I am the former owner of CrossFit Binghamton. It's weird to say. As you may have heard, we recently sold CrossFit Binghamton. We did not close. We did not go out of business. We did not shut down. We are not pregnant. At least I can say with certainty that I am not. Running/owning a gym was a MAJOR part of our lives for the past five years. We loved it. We are not sad about selling. We are excited! We are excited for more family time and to pursue our hobbies and interests to the fullest. We are excited in that we sold to Greg at GSR CrossFit and we believe he can continue to provide our now former clients with great service. Many have offered condolences on us selling the gym. We couldn't feel more differently. We would expect congratulations. We were able to create, grow and eventually sell a our fitness business.
We are excited about all the lives that we changed for the better. Excited for all the wonderful people we met through the gym. Excited for all the people that changed our lives for the better. I learned something every day in the gym.
My journey into fitness has been lifelong. 3 sports in high school, soccer in college and enthusiastic about being active all the time. Post college, I began my current career but always loved fitness. I kept doing workouts from my college soccer program and was always exploring. I found CrossFit in April of 2008. I was hooked immediately. After a few ejections from Planet Fitness, I realized if I wanted to do CrossFit in Broome County in 2008 I would need a garage gym to do it in, because nowhere existed where it was ok to drop weights, sweat, grunt and exert yourself in a manner that caused heavy breathing. Lucky for me, we had a 1200 square foot garage that would be more than sufficient space to do CrossFit. So I slowly started accumulating equipment necessary to do CrossFit. After a few months of doing "weird" stuff in the gym, Mandy started to join me.
I learned and taught myself everything on my own. This was wildly inefficient but it allowed for a much deeper understanding of what it took to complete all these new movements etc.,
It's amazing what you can teach yourself when you have an appetite to learn. Watch a video, try to duplicate the movements, learn the sticking points, video it, make adjustments etc., Now do this for EVERY movement CrossFit offers. I watched and read hundreds (thousands) of hours of videos/articles on CrossFit, movement, programming. These searches sent me down so many different paths OUTSIDE of CrossFit.
Once I had what I thought was a competent base of knowledge, Mandy and I decided it would be wonderful to share this with others. We decided to train right out of our home gym. We affiliated with CrossFit in October, 2010 and started small. Very small. Couple of people a class most times. We had NO IDEA how to run a business but we were passionate to teach others this thing we loved. Over the years we have seen people do things beyond their wildest imagination. Pull-ups, heavy deadlifts, completing distance runs, joining military units, passing standards for police tests, achieving improved body composition etc., We watched the community grow and started scheduling events that were well attended. People became friends at our gym. Every day at 6 p.m. our driveway and street was LINED with cars. Our neighbors thought we were crazy and probably didn't love the PR clean and jerks being dropped from overhead.
Eventually we outgrew the our 1200 sq. foot garage and decided we needed to open a facility at a better location than Conklin,NY. We got a great space for our needs and renovated it to our own little piece of fitness heaven. From there we grew. We were so excited to share this with EVEN more people. We put on a few events that were a lot of fun at our new location. We put on an event at the Thater race, that despite the weather was a blast.
As always happens, good things must come to an end. The gym was wonderful but we looked to the future when deciding to sell. We wanted to be able to spend more care free time with family and friends. We wanted to find a way to provide even better service to our clients. We also wanted to sell while we had a loyal client base and thus would be attractive for a potential buyer. We found that opportunity and were able to sell. It was not easy to come to terms with. We love our gym. We love the people we have met at the gym. We loved being the "organizers" or "placeholders" for CrossFit Binghamton. We loved guiding peoples fitness journey. Even though it was difficult, we knew it was the right decision based on our goals and values for the future.
We still are involved in fitness. It is a life long pursuit for us. Exploring, learning, experimenting, applying, etc., We are still providing consulting and remote individual coaching for those that have access to a gym. (send us an email or message if this interests you) This is the future of fitness(but that is a whole new blog post).
Fitness for us is a journey, a wonderful life long journey. We were happy to bring CrossFit to the Binghamton area and will have a special place in our heart for everyone we came into contact with as a part of this wonderful journey. We want to say thank you to everyone that helped us along the way. We want to say thank you to all our wonderful clients. We want to say thank you to all those that let us be a small part of their fitness journey. From the bottom of our hearts, Thank You!
Pat
