I started going to SoulCycle in April of last year because I was as far from my natural inclinations as possible and I was interested in testing myself. I had moved to New York a few months earlier, and although the move took years in the making and decades in idle fantasies, it had still taken my breath away and left me dazed and without a stable identity. When I was preparing to leave London, I joked with mild bravado about how I was leaving everything behind, all the nesting objects I had accumulated over a Covid-era life living alone, behind me. I didn’t want them anymore: the ceramic molds, the framed works of art, and the expensive knife set. They were physical suggestions of a cozy domesticity, a domesticity that I never managed to evoke in any meaningful way despite my accessories. I didn’t want to carefully disassemble and pack these things and have to make room for them in my new life. I wanted to arrive with very little and see what happened, rather than trying to inelegantly fit my London self into its new terrain.
For most of us, there are only a handful of moments in life when we are given the opportunity to reconsider what is fundamental to ourselves and our behavior. Having a child is known to make people open up and reconfigure their sense of identity. Falling in love can do it. I have discovered that moving countries is also a challenge, in both liberating and destructive ways. The feeling that people don’t have a preconceived notion of us is something I often find pleasant, even comforting. Saying and doing things without violating a pre-existing conception of who I am, having that power and freedom, is the closest I get to being a superhero or a spy. But also, when I’m adrift right now, it’s the closest I come to being completely empty. Suddenly, my defining traits and cherished beliefs are called into question.
This is the reason why I stopped drinking for a period shortly after my arrival, alarmed by the porosity of my boundaries after they had been reset in America and no longer fit my old London routines. Here, the bar stayed open forever and people wanted to talk to you, not just when they wanted to have sex but simply because they liked to talk. For someone like me, who not only likes to have a drink but, more than anything, talk to people I don’t know late into the night, it was a difficult situation to resist. So I stopped drinking and started going to soul cycle.
I knew, vaguely, what SoulCycle was: a physical fitness I study with many branches, where instructors led a class of people on stationary bikes through a cardio and strength routine, set to music. I knew people found it addictive, and I knew there was something that made me distinctly uncomfortable about the awestruck, cultish way they talked about it. Years ago, when I was getting off the ground in London, I was occasionally encouraged to go by well-meaning colleagues and friends who loved it and assumed I shared with them some kind of basic cardiovascular capabilities that I simply didn’t.
When they described it, it not only seemed impossible to an unfit person like me but, more generally, repellent to my nature. He knew that in the past they had accused it of having a toxic atmosphere (they later acknowledged that there were mistakes). And my impression was that it was just a lot of supposedly encouraging shouting from the instructors and a lot of complacency and admiration for the energy in the room. I assumed it was what one might describe as “woo-woo”; that is, the sort of thing that required a susceptibility to vaguely spiritual language and supernatural concepts of dubious explanation. I struggle with the woo-woo stuff in general, always trying to smile along with the tarot and astrological chart and making faces without realizing it, but the idea of combining her aesthetic with the kind of hard-bodied, angry boss look popular among SoulCycle fans it seemed particularly unacceptable. .
Then I saw that they were offering unlimited classes for two weeks for new beginners, and knowing that full-price classes are expensive ($40 for 45 minutes), my desire to take advantage of a bargain overcame my terror of intense exercise. On top of this, SoulCycle was one of the few activities I was able to schedule into my new alcohol-free nights where booze wasn’t potentially on the table. Everything from midday movies to life drawing classes seemed to offer me Mimosas, and I discovered that if I scheduled a spin class at certain crucial times, I’d be too sweaty and exhausted to even want to go to a restaurant or bar.
I went to my first class at a Wall Street studio terrified. Any disdain I feel for self-indulgent exercise and spiritual pursuits is based, I’m sure, largely on fear, on feeling incapable of being athletic or experiencing any dimension of life other than the depressing material one I pass by. the time. with and describing. I was surrounded by a surprisingly uniform collection of bodies, which didn’t seem to share much in common with mine. In gyms and In the saunas I was relieved to find variation in the bodies around me, certain that I, too, had the right to undress and be physical as much as anyone else. It is not like that in the Wall Street Soul Cyclehowever, where I gawked at the foot-long waists and sleek blonde ponytails.
He was sure it had been a mistake to come and quite possibly the beginning of a serious medical emergency. As I strapped myself onto the bike and secured my special shoes to the pedals, I made a deal with myself: all you have to do is not throw up or pass out, those are your only obligations. I almost immediately denied both promises when the instructor asked all the beginners to identify themselves and raise their hands. I did so, embarrassed, along with three others. Everyone applauded us. I died. I made eye contact with another rookie and we both died.
At one point I wanted to vomit. I had to stop myself from begging the instructor to stop, for God’s sake. But I lived. When class ended, the instructor approached me, in the darkened studio, holding a lit candle. He held it close to my face and looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” I whispered.
“Girl. Blow out the candle. It’s one thing,” he whispered back.
Later, in the brightly lit hallway, he approached me again and asked if I always turned so red when I worked out. At that moment my whole head was pounding. I said, “Yeah, I’m not used to working out and I’m Irish,” and I think maybe this is the summary I should use for both dating apps and author biographies.
I returned to SoulCycle a week later, this time in Brooklyn Heightsnot far from where I live. I was pleased with the agony my butt and legs had been in, assuming this indicated progress and courage. This time my instructor was a beautiful non-binary person named Kiss, and towards the end of the class she thanked us for our efforts and told us thank you for coming. Normally, that would have made me roll my eyes. Thank a group of privileged people for running around on our little wheels like vain caged hamsters? But then Kiss started talking about getting sober a few years ago and how SoulCycle helped them find a center and a life outside of addiction, and then they thanked us again and told us to do one more sprint for the last song, the most fast as possible. as we would like, or as slowly; They were just glad we were there. At this point I was completely crying while “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn was playing. I had started crying when I heard the tremble in Kiss’s voice as they congratulated each other on their sober day, and I continued because I was so exhausted. I went back to SoulCycle every other day. I cried in class all the time. Sometimes it was because my own weakness made me feel so pathetic, and other times it was because it made me feel so psychotically high and powerful that I cried simply out of gratitude.
Some of the things I was happy to see behind when I moved from London were the dresses. All my life I have tried to fix my life with dresses. I was a gangly teenager and I changed my wrap dresses to flatter myself better. When I first made some money, after selling my book in 2019, I found my body as tragic as ever, but I had the means to buy expensive things to put on it. It amazes me now to think back to that manic pandemic era when I bought a bunch of dresses to wear in an apartment where no one else could see them, hoping it would help me love my body (myself) a little. little more. The futility of that is evident to me now. Last year I wanted to stop buying new things and try to pay attention to my body and my current self (having to admit now that they are the same), and it seemed like a good investment to buy a habit instead of an item of clothing.
The easy moral of my SoulCycle journey, the received wisdom, is that it didn’t matter if I got lean or strong, it only mattered that it made me feel good. It’s about mental health, building muscles for later life, or something else valuable. Personally, I expected it to make me more attractive and stronger, and it did neither of those things. People kept telling me to move on and I did. I did it, I do it, and sometimes it’s transcendent and sometimes I’m willing to set the place on fire with the ceremonial candle. But that didn’t make me a different person, and in fact, I think I like that. It never made me want to live again, it never made me enjoy exercise, it never broke me down. Its infinity is quite pleasant, all of us pedaling down that god-forsaken rabbit hole. Last week, a woman had to be pulled out in the middle of class because she was about to throw up. And there, save for the grace of God, went I.