Just like a SoulCycle class, life can shift from an easy spin to an intense period of heart-pumping resistance within moments. Stacey Griffith can relate to this. The SoulCycle instructor figures that half of her life has been spent riding the ride in an indoor cycling room.
“It’s my passion,” the New York-based trainer says. “It’s just my favorite place to be.”
So when Griffith’s world was rocked with news of a fast, stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis in the lymph nodes in June 2023, the thought of trading in her spinning shoes for chemotherapy needles was a hard reality to grasp.
“I’ve never had anything like that happen in my life before,” Griffith says. “I’ve never had a life-threatening illness go through my body. I never imagined myself being the person who it happened to. I just was paralyzed physically [and] mentally, and was just like, ‘Oh my God. How am I gonna deal with this?'”
Stacey Griffith Tried Fighting Through the Disease at First
Griffith, who was also hit with a “double whammy” because she was in menopause, decided to act like all was normal for the sake of herself and her community of riders.
“I tried to teach toward the end of June [2023]” Griffith said of heading out to SoulCycle’s infamous “The Barn” location in The Hamptons where she’s become a summer staple. “A lot of people travel to the Hamptons from all over the country internationally. They just come here for Fourth of July at The Barn. It’s been every summer, so I kind of wanted to teach through those classes that were already booked and bought. People [also] rent houses out here. I just felt such loyalty to them all, so I tried teaching through it.”
But soon she realized that her body wasn’t cooperating with her mind and the cancer was taking over. After dedicating 18 years of her life to others, she knew she needed to put her health first.
“I got about 90 percent of the way through the weekend and through the week and I was just like, ‘You guys, I can’t do it anymore,'” Griffith explains. “It was so emotional because we sent out a mass email kind of letting people know so that I didn’t have to say it every time when I taught. I had like 12 classes on the schedule from Thursday to Tuesday or something.”
The mental toll that comes with hearing the words, “You have cancer,” was weighing on her, too.
“Everybody gets the memo and I think that might have made it worse,” she says. “Because now, everybody was so upset and just really so compassionate. I think there’s almost 80 bikes in that studio. Having that many people staring at you with these compassionate eyes and people were really upset and crying. We all were just kind of freaking out a little bit.”
Stacey Griffith didn’t want her riders to see her cry or be sad either, so she decided to take three or four months off to have surgery and get through chemo, radiation and immunotherapy. Despite her new normal, she couldn’t stop thinking about her life on the bike.
“Every time I thought about teaching or I’d be somewhere and I’d hear a song, I would just start crying,” Griffith shares. “I couldn’t. My body and my mind could not match up to be the person that I was when I left.”
Personal Battles Following Chemotherapy
After losing a lot of weight while participating in a chemo trial, doctors warned her that if she lost more, she’d have to discontinue, which wasn’t an option for the usually muscular athlete.
Griffith was declared to be in remission by December 2023, but her body wasn’t done giving her trouble. Between not moving like she was used to and the cocktail of heavy duty steroids and chemo the doctors had prescribed, Griffith eventually packed on 40 pounds, and found herself overweight for the first time in her life.
“It was very uncomfortable for me to even walk,” Griffith, who was doing light weights and walking during treatment, says. “I was out of breath because I’m not used to moving my frame and that is nothing I expected.”
Frustrated that nothing was working to lose the weight, Griffith surprised herself when she looked into alternative methods including popular injections. She was so tired of being poked with needles, she decided to return to the basics as a student instead of a teacher and asked for help.
“I said to Michelle, my partner, ‘I’m just gonna do two SoulCycle classes in a day until I get this weight off,” Griffith, who leaned on other instructors, says. “I’m just gonna go right back into how I was before, which was, I would intermittent fast. I would drink lots of water. I’d have a balanced diet. I wouldn’t have any sugar, nothing fried. I’m just gonna listen to my own advice, like I would if I was teaching my class.”
Stacey Griffith Relied on Her Work Ethic to Return to Riding
Since April 7, 2024, Stacey Griffith has followed this riding plan consistently for five days a week as she watched the number on the scale drop. Although the experience took a toll on her mental and physical health, she’s finally coming out on the other side.
“I was very, very, very fortunate that even before my surgery, I was cancer free,” Griffith, who credits her partner Michelle for pushing her to add swimming and 10-mile bike rides during her recovery, adds. “So in three months, I got the cancer out of my body and there were doctors who were like, ‘You have the blood work of a 20-year-old athlete. You don’t have the blood work of a cancer patient.’ I was like, This is awesome. I need to get out into the world and show the girls and the women of this world that in the event one of eight of us, which is the stat, gets breast cancer, you can be OK. You can push through it, rise above it, beat it and you can feel good. It just takes some time.”
And that time has come.
This past July, Stacey Griffith officially returned to the podium at The Barn riding at the helm as an instructor and isn’t looking back.
“It was so hard,” Griffith, who’s teaching six days a week, shares. “I feel good. I’d say I’m 75% back.”
“I think I came back a lot stronger. I can’t imagine myself not teaching. If I’m getting older, so are my students. No one’s getting younger. I just had to retrain myself and reinvent my class a little bit and so far so good. We’re having the best time.”
