*Disclaimer: after letting nary a curse word come out of my mouth for 36 years, I did emerge from a radically tough season of life with a bit more of a salty side to my language. For those concerned, know this: I love Jesus more than ever, and I generally feel ok about a well-timed swear. Now you know.
It was two, maybe three weeks after everything fell apart that something new came over me. Call it a feeling, a desire, a motivation, a spark that had gone completely dark but began to flicker again. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it was there. I texted my friend Emily first:
I am about to hop on the Peloton and do the hardest F-ing ride I can find. I just need to feel something different than I’ve been feeling for the last few weeks, I tell her.
YES FRIEND, she responds immediately. Get after it. I am cheering for you. And I’m so proud of you.
I clicked start on a 45 minute ride and joyfully let Alex Toussaint swear at me a few dozen times, telling me to keep moving, keep going, stop holding back. And when I was done, I was sweaty and exhausted and my legs were burning, and I felt just ever so slightly different. The idea that most writers don’t really like writing but do it mostly for the feeling of having written, it’s true for exercise, too. I like having ridden. And that day—when I needed desperately to feel something besides pain, besides anxiety, besides the hollowness that creeps into your body when you’re hurting and have no idea what the next day brings—I had ridden.
Today, there is one year and four weeks and more than 300 rides between me at that moment, that compulsion, that necessity to feel something different.
Did the Peloton bike save my life over the last year? Of course not, that’s a bit too dramatic. God did that miracle all alone.
But still, the bike did do something for me, and in God’s kindness, and the brilliant way he designed our minds and bodies, it has still been what I would call miraculous.
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