For Grief, Peloton

Rebuilding myself and my life one Peloton class at a time

There are two types of people in the world: those who have a Peloton and never shut up about it, and those who don’t and wish we would. I am the former.

I do not believe it’s a coincidence that I found the strength, the fortitude, to begin putting myself back together and rebuilding my life at the same time I became a Peloton member. I financed a Bowflex bike in January 2021 in an attempt to distract myself from life through exercise. It was a spectacular failure. The Bowflex video classes offered no captions, rendering them useless to me as a deaf person and making time spent on the bike the most boring part of my day. Eventually it became a $1200 clothes rack.

In March 2022, after seeing deaf friends praising Peloton for captioning their classes on Twitter, I sold the very expensive clothes rack and got my Peloton Bike. Once again, my goal was to distract myself from ever having to feel my feelings and look at my grief. I was not part of the Peloton Cult, I was just trying to exhaust myself.

My late partner and I used to mock the Peloton commercials, as many did, with the rich people riding their bikes in their houses with conveniently constructed platforms for their bikes in their living rooms. We laughed because it was a lifestyle so…