Conjugating Verbs While You Pedal

At a time when most people groan, grunt and pant, Susan Sullivan speaks French.

As part of an unusual exercise class at a small Portland health club, Sullivan and a few classmates get together twice a week to ride exercise bicycles while taking French lessons.

“Actually, you don’t think about the riding part at all,” said Sullivan, an elementary school principal. “You just automatically think about the French. Your body becomes automatic.”

The lessons are offered at Corner on Health, a homey athletic club that recently started a similar Spanish class and offers another course in which bike riders watch classic movies while they pedal.

The French classes, which started last winter, feature eight to 10 riders in a semicircle in front of Kim Brown, a Portland State University professor, who teaches the class in return for a free club membership.

Brown said the classes are mainly oral, with little reading or homework.

“What that means is I needed to adjust the teaching schedule so there is more repetition,” she said.

Students pay $35 for a six-week session. Four-week sessions this summer will cost only $25.

At the end of the hourlong session, participants are tired and sweaty, but not so breathless that they are unable to speak their newly learned French, said Brown.

Students largely decide what the classes will study, which so far has ranged from travel phrases to camp songs.

“We had our share of the equivalent of ’99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” Brown said.

Ellie Hodder, owner of Corner on Health, said she knows of no other clubs that combine exercise classes and language lessons, although a few Portland-area facilities have expressed an interest in copying her idea.

“I invented this,” said Hodder, whose 2-year-old operation is tucked in a plain-looking building in an industrial area. It is a far cry from the athletic shoe-commercial trendiness of yuppie clubs. Hodder’s club features a book-trading table, a seminar on how to write a resume and a class that prepares overweight women to walk a marathon.

The language-bicycle courses grew out of a desire to create classes that allow people to do something they enjoy while also getting a workout, Hodder said.

She originally wanted to offer a Spanish class but could find no one to teach it. Brown already worked out at the club and offered to teach French. This spring, Brown found another Portland State instructor to teach the new Spanish course.

Hodder also persuaded a company that makes stationary bicycles to loan her club 15 of the machines; in return, she features the brand name in flyers and mentions it often in interviews.

The film class has generally been smaller than the French class, perhaps in part because an entire movie can present some riders with a daunting workout, Hodder said. For example, she said that during one 115-minute film, several of the male riders quit.

“The women toughed it out,” she added.

Sullivan said she usually takes some sort of exercise class at Hodder’s club and started the French course because it “sounded like fun.” She stuck with it through three six-week sessions, but has now switched to Spanish.

“This last term we had beginners, and so now instead of being the stupidest person in the class, I’m one of the more intelligent students,” Sullivan said.

Hodder said she doesn’t expect students to learn a language fluently while pedaling away, merely to become conversational.

“We’re trying to do something where you can go on a vacation and feel comfortable,” she said.