If you’re looking for one more reason to hate the various Hamptons—a reason other than $29 guacamole, $100-a-pound lobster salad, and some party where Tom Brady may or may not have brushed up against Kim Kardashian—I invite you to sign up for a workout.
It will probably cost more than it should, the parking lot will be pulsing with Range Rovers and rage, and someone’s foot will kick remarkably close to your face. You will discover the particular revulsion of being sprayed with foreign sweat. And, if you’re lucky, an influencer will capture it all on Instagram Reels. Fun, right?
Perhaps you’ve read about the Tracy Anderson Method, where classes start at $65, unless you’d prefer to pay $5,500 for the opportunity to book a priority mat for the summer. The room is heated to around 95 degrees. On TikTok, Julia Montgomery described it as “the ninth circle of hell.”
My friend Holly, a former Tracy Anderson fan, explains: “There’s a hierarchy of women in the front row who’ve been going forever and stare at themselves in the mirror without smiling. I loved it. I’d watch them the whole time and the class would pass by so quickly.”
You will discover the particular revulsion of being sprayed with foreign sweat. And, if you’re lucky, an influencer will capture it all on Instagram Reels. Fun, right?
The people I know who went to Tracy Anderson told me they’d never looked better, and from that fitness peak, it was all downhill. One said she pulled a hip flexor, another tweaked her back, and both replaced Anderson with a chiropractor. “My main beef is the way they make you contort yourself,” Montgomery told her TikTok followers as she flailed this way and that to the blare of “Life Is a Highway.” “I’m sorry, but no one should be spread-eagle to Rascal Flatts.” She has a point.
Christy, an art adviser in New York City who’s been coming to East Hampton since birth and asked me not to use her real name, goes to the occasional Tracy Anderson session. She is confounded by all the ire. “You’re sweating and releasing endorphins and that should be positive,” she says. Apparently, there are not enough endorphins in the world to counteract this particular brand of exercise aggression.
The fury seems to extend behind the scenes and beyond the studio. According to a report in Insider, Anderson has filed a lawsuit against a former instructor, Megan Roup, who started her own workout called the Sculpt Society. Anderson accused Roup of stealing her moves and method in violation of her contract. Roup, in turn, asked for the dismissal of the suit. Their legal dispute is ongoing.
Anna Kaiser, once the chief content officer for Tracy Anderson, has her own studio in East Hampton, attended by Kelly Ripa, one of the fittest people in these parts and a former regular in Anderson’s front row. It almost seems as if Kaiser designed her program to be the anti–Anderson Method. “My classes are focused on form,” she tells me somewhat pointedly. “They’re not about motivating people with personality or sex or rage.”
It’s hardly surprising that tempers often flair in these hot, overcrowded rooms. “Part of the problem is, everyone in the room is hungry,” says Tracey Jackson, a screenwriter and the author of Between a Rock and a Hot Place, who has taken barre in Bridgehampton for decades. Also, adds Isaac Calpito, who created Torch’d, a mix of mat work and dance moves, “you’re dealing with people at the top of their fields: C.E.O.’s, presidents, celebrities. There’s a lot of opportunity for clashing personalities from people used to getting what they want.”
“People are honking their Escalades. It’s a sea of Birkins. It’s ‘I need to be in the front row!,’” Calpito says.
At his Torch’d classes, Calpito manages the outsize personalities with affection. “I love a queen bee. I grew up idolizing Bette Davis, Madonna, and Faye Dunaway,” he adds. “Any time you get queen bees in the same room, it’s like a battleground.” When he was an instructor at SoulCycle, from 2015 to 2019, Calpito brought Faye Dunaway to the studio. I saw her in Bridgehampton, where she sat on a bike near the door, requested multiple towels, and pedaled languorously, apparently never breaking a sweat.
The Torch’d classes at the Topping Rose House, in Bridgehampton, and Gurney’s Montauk Resort, cost $150 for 40 minutes. And that, too, might add to the pique. “There are fights,” says Calpito. “I can’t give you names. But dueling personalities fighting over ‘Your leg was too close to my head.’ And someone yelling, ‘If you got your leg higher, you wouldn’t have such a saggy ass.’ I tell them, ‘Look, ladies, no one has a dusty ass here.’”
