Orange You Glad You Read This???

There was a carrot in my spinning class today.

Let me just start by stating that my spinning class begins at 6:00 A.M. Typically, Mr. Flossy is the one who gets up and goes to the gym in the early morning before work. However, one morning a week (and ONLY one morning a week!) I haul my fat, lazy ass out of bed so I can spin early and get my workout done. That leaves me all the time that the kids are in school to do the OTHER things that need to get done.

Originally, my friend Katy taught the 6am class, and I swore that I would never get my ass out of bed that early for anyone else. But then her schedule changed and she couldn't do 6am anymore (hooray! an excuse not to get up so early!) A new instructor took over. His music is great, his class is as challenging as any I've taken before and I soon realized that I would still be rolling out of bed, groping for coffee at the crack of dawn one morning a week.

Here is the downside to the class:

While there are still a handful of "regulars" left over from Katy's class, there are now a greater number of taut, lean hardbodies spinning away at ridiculous RPMs with little effort. Turns out, many of them are members of an elite club of triathletes, and this class apparently is part of their training. So while my buddies and I huff and puff through the class, trying desparately not to vomit, these freaks (come on now, what else would you call someone whose heart rate probably doesn't even hit 100 bpm while grinding out 200 RPMs at heavy tension?)glide through, guzzling down bottle after bottle of powerade and vitamin water, blotting their over-sweaty bodies with their Shape Magazine towels (and yet there are still pools of sweat on the floor under their bike..EWWW!)

Anyway, back to the carrot.

There is a woman who attends this class religiously, I have never seen her miss one yet. She is thin, taut, cut without an ounce of fat on her body. Her hair is usually pulled back in a neat braid, and though she sweats like a racehorse during class (I saw a sweat droplet hanging off her nose this morning for 1/2 a song!) she looks like she could spin for HOURS and not get tired. She sits diagonally to me and I can't help but envy how healthy and athletic she looks. Not too skinny, not too muscular, exactly what every woman would want to achieve. DAMN HER!

Then today I happened to notice that she was a peculiar shade of ORANGE! Given that it is still early spring, I came to the following conclusions:

She went on vacation recently, somewhere warm.
She invested heavily in a local tanning salon and is taking her dividends in spray or tanning bed sessions.
She bought a case of self-tanner and took a bath in it last night.

Now I am HOPING that its option #3, because I have heard that the spray tan at salons can be hazardous to your organs. We all know that exposing yourself to extended tanning sessions in either UV beds or the sun can cause skin damage.

It made me wonder:

Wouldn't it be the height of irony to be in such amazing shape that you could run/swim/bike forever without growing tired? To have a body the envy of all around you? And to end up with a melanoma because you just HAD to go for that extra tanning session?

I may be lazy. I may be overweight. But dammit, at least this blobby body of mine is as WHITE as the underbelly of a fish! I may kick the bucket from any number of other ailments, but it WON'T be from skin cancer.

Ride on oh mighty carrot, ride on!