass. i spend three days a week in great proximity to mayfair, so you can imagine through this free trial i have developed a great affinity for dalliances with ludicrously expensive gyms.

psycle (allegedly pronounced sans p) is a spin gym that has pricing packages from 5 classes a month - a mere £95, ranging to the unlimited package (which contrarily seems to be defined by a limit of 31 classes per month) for an extremely chill £325.

i had never done a spin class before, but i have watched television so i knew what to expect. a dark room with tubular neon lighting, blasting bad edits of 2010s b sides, swishy pony tails in matching alo sets and chiselled gay men sweating through the demons of last weekend’s chem sex orgy. this all delivered, and because of the locale, it meant that i was also accompanied by a booja booja chocolate box of older, richer women and their vacuum sealed pilates arms. oh, and a team of front of house staff, to help one mount/dismount one’s bike.

in terms of the work out: i was surprised at how well adjusted riding lime bikes semi pissed home made me to a spin class. i had presumed the lime’s motorised engine had withered my legs, akin to two moistened strands of spaghetti, but i was able to keep up with the variety of instructions of; left, right, left, right, twist the dial, BURRRN! not without, obviously, a tsunami’s worth of sweat coursing from every inch of my body, spraying the bike like a gurney.

the instructor (30s, handsome, gay, with a proclivity to lobbing the word fuck into the room as if flung from the very back of his mouth,) had a sadistic, berserk look in his eye that made you feel as if you were not in the basement of a spin class in west london, but rather watching someone unleashing a messiah complex after coming up on a small mountain of mcat on an ibizan dancefloor. not helping his case was his maniacal laugh which he would deploy throughout the session, cackling as he told us to FEEL THE *FUCKING* BURN!!

i was surprised by the amount of things you can do on a stationary bike. you can be in your seats or out of them, you can go faster or slower, you can do some complex jane fonda-esque arm choreography with some very light weights that make you want to die because how the fuck is a 1 kilo weight so fucking heavy???

throughout the whole course of the class, the instructor had a perchance for screaming THAT’S IT! YOU’RE NEARLY DONE! stuck in a basement with casino-esque qualities; no light, air conditioning, no clocks, i edged being done from 15 minutes in. this is not great for your mental. at one point i looked around for a lifeboat- the bright glow of an apple watch to relieve me of my time blindness, but around me, only naked wrists. i was alone in a sea of stationary bikes, a dubstep edit of shackles (praise you) my only friend.

after an evangelical speech from the (not high?) instructor on how grateful he was for spin, how it changed his life, how nothing else mattered outside the room, the class ended. i was grateful, elated, eggplant purple in the face.

naturally, for journalistic purposes, i had preordered a smoothie to slurp post class. it was called ‘no resistance’ and it cost nearly half as much as the sports bra i was wearing. the flavour palette gave the distinct impression that i’d just gotten dumped (by a wave, not a person- still unpleasant) on a tropical beach: silty with the tang of underripe bananas.

still, it’s not what’s on the inside that counts. walking around soho afterwards, a smug air of satisfaction and a slight limp, it was the perfect prop. i was a fit girl. a girl that went to spin. someone who could do anything. i nodded at a suit, and he looked back at my face, a beaming carrie, dripping red with exertion, eye twitching, a flimsy crown of flyaways. he recoiled. i skipped along with another sip.

all in all: very enjoyable, would absolutely go back again. if i didn’t have to pay that is. 4/5★

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let me know if you enjoyed this longer form review. if you didn’t, keep it to yourself. xx