Sunday riding

Aug. 13, 2009

Dear Julie,

Early most Mondays and Fridays I take a spinning class at my gym. We ride stationary bicycles while an instructor guides us through imaginary terrain. Sometimes we sprint as fast as we can. "Ride like you stole it," one of the cycling posters urges. Sometimes we stand and charge up hills we've created by turning up the resistance on our bicycle pedals. All this is done to music with a pounding beat meant to propel us forward in place.

Only minutes into this program, most people are glistening with sweat and might have reached the state of breathlessness short bursts of intense exercise can produce. That's the heart-rate zone where fitness is achieved. Exercising regularly to breathlessness also can slow the loss of brain functions related to aging.

After 45 minutes, anyone who has given their best in a good spinning class is floating in a sea of endorphins. The sense of well-being can last for hours.

The teachers, Amy and Lori, are inspiring, as is everything about the spinning class except the music. It's the bassy techno European blat the Sex Pistols, the Clash and Elvis Costello tried to kill off during the disco horror movie of the 1970s. The Clash seemed to have succeeded, but disco is a zombie.

DC and I recently began a Sunday morning bicycling tradition. We rise early and begin riding south. We glide along beside the Mississippi River past the university's River Campus, a merger of 150-year-old buildings and modern architecture dedicated to art. The river road leads to an area of town once called Smelterville. Many of the city's poorer, hardest working people lived there when DC and I were children. The floodwall built to protect the downtown didn't protect them. Their houses are gone now.

We ride south past cornfields that shimmer in the morning sun, past a dairy that hides down a long lane, past the Shriners' lodge, past an Italian plant that makes cement and the asteroid-sized cavity where the rock is extracted, beyond the indoor swimming pool where employees of the plant's former owners once washed the dust off, past the Pi Kappa Alpha lodge, where the R&B band I joined in college played "My Girl" for Greeks to grope to.

Our ride culminates at the small pasture and barn five horses call home. Most are chestnut colored. One is darker, another might be an Appaloosa. DC, who hasn't been around horses much, is unsure when we pet them. I didn't grow up riding horses either but became acquainted with some one summer during college.

My friend Chips had invited me to live at his house on a farm. We barbecued dinner every evening and, at the urging of the farmer who didn't live there anymore, exercised his horses before dusk.

The barn held no saddles, so we rode bareback. Riding was scary at first, especially when we turned back toward the barn and the horses, eager to return, began galloping. But soon enough riding became exhilarating. Especially the galloping part.

Maybe it was the surge of adrenaline summoned to help me cling to the back of hundreds of pounds of muscle and bone charging through a pasture. Maybe it was the joy of my mind and body being attuned to one thing at every moment.

Riding a bicycle feels something like that to me. Firing down a hill, ears filled with only the sound of the wind, the speed and movement are thrilling. Most everyone remembers this feeling from childhood, when we imagined we could fly. We still can.

Love, Sam

sj-blackwell@att.net<I>