Much ink has been spilled about SoulCycle, the boutique indoor cycling chain with quasi-spiritual elements that enjoys a devout following at 60 studios in ten states. Founded on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, the company is best known for its 45-minute spin classes, which have a meditative but partylike atmosphere. Think candles and EDM.
Despite being billed as a party, my first SoulCycle class was ridiculously difficult. The dim room, aglow with candles, felt less like a fitness studio and more like the set of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video. The darkness concealed the fact I was wearing old, threadbare workout attire in a sea of toned, Lululemon-clad class members.
At some point, I had to accept that I was more involved with SoulCycle than I cared to admit. And not for an article I was supposedly writing either, but for the actual workout—the experience of exercising much, much harder than I ever would on my own. Maybe even for that oft-touted moment of “soul.” This “spiritual” portion of the ride is the primary thing sold to potential investors as separating SoulCycle from other fitness brands.
With its clean, all-white interiors and a grapefruit-scented Jonathan Adler candle eternally burning, the lobby of SoulCycle has a spalike feel that can also be interpreted as a sterile, churchy one. The studios, meanwhile, give me occasional flashbacks to my adolescent experience with Acquire the Fire, an evangelistic youth rally sponsored by Christian youth organization Teen Mania Ministries that was first held in 1999 at the Pontiac Silverdome. It was three days in a dark stadium with inspirational sermons and altar calls and 70,000 teens sobbing to worship songs that just build and build. I was hooked. Only later did I begin to understand that specific elements—music, mood lighting, teenage hormones—helped whip us into that emotional state.
