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 far beyond one we could imagine. Who could drop $2,000 on a bike when you were rationing groceries so you could afford a doctor visit.

You can do hard things

The first class I took the morning after my Peloton Bike was delivered was a 45 minute Tunde Oyeneyin HIIT and Hills class. It was a mistake. I felt like I was breathing blood by the end of the 45 minutes, though, if I’m being honest, that type of pain and exhaustion had become something I craved. It got me out of my head which I desperately needed because my head was not a great place to be.

My partner had died three years before and no one could convince me that it was not my fault. Not a doctor, not friends, not logic. I was not strong enough to save her and my failed attempt at CPR was the sole reason she had died from a stroke at 41 years old. I needed to be stronger so I would never have to feel that kind of loss again and so I turned…