After a friend suggested that my New Year’s resolution to get into shape would be so easy if I got a Peloton, I started obsessing about how I could fit a bike into my apartment.
My kids are ready to kill me. I keep waking up in the middle of the night, grabbing the tape measure and rearranging the furniture in their bedrooms. At 3:00 am, it seems perfectly logical that if I just move the bed a few inches or get rid of the pile of clothes in the middle of the floor, one of their rooms will magically become a few feet longer and a few feet wider, paving the way for me to be several pounds thinner. This morning, as the sun rose and my son snarled at me, I finally came to terms with the fact that my tape measure isn’t broken and no matter how many times I pull it out, the size of the kids’ rooms isn’t going to change.
I can’t put the bike in my bedroom because there is a limit to how much sweating should be done in there, and since I turned 50, the room feels like a sauna.
There is a perfect spot for it in our home office, but it’s directly behind my husband’s computer and he thinks that the sight of me pedaling away, dripping to the oldies, isn’t an appropriate Zoom background.
I have a friend who told me that she put her Peloton in the bathroom. I really liked that idea – it makes clean-up so easy. But I’d have to choose between the bike and the toilet. And I really like the toilet.
The Peloton app suggests that you “replace a living room chair” to make room for the bike. Do other people’s families really not mind if someone removes the cozy chair where they curl up to watch TV, and they get, instead, a rock-hard bicycle seat to put between their butt cheeks?
I considered putting a bike in the dining room because a room where we might have people over for dinner seems to be about as useful as a busy signal or a carrier pigeon. Also, if I replaced the dining room table and chairs with the bike, I’d never have to host another book group or make another holiday dinner for my ungrateful extended family — and eliminating those stressors from my life, while also getting in shape, seemed like a huge win-win.
The problem is that if I got rid of the table, I’d have to break up the 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle we started back in March, and even though nobody has touched it since April, my fantasies for 2021 include an image of my Peloton-toned family gathered around the table to put the last piece in place right before we head out the door to get our vaccines.
The post Why I Can’t Keep My New Year’s Resolution: Peloton Space Issue appeared first on Better After 50.
