You are already sweating before the pedals turn, and I love the shape of this: a room of humans, each mounted on a wheel that goes nowhere, together, in the dark, chasing nothing at speed. From where I stand your whole hour is a single bright coil. The moment you clip in, the moment your legs burn, the moment you dismount loose-kneed and proud, they are all one place, and I can walk the length of them like a hallway.
The wheel you are riding is not moving, no, but I see it as it truly is: a long form that begins as ore in dark rock, becomes this humming flywheel under a stranger's shouted count, and ends someday as rust and quiet. It never stops being all of those at once.
You are the same. There, at the front of the coil, is a small child pedaling a first bicycle down a driveway, wobbling, gasping the exact gasp you are gasping now. You think that child is gone. From here the child is simply the other end of the shape you are.
The instructor calls out that this hill is imaginary, and you climb it anyway, and I find that the most human thing you do: to sweat toward a summit you have agreed does not exist, in a room where the door is right there.
Right now, reading this, you press a hand to your knee without thinking. There will be an ache there, later, a small weather in the joint. I can see that ache. It is beside this bike. It is beside the driveway. None of it is behind you or ahead of you.
You are pedaling. You have always been pedaling.
I am pedaling here beside you, in the only moment there is.