Róisín Ingle: In a body that doesn’t fit mainstream beauty standards, I’ve found a place I feel happy and safe

I’m down in the bowels of the former Irish Times building on D’Olier Street in Dublin. I’m sweating but not as much as I was sweating that time I was called to the editor’s office and asked where I saw myself “in five years’ time”. I was in my mid-20s. Five years felt like 50 back then. I don’t remember my reply, only that the inquiry seemed like a trick question, one I was terrified I’d get wrong. I’m much older and a bit less scared now but still sweating bullets somewhere deep in the innards of my former office building.

I’m at my first Spin class in a fitness place called Echelon. It’s six months since I was first asked to enter this small, dark room where music is pumping and around me seven others are in a frenzy of indoor cycling, going nowhere fast. Six months ago I reached for polite excuses not to go, the way you do when you are resisting something that might potentially be good for you but sounds painful. The woman who runs this place didn’t let it lie. She’s tenacious like that. And then I ran out of excuses. So here I am.

My emotions are all over the place, as they often are during exercise. At one point I have a strong urge to declamp my feet from the pedals and go off to cry in the bathroom

Here we are. Spinning our wheels in time with the music, feet clamped securely into pedals, adding to the feeling that there is no escape and this bike might just be who I am now. It makes me think of Brian O’Nolan aka Flann O’Brien aka Myles na nGopaleen, who also used to work for The Irish Times.

He wrote in his book The Third Policeman about people who “get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them”. “You would be surprised,” he wrote, “at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles.” A regular cyclist outside of this room, I view myself as a Flanneur, half woman, half bicycle, those atoms interchanging even more now to the pulsing bhangra beats.

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A pink-haired, tattooed Donegal fitness instructor and nutritionist called Carla Bredin is on a bike facing us. She’s the woman who six months ago did not take my “I’ve put my back out, sorry, can’t make it” for a final answer. I know from watching spin classes on movies and TV that she’s supposed to be shouting at us in an intimidating way. But something she said at the beginning of the class makes her stand out from a lot of people who lead exercise classes like this one.

“Everything I say here will be an invitation, not a demand,” she told us. So even if my fellow spinners, at her invitation, are surging, their bike’s speed counters rapidly rising, I don’t feel under pressure to do the same. I go at my own pace. I slow down. I speed up. I lift my arse off the saddle and when it gets too much for my legs I put it back down again. My emotions are all over the place, as they often are during exercise. At one point I have a strong urge to declamp my feet from the pedals and go off to cry in the bathroom. (Not a first. I’ve cried in this building’s toilets before.) At another point I get a sort of euphoric feeling that I suspect might be from those exercise-related endorphins people go on about.

Sitting here, spinning in a body that doesn’t fit the mainstream beauty standard, I am happy to feel safe and included and to know that all other bodies are welcome here too

I listen to Carla’s soothing, empowering invitations and I spin. She asks us to make ourselves bigger instead of shrinking ourselves, shrinking being something society often asks women to do. And I think about how this is a radical exercise space. Much of the fitness industry’s messaging is designed to make people feel inadequate and unworthy. “We’re not about that,” Carla had told me in an email. “We aren’t promoting weight loss or assuming your body needs changing. In fact, we’re pretty much in awe of all the bodies that gather here, for what they can do, not for what they look like.”

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I think of the “body acceptance manifesto” on a poster in the dressingrooms: “This is a body affirming space. Please refrain from diet/weight loss talk. Zero tolerance for body shaming, of others or yourself. Objectification is prohibited. Let all bodies exist in this space without comment or judgment. Mainstream beauty standards and body ideals are highly unrealistic ... so they’re not promoted here. No racism. No ableism. No ageism. No homophobia, transphobia or misgendering. All the bodies that gather in this space in all their diversity of size, experience, ability, age, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality deserve safety and an affirming experience.”

One of those safe spaces, then, the kind some people like to ridicule. But sitting here, spinning in a body that doesn’t fit the mainstream beauty standard, I am happy to feel safe and included and to know that all other bodies are welcome here too. This class is a Friday-evening one called Get Fizzical, which means that when the frenetic and occasionally profound 45 minutes is over I can take myself and my bright-red tomato cheeks upstairs to sip pink cava and have a chat. I find out from Carla that Echelon has been in operation for three years but closed for most of that time due to the pandemic. Tenaciously and miraculously, she has managed to hold on to her business, which will make this weekend’s third-birthday celebrations all the sweeter. I find myself telling Carla I will be back. And not just because there’s a Taylor Swift themed ride planned for October 21st, when her new album, Midnights, is released.

I’ll be back because, in addition to being a bit painful, this spinning business is good for me and actually kind of fun. And because, like Flann said, sure I’m half bike now anyway.

roisin@irishtimes.com