CycleBar: Riding the Rage Away

I’ve been a bad blogger… I tend to overshare on my personal social media accounts, but I try to keep it sweet and to the point professionally when it comes to Fit ‘n’ Fluffy and all that entails. Thus, I’ve kept it light and I couldn’t bring myself to post for a long time because I was having some serious brain farts when it came to creating content. I work out almost every day and have all these endorphins running through my veins and a plethora of experiences that I could share. I’m supposed to be happy and enlightened all the time, right? Wrong. So wrong.

It’s not that I was completely inactive previously, but I really got into working out when my dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2010. I also happened to soon find myself unemployed, so I had a lot of free time for fitness and a lot of pent up emotions that needed to be released. I lost a lot of weight quickly and hoped to keep up with it, but I ended up having some health issues of my own and things got sidetracked. Do you see a pattern here? Ugh. My husband says I’m the hardest working procrastinator that he knows.

A few years have gone by and I wouldn’t say I’m as focused on weight loss these days. Overall, I just want to be happy and healthy. Achieving both can be quite difficult when you work 45+ hours and have other obligations, but I’m lucky in that I’m teaching Zumba® Fitness as a side job now and I get paid to work out! The pay isn’t incredibly lucrative, but it’s been enough to allow me to take some other group fitness classes and I recently tried indoor cycling again and really took to it.

CycleBar

Janine K., who is a user on Yelp.com, runs a Fitness Club for the Chicago Burbs community. She scouts out gyms and studios where she can host Unofficial Yelp Events (a.k.a. Yelper Takeovers). Sometimes we meet up as a group and sometimes we simply have access to discounted or free classes to try out on our own. I’ve attended a handful of the events and have returned to a few places, but something really clicked when I went to CycleBar Yorktown Center during their opening week. Yorktown Center in Lombard, IL seems to be working to reinvent itself as a health hub. They’ve remodeled and added CycleBar, The Barre Code, and more recently an OrangeTheory. During their introductory period, I was able to get a 20 ride class pass at a deeply discounted rate. I have made it a point to try and go at least once a week and I’m seeing results!

There wasn’t really a singular event that caused me to jump back into pushing myself physically. I’ve been unhappy with some things in my life and old demons were coming back to haunt me. Mentally, I needed a change. Physically, I also felt I needed a change. CycleBar has been that change for me. It’s allowed me to really challenge myself and go through many emotions during a ride and come out feeling better at the end of it. As the title says, I’ve been riding the rage away.

I don’t mean to make it sound like these classes play angry rock music and instructors scream at you. In fact, it’s mostly the opposite. Each CycleStar has their own vibe and no two classes are the same, but they generally play uplifting, upbeat music and rattle off cliché mantras that are exactly what you (or at least I) need in the moment. If you’ve taken a yoga class with a modern twist before, some of it’s a lot like that, but on a stationary bike. They have battery powered candles for mood lighting and tell you things like, “You’re going to make it over this hill because we have to make it over a lot of hills in life. You are bigger than this incline!” And I eat that shit up.

Cycle Selfie

My father lost his battle with throat cancer in 2014 and one would hope such a traumatic event would be behind me with his passing, but we recently discovered that my mother-in-law has cancer and a whole lot of unresolved emotions and unpleasant feelings returned with that diagnosis at the beginning of this year. Like I said, I didn’t join CycleBar to escape that, but it’s definitely helped. It also doesn’t hurt that one of their CycleStars, Cami, is a psychologist and she will definitely put your problems into perspective. Things could probably be worse and there are still small things that you can work to stay in control of, like focusing on your ride and either just getting through it or doing a little better than you did the time before. I’ve also ridden with Kyla, Libby, Sam, and Kelley. You really can’t go wrong with any of them.

Unfortunately, I worry I won’t be able to continue coming to CycleBar once my class pass runs out. We’ve had to take another hard look at our finances and it can be really depressing to realize that things that make you happy are often the first on the chopping block. Sure, I could probably find a stationary bike at one of the gyms where I teach, but it’s not the same. Group fitness keeps me accountable and I know myself well enough to know I most likely won’t be doing any of the DIY workouts with laundry baskets nor using my dogs as free weights, despite how easy YouTubers make it look. Thinking of giving this up makes me angry. What can I say? It’s a vicious cycle.

But the real point here is that you should give them a try if you can afford it! The Yorktown Center location has a bunch of great deals through February 2018. CycleBar itself has a number of locations in the Chicagoland area and a decent amount scattered throughout the US. I can only imagine they will take off and continue to grow because I’ve found it to be contagious. I even visited a location in Woodbury, MN when I went up to visit family. That class I attended had mimosas afterward. You can’t be mad at mimosas!

Kyla (left) & Cami (right) tag team for the first CycleBar Yorktown Center fundraiser CycleGiving: Make-A-Wish Illinois