Beverly's Inner Cycle Owners Bring Renewed Energy To Salem Studio

SALEM, MA — After two years of stops, and starts, and doing whatever they could simply to keep pace, Inner Cycle fitness studio co-owners Hillary Mandelbaum and Emily Skoniecki finally feel the freedom to pedal forward into a stylish new studio in Salem.

The Beverly High alumnae owned five Inner Cycle locations — with plans for expansion — in the winter of 2020 when the COVID-19 health crisis tossed their best-laid plans into what at times seemed like an endless maze of ever-changing restrictions and omnipresent uncertainty.

"It was really like a marathon of just kind of a lot of grit and lot of hard work to constantly be in the push-pull of everything," Mandelbaum told Patch on Thursday. "It would seem like things were getting better and then we would catch another (virus) surge or there would be another mask mandate.

"We won some battles there. But we lost some as well."

Mandelbaum spoke with Patch in November 2020 about the toll of the shifting orders that allowed her to re-open her studios, but only if bikes were 14 feet apart and her clients wore masks at all times. Despite the capacity restrictions, and relative safety of gyms and fitness centers amid the protocols according to statistics at the time, she was frustrated with government messaging that she felt discouraged the use of businesses like hers even though they were playing by the rules.

"We had no control," she said. "We were at the mercy of whatever the decisions were being made for us. It was hard after 9½ years of being in control of our business to have it dictated to us how we had to operate."

Yet, Mandelbaum and Skoniecki kept pushing forward. There were hard decisions — they closed the Marblehead and Gloucester satellite locations that never rebounded from the initial shutdown — and relied on the faithful supporters who stuck with them through remote workouts and all the coronavirus orders.

"They continued in the fight with us," Mandelbaum said. "Without those key, loyal clients we would never be here."

Now not only is Inner Cycle still there in Amesbury, Beverly and North Reading, it recently expanded to a new location on Canal Street in Salem near Salem State University with an official ribbon-cutting set for next Thursday afternoon.

"We had been looking at Salem for a while," said Mandelbaum. "Having closed Marblehead we knew some of those clients would now be able to come to Salem too so that was good.

"It's a really cool space. It's all state-of-the-art. It feels like a Boston studio. I am super proud of how it all turned out."

She said it was another former Beverly High classmate of theirs, Salem Principal Planner for Community Development Kathryn Newhall-Smith, who reintroduced the idea of expanding Inner Cycle to the Witch City.

The space is bigger than the satellite one closed in Marblehead with 20 bikes to start and the room to expand to twice that.

"It will come with time," Mandelbaum said. "Salem is a really cool, funky, really inclusive community and I am very hopeful we will do really well there."

While hope is something Mandelbaum never lost during the pandemic, she is relieved and reinvigorated to finally feel like it is finally back in Inner Cycle's hands to go out and try to realize all of her hopeful aspirations.

"We're not quite out of the woods but I'm done with making that (pandemic) excuse," she said. "I'm so tired of talking about COVID-19. Yes, that was really hard. But I'm very happy we are back in that place where we can make our own decisions and run our business like we choose.

"It's really, really refreshing. To open up a new place and give new life to the business shows people that we're not done yet.

"We're still here. Yeah, we've had our ups and downs. But now we can really see the future of the business."

(Scott Souza is a Patch Field Editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)