Spin Me Right Round! How Naughty Kelly Ripa Stays Fit at the Beach

On Sunday, Aug. 4, Gregg Cook, an instructor at ZoneHampton, an East Hampton gym frequented by Kelly Ripa, Katie Lee Joel and Marci Klein, was teaching an 8:30 a.m. spin class.

Mr. Cook, who has a sharp nose, chiseled jaw, intimidating biceps and a tattoo of a thunderbird on his forearm, was sitting at the front of the completely full class on a stationary bike in a red muscle T-shirt and Spandex bicycling shorts.

“If you haven’t broken a sweat yet, you have some catching up to do!” Mr. Cook shouted into a microphone piece wrapped around his hairless head. “If I said you had to go at this speed for another five minutes, what would you say?”

ZoneHampton is hidden between a bowling alley and a Sleepy’s mattress store along Route 27. “We get a really hip New York City crowd here,” said Marion Roaman, who walks around the two-floor gym in workout gear and socks when she’s not teaching. She opened ZoneHampton with two friends in 1996 (they parted amicably in 1998), and seven months ago opened a new branch on the Upper East Side.

“Sometimes I’ll be teaching a class and I’ll think, ‘Oh, there’s a guy who’s been taking my classes for literally 13 years,’” said Ms. Roaman. “And then I’ll look at another side of the room and there’s Alec Baldwin pedaling away. It’s not really a distraction, other than sometimes feeling like I’m teaching Ferris Bueller whenever Matthew Broderick is in my class.”

Ms. Roaman, who is 36, said that the average pay for instructors in the business is $70 an hour, but she often pays more. “I can’t disclose how much more,” she said. (“Marion treats me very well, compensation-wise,” Mr. Cook told the Transom.) Then there are the perks: “If someone commits to teaching for the summer, I try to find them a place,” she said, adding that she covers the costs for some of her instructors. (Sign us up!)

Back in Mr. Cook’s class, Prince’s “Kiss” was blasting over the speakers. “If you can do this with your mouth shut, you have chosen an intensity that is too low! Push! Push! Push! Push!”

At the end of class, Mr. Cook—who just had his first child—had an announcement to make. He had been teaching at Zone part time while working at Equinox branches in New York, but now, he told the crowd, he was a full-time ZoneHampton instructor. Everyone cheered.

ialeksander@observer.com