Going somewhere by pedaling in place

The class followed suit despite her not uttering a word. That’s because they all know Clotilde Chaumet, the 27-year-old spinning coach whose 45-minute classes book up as soon as they’re made available, a week in advance.

Spinning isn’t totally new to Paris, but it just reached a pivotal moment: One of the city’s first studios, Dynamo, which opened in 2015 and was modeled on SoulCycle, was recently bought by its competitor, Let’s Ride, which opened a year later. Clo, as Chaumet is known, is one of Dynamo’s original master coaches, with devotees at every class and her own brand of yoga.

“She’s mastered this technique of creating a journey,” said Stéphanie Nieman, one of the three founders of Let’s Ride. “She takes you in and plunges you into a new universe. Whenever the music changes, she knows where to take you and you don’t even realize it’s happening.”

Chaumet, who revises her hip-hop-heavy playlist for each of her 13 weekly spin classes, spends less time on the bike and more time moving around the candlelit room, yelling out cues with the rhythm of a rapper: “Gauche, gauche, gauche, gauche. Droite, droite, droite, droite,” she will say, instructing her students to go left or right.

Her husky just-smoked-a-cigarette-voice (though, of course, she doesn’t) often gets muffled in the mic of her headset, but loyal riders follow along as if their lives depend on it.

“She really pushes you,” said Jade Dabrigeon, 25, a fashion publicist who began taking Chaumet’s classes soon after the studio opened. “The whole point is to be able to stop thinking and just feel the energy of the room. It’s also really satisfying to look in the mirror and see the whole row perfectly synchronized like a ballet.”

Chaumet was born in Paris and was raised on the west coast of France, where, as a child, she liked archery, horseback riding and surfing. Before her spinning career, the self-proclaimed tomboy (she pairs cotton sport socks with Gucci loafers outside the studio) flitted between jobs. There was waitressing at Joe Allen in Paris and folding shirts at Quiksilver, all while flying back and forth to California, where she was a surf instructor in Santa Barbara and a chef for the crew of “Unusually Thicke,” a reality show starring Alan Thicke and his family.

“I was really living the life there,” Chaumet said on a recent Tuesday after class, sipping a second allongé at Fragments cafe in the Marais. “I didn’t have too much money, but I’d wake up, go swimming, then work in a cafe for a bit and maybe take a yoga class. At 5 or 6, I’d surf before happy hour.”

But when she came back to Paris to renew her visa, her mother and grandmother urged her to make something more of herself. As if on cue, Dynamo discovered her growing presence on Instagram and asked her to train as one of their coaches.

“It would stop me from going back to California and traveling,” she said. “I had to do it fully. I’m really competitive with myself.”

Before she started training at Dynamo, she traveled to Mysore, India, to get a 200-hour yoga teacher certificate at the Ashtanga Yoga Mysore center. In 2016, while building her Dynamo clientele, she started Trés Intense Hip Hop Yoga, a 60-minute vinyasa flow class that she teaches four times a week at a cavernous space just off the Champs-Élysées.

“Every time I teach a class, whether Dynamo or TI, I teach the class I would like to take,” Chaumet said. “I say aloud what I would say to myself: Take that risky path, follow what you really like.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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