Novelist Megan Nolan on sobriety, self-revelation and SoulCycle

I started going to SoulCycle in April last year because it was as far away from my natural inclinations as anything could be, and I was interested in testing myself. I had moved to New York a few months prior and, though the move was years in the making and decades in idle fantasising, still it had winded me, and left me feeling dazed and without a stable identity. When I was preparing to leave London I joked with thin bravado about how I was leaving everything, all the nesting objects I had accrued during a Covid-era life lived alone, behind me. I no longer wanted them: the ceramic ramekins and the framed artworks and the expensive knife set. They were the physical suggestions of cosy domesticity, a domesticity I failed to ever meaningfully conjure despite my props. I didn’t want to disassemble and carefully pack these things and have to make space for them in my new life. I wanted to arrive with very little and see what happened, rather than trying to inelegantly wedge my London self into its new terrain.

There are, for most of us, only a handful of moments in life when we are given the chance to reconsider what is fundamental to our selves and our behaviour. Having a child is known to cause people to split open and reconfigure their sense of self. Falling in love can do it. Moving country is one too, I have found, in ways both liberating and destructive. The feeling that people have no preconceived notion of us is one I often find pleasing, soothing even. To say and do things without violating a pre-existing conception of who I am, to have that power and freedom, is as close as I come to being a superhero or spy. But then, too, when I am adrift in these moments it is as proximate as I come to being voided entirely. My defining traits and cherished beliefs all suddenly come into question.

This is why I stopped drinking for a spell not long after I arrived, alarmed by the porousness of my boundaries after they had been reset in America and no longer conformed to my old London routines. Here, the bar stayed open forever and people wanted to talk to you, not only when they wanted to have sex but just because they enjoyed talking. For someone like me who not only likes a drink but likes, more than almost anything, to talk to people I don’t know late into the evening, it was a difficult situation to resist. So I stopped drinking, and I started going to SoulCycle.

I knew, vaguely, what SoulCycle was: a fitness studio 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 that there was something that made me distinctly uncomfortable about the awed, cultish way they spoke about it. Years ago, when it was taking off in London, I had occasionally been encouraged to go by well-meaning colleagues and friends who loved it and assumed that I shared some sort of baseline cardiovascular capabilities with them that I simply did not.

The instructor asked if I always got so red. ‘I’m Irish,’ I said

When they described it, it sounded not only impossible for an unfit person like me but, more broadly, repellent to my nature. I knew that in the past it had been accused of having a toxic atmosphere (they have since acknowledged there were missteps). And my impression was that it just involved a lot of supposedly encouraging screaming from instructors and much self-congratulation and admiring of the energy in the room. It was, I took it, what one could 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 woo-woo stuff in general, always trying to smile along with the tarot and astrology chart and inadvertently grimacing, but the idea of combining its aesthetic with the sort of furious, hard-bodied girlboss look popular among SoulCycle aficionados seemed particularly unacceptable.

Then I saw that they offered unlimited classes for two weeks for new beginners, and knowing that the full-priced classes are expensive ($40 for 45 minutes), my desire to take advantage of a bargain outweighed my terror of hardcore exercise. As well as this, SoulCycle was one of the few activities I could schedule in my newly alcohol-free evenings where drinking was not potentially on the table. Everything from midday films to life-drawing classes seemed to be offering me Mimosas, and I found that if I scheduled a spin class at certain crucial times then I would be too sweaty and exhausted to even want to go to a restaurant or bar.

I went to my first class in a studio in Wall Street, terrified. Whatever disdain I feel for both self-congratulatory exercise and cod-spiritual activities is, I am sure, based largely on fear, feeling myself unable to be athletic or to experience any other dimension to life than the depressing material one I spend my time grappling with and describing. I was surrounded by an astonishingly uniform collection of bodies, ones that did not look like they shared much common ground with my own. In gyms and saunas I had mostly been relieved to find variance in the bodies around me, assured that I too had the right to undress and be physical as much as anybody else. Not so in the Wall Street SoulCycle, however, where I gawped at handspan waists and sleek blonde ponytails.

It didn’t change me into a different person, and I think I like that about it

I felt sure it was a mistake to come, and quite possibly the beginning of a serious medical emergency. As I strapped myself into the bike, locking my special shoes into place on the pedals, I made a deal with myself: all you have to do is not vomit or faint, those are your only obligations. I almost immediately negated both promises when the instructor asked all first‑timers to identify ourselves and put up our hands. I did, cringing, along with three others. Everyone clapped for us. I died. I made eye contact with another first-timer, and we both died.

I did want to vomit at one point. I did have to restrain myself from begging the instructor to stop, for God’s sake. But I did live. When the class ended, the instructor came over to me, in the darkened studio, holding a lit candle. He held it near my face and looked at me expectantly.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I whispered to him.

“Girl. Blow out the candle. It’s a thing,” he whispered back.

Afterwards, in the lit-up lobby, he approached me again and asked if I always got so red when I worked out. My entire head was, at this point, throbbing. I said: “Yes, I’m not used to exercise, and also I’m Irish” – and I think perhaps this is the summary I should be using for both dating apps and author bios.

I went back to SoulCycle a week later, this time in Brooklyn Heights, not far from where I live. I was pleased with what agony my ass and legs had been in, assuming this indicated progress and valour. This time around my instructor was a beautiful non-binary person called Kiss, and towards the end of the class they thanked us for our effort and said thank you for showing up. Ordinarily, that would have made me roll my eyes. Thanking a bunch of privileged people for running in our little wheels like vain hamsters in cages? But then Kiss began speaking about becoming sober a few years back, and how SoulCycle helped them to find a centre and a life outside of addiction, and then they thanked us again and told us to do one more sprint for the last song, as fast as we liked, or as slow; they were just glad we were there. I was fully weeping at this point, as “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn played. I had begun weeping when I heard the shake in Kiss’s voice when they congratulated themselves on their sober day, and continued because I was so exhausted. I went back to SoulCycle every other day. I cried in classes all the time. Sometimes it was because my own weakness made me feel so pathetic, and sometimes it was because it made me feel so psychotically high and powerful I was weeping just out of gratitude.

Some of the things I was glad to see the back of when I moved from London were dresses. My entire life, I’ve tried to fix my life with dresses. I was an ungainly teenager, altering wrap dresses the better to flatter myself. When I made some money for the first time, after I sold my book in 2019, I found my body as tragic as ever but had the means to buy expensive things to put on it. It amazes me now to think of that manic pandemic era where I bought any number of dresses to wear in an apartment nobody else could see them in, hoping it would help me love my body – myself – a little more. The futility of that is so glaring to me now. I wanted, last year, to stop acquiring new things and to try and pay attention to my actual body and self (having to now admit that they are one and the same), and it seemed a good investment to acquire a habit instead of a garment.

The easy moral of my SoulCycle journey, the received wisdom, is that it didn’t matter if I got thin, or strong, it just mattered that it made me feel good. It’s all about mental health, or improving your musculature for later life, or some other worthy thing. Personally, I was hoping it would make me more attractive and strong, and it didn’t do either of those things. People kept telling me to keep going, and I did. I did, I do, and sometimes it is transcendent and sometimes I am ready to set fire to the place with the ceremonial candle. But it didn’t change me into a different person, and actually I think I like that about it. It never made me want to live again, it never made me enjoy exercise, it never got me ripped. Its endlessness is enjoyable enough, all of us pedalling in that godforsaken rabbit hole. Last week, a woman had to be led out mid-class because she was going to vomit. And there, but for the grace of God, went I.