They wouldn’t be caught anywhere else

By day, Oleg Raynes programs computers, a job so immobile that it gave him three herniated disks and a pinched nerve. But Sunday night, he donned leopard-print tights and ran away to join the circus -- for two hours, at least.

In a tent full of cheering people, he sliced through the air on a trapeze, worrying only about whether his tights would stay up. They didn’t quite, but Raynes performed his trick with grace, and that was enough.

“Of course I feel nervous before I jump off the platform,” he said after the show. “But it is a pleasant feeling. And afterwards I feel great.”

About 18,000 students have come to the Trapeze School New York since it set up five years ago on the bank of the Hudson River. Nearly 100 come religiously every week for a physical and mental workout that gives them great abs and the unequaled thrill of flying.

Sunday was the students’ autumn show, and it was a display not only of gravity-defying acrobatics, but also of corporate New Yorkers’ secret lives, their superhero alter egos flying through the air with the greatest of ease, leaving their quotidian worries on the ground. Some have found love at the rig. Others have gotten jobs there. All have found courage.

Amy Growick, 28, a TV news producer who comes to fly nearly every day, spent 22 hours working on new tricks last week. Her best, a double back flip, is something straight out of Cirque du Soleil.

She woke up sick from a recurring staph infection Sunday morning and thought she would have to drop out of the show. But by late afternoon, she was there in a shiny cheetah-skin bodysuit she had made just for the show, and threw her double three times.

“I’ve worked so hard for this. There was no way I wasn’t going to show up,” she said. “It’s like an addiction.”

For Raynes, it was a miracle cure.

He was troubled by herniated disks until he tried trapeze during a Club Med vacation in January and found that hanging from the bar expanded the space between his vertebrae and relieved his pain. Since then, he has taken trapeze classes several times a week, installed a practice bar in his home for basic swings and 80 daily pull-ups, and has lost 50 pounds.

Three other colleagues from his company, Citigroup, also come for classes, and one, Jason Fowler, loved it so much he is now moonlighting at the school as an instructor.

That is the kind of passion that founder Jonathon Conant, 45, hoped to find when he set up the school in 2001 in the Hudson River Park, where it attracted an instant clientele from passing joggers and bikers.

An unexpected kind of student gravitated to the open-air rig after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some people found solace in flying after the tragedy, as well as a way to conquer their fear of heights -- and falling -- after seeing people plunging from the World Trade Center towers.

Those were unusual cases, but facing down fear on the platform is not.

“Everyone is afraid when they first go up the ladder,” said Conant. “It would be unnatural if they were not. But when they come down after completing a trick that they never imagined themselves doing, it can be transforming.”

Conant also has schools in Baltimore and Boston, and there are independent schools in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The cost is $47 to $65 a class, depending on the time.

Dino Ramos, 34, said it was “an epiphany” the first time he swung on the trapeze: “I felt comfortable in the air, like this is what I am supposed to be doing.”

Ramos had been working as a regulatory analyst at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, where he said he felt like a cog in a big wheel. “Here, I feel like a survivor. I’m not too scared of change anymore.”

He jumped at the chance to be a full-time trapeze instructor at a Club Med in the Turks and Caicos Islands, telling his mother he really was running away to join the circus. Now he is the general manager of the New York school, and one of its best catchers.

On Sunday, he hung upside-down from the catcher’s bar, his Pebbles-style ponytail dangling, as he assessed each flier’s timing and adjusted his own swing so he would be in the right place at the right time to pluck them out of the air.

“Gotcha,” he said, as he firmly grasped the forearms of one flier, then after a swing together, launched her back into space for the return bar.

Ramos came to trapeze just five years ago, but some people are born into it.

Tito Montoya, one of the instructors, is from a four-generation circus family, and started flying when he was 5 with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. His mother was a high-wire walker, his sisters were also trapeze artists and his father was the catcher. His brothers-in-law were the lion tamer and the human cannonball. His best trick is a triple flip, and flying is as natural to him as walking.

“I never thought I would see trapeze take off as a sport anyone can do. But hundreds of students come through here each week, and almost everyone can do a trick after their first session,” he said.

The school got a huge boost after it was featured in an episode of “Sex and the City” in 2003, and became a favorite site for pre-wedding parties.

But unlike Montoya, the rest of the students Sunday night -- dressed as a lion tamer, a human cannonball and even a bag of popcorn -- have been working hard to earn their night at the circus.

Hal Anderson, 36, works nights as an electrician at New Jersey Transit and now spends most of his days at Trapeze School. “I think about running away to join the circus every day,” he said. “Absolutely. I would rather fly than sleep.”

Jeffrey Litvack, 37, a Harvard Law graduate who runs his own consulting business along with the school’s weekly Intensive Flying Workshops, says flying has other benefits -- like a great body. He was recently featured on Nerve.com, shirtless with a cowboy hat, hanging from the catcher’s trap, doling out Sex Advice From Trapeze Artists.

That was after he met his girlfriend -- yes, at the trapeze rig, he notes. And no, his consulting clients -- for the most part -- don’t know about his other life.

But he sees a future in trapeze as a mainstream sport, like yoga, with both physical and spiritual aspects.

“Trapeze is not a competitive sport. It is fully focused on you as an individual and helps to condition your body like nothing else. Every muscle gets engaged,” he said, “and it’s never, ever boring.”

maggie.farley@latimes.com