One dusty battleground is the parking lot at the Barn in Bridgehampton, a fitness hub that houses SoulCycle—where I went religiously for 13 years—along with Forward Space, a dance program owned by Jason Sudeikis’s sister Kristin, and a new tenant called, viscerally, Tremble. I’ve witnessed shouting matches and one fender bender in that parking lot.
Calpito explains: “You have the largest personalities in the largest cars in the smallest parking lot.” Jackson adds, “On the weekend, that parking lot looks like a Taylor Swift concert”—but without the euphoria. This summer, the studios hired parking attendants to direct traffic and attempt to keep the peace.
When SoulCycle in Bridgehampton became so popular that the waitlist sometimes exceeded 100 people, the company added a new level of pricing called SuperSoul. Those who paid $3,400 for 40 classes—or $85 a pop—would have access to early sign-ups and other perks. Laurie Cole, a senior master instructor at SoulCycle, tells me clients become so attached to certain teachers at certain times on the weekends that “they’re like, ‘If I don’t have this in my day I’m not going to be O.K. I’ll be a raving lunatic.’”
“You have the largest personalities in the largest cars in the smallest parking lot.”
Reed Parmelee met his fair share of raving lunatics at his summer job at Barry’s Bootcamp in Southampton. He worked the front desk and wiped sweat off the equipment. “People sweat a lot,” he says. He loved the job, with its characters and circus performances. For example: “This guy Ubered to class and was 10 minutes late,” says Parmelee. Barry’s has a five-minute cancellation policy—anyone who doesn’t arrive five minutes before class loses his place. “The guy said he paid $100 for the Uber and wanted me to give him cash to pay for his Uber home. When I told him, ‘I’m not going to give you cash; we don’t even have cash,’ he said, ‘We can agree that it’s both of our faults.’ And then he stormed out.”
This sort of behavior doesn’t go unpunished. The manager added a notation to the Uber hooligan’s account profile under the designation “User Requires Extra Care.” It’s not a compliment. Some other recipients: “They could be the nicest people ever to the instructors and monsters to the front desk,” says Parmelee. They could get moved from Treadmill No. 13 to another treadmill that is not No. 13 and “be super-hostile.”
One person mocked a man on the next treadmill for being slow. “He started running backward to show the other guy how slow he was.” The backward-runner’s behavior was noted—User Requires Extra Care—alerting instructors in studios across the country to watch out for his antics.
These people “believe they’re better than the person next to them,” says Alexandra, who asked me not to use her real name. “It creates this dynamic of self-righteousness.” There was the time she, her mother, and her sister went to New York Pilates in Southampton hoping to work out next to each other. “So a woman in her mid-50s wearing 100 Cartier Love bracelets took a place in the middle of the empty room. I was like, ‘Would you mind moving so we can be together?’ And she just said, ‘No,’ and didn’t budge.”
If it all sounds like a hornet’s nest, it is. “I was accused of elbowing someone,” says Jackson. “We’re women in our 50s and 60s who are acting like mean girls in high school. And I’m one of them.” She describes a prime spot in the front row of Barre None as “the $55 million beach house of mat space.”
It isn’t enough to own a house on Further Lane and stroll on the beach in head-to-toe Prada. The privilege must reach the tables of Le Bilboquet and the snaking lines at Round Swamp Farm. At exercise studios up and down the eastern tip of Long Island, the scene “encapsulates big wealth taking up everything,” says Jackson. “You go to the farm stand, and some guy drives up and buys all the lettuce. Do you really need all the lettuce?”
That said, there are some softies. A friend who worked at SoulCycle Bridgehampton’s front desk for two summers tells me about “nice people, the higher-profile clients who would bring in bagels or leave wine in the fridge. I don’t want to say it was bribery, but you’d see their names on the waitlist and think, They brought muffins last week.”
There are peaceful alternatives if you search for them. Jimmy Minardi teaches cycling on actual roads, surfer yoga, and a boot-camp class on Main Beach in East Hampton to clients including Christy Turlington and Colin McCabe, a co-founder of the Chopt salad chain. “I’m not the best-looking. I’m not cool. And I don’t go back and forth to the city,” says Minardi, distinguishing himself from other instructors. “And if I had my choice, I’d ride outside or go on a beach walk or go in the woods.” Oh, yeah—nature! Isn’t that why we flee the city in the first place?
Linda Wells is the Editor at Air Mail Look