Aryn and I met while we were living in Seattle. At the time, I was the master trainer at a large chain gym. It was a quick and easy job straight out of college and paid ok, but the environment wasn’t great and people didn’t seem to really matter to the business, wether it was clients or staff.
At that time, I had personally been doing CrossFit for a couple years and I knew I wanted to ditch the idea of going to grad school for physical therapy and eventually open my own CrossFit gym so I could truly help people live their best lives. I just wanted to get some more experience first.
At that gym, I was working from about 6am to 8pm Monday through Saturday, but was really only working 4-5 hours per day. It was just spread out in 25 minute increments of work and then typically a few hours between big rushes of clients. (Yes, we were only doing 25 minute PT sessions with clients and they cost $70 per session. Yes, it was just shy of $170 per hour and this was back in 2012/23…)
Fast forward a bit and with me making about 15% of what that gym was charging people to work with me, I decided it was time to start looking somewhere else for work.
I was lucky that my first job I found was in the CrossFit world was at CrossFit Devotion in Covington Washington. Jake and Carissa were great leaders that were willing to work with me and teach me everything they could, even though they knew my ultimate goal was to open my own gym. I learned a lot in that gym and I still love getting to see Jake and anyone else from Devotion to this day.
Fast forward a bit, Aryn and I are married, I’m splitting my time between 6 different gyms to try to fill my day (at the time there just wasn’t a lot of options to get hours) and Aryn was working at a start-up tech company by day and interning at a CrossFit gym in the evenings. It was also getting more and more expensive to live in Seattle and we knew long term we wanted to move back to eastern Washington to be closer to our families while also starting our own.
We decided to give it a shot. We quit our jobs, packed up our waterfront apartment in Seattle on Halloween of 2017 and drove across the state to drop off all our worldly possessions in my sister’s basement.
We took a couple weeks to travel across Thailand and day dream. When we got back, it was time to get started.
We narrowed it down to knowing we wanted to start a gym in Kennewick. We wanted to create a space and environment where health, confidence and quality of movement took place over competition, fear and doing things just to do them.
I also knew that we wanted to create a space where coaches could professionalize the industry. The fitness industry is full of people selling quick fixes, unrealistic goals and pushing their own goals on you. Most coaches don’t stick around long enough to learn what really matters to make a lasting impact on people.
It’s a shame because we have a huge opportunity to help people live their highest quality of life. It is rare to find a gym owner, coach or personal trainer that didn’t start this job with the idea that they just wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. Unfortunately the inability to make a real living ends up pushing most people to leave for a more stable career before they get the chance to fully develop.
In 2018 we found a place to change that. We have a good friend from Seattle that was looking for space in the Tri-Cities to open the next orange colored gym and he was also helping us scout out a spot for our own gym. Between him and Jaimi Marden, our rockstar commercial realtor, we settled on a space right off Union and Clearwater, next door to my families’ business, the Hi-Land Garage.
We are coming up on year eight of us building this dream. We have seen people get control of their diabetes, lose 100 pounds, begin to play with grandkids and accomplish so many things we can’t even keep track anymore.
We continue to try to innovate and find ways to make legitimate career paths for anyone willing to listen, learn and work within the fitness space.
We have also now begun to raise our own kids in and around the gym and it’s everything and more than we could have dreamed of.
Thank you all for being a part of this journey and if you haven’t joined us yet, we can’t wait to talk to you about wether or not we are a good fit for you.
