Stone Brook Strength celebrated 10 years of operation this year. It feels like both a long time and a blink of an eye. I think of the hundreds of people who have sweated in our gym and especially the members who not only started a fitness habit with us, but stuck with it better than any previous efforts. I get encouraged thinking of the downline effect a fit person can have on his or her family and friends. Working out to be “in shape” has been a significant and satisfying part of most of my life and so has sharing that fitness with others. The reality that is Stone Brook Strength can be traced back to a very humble beginning and some key moments of dissatisfaction…
I was doing some organizing in our home office recently and found some old faded 3×5 cue cards. There were 2 or 3 workout descriptions written on each card. Back in 2004 I had found this web page on the internet that posted a workout each day and there were people logging their workout results in the comments section. I found it intriguing and the workouts looked simple and challenging at the same time. I had been regularly working out and lifting weights for most of my life, and around that time I had changed things up to focus more on calisthenics, running and swimming. Here is one of my own key moments of dissatisfaction – I had been feeling a bit frustrated with the usual gym scene and thought that more military boot-camp style training would be a good idea. I did enjoy it, but still missed some aspects of barbell training. And now I was seeing workouts that not only combined several training methods, they were often combined in the same workout!
Yes, I had stumbled upon the www.crossfit.com site in its early years. And my own uncertainty with the permanence of this “internet thing” back in ‘04 had me thinking that if this webpage disappeared I ought to have some of the workouts written out for my own reference. Hence, the cue cards. As I started to put the workouts into practice, my wife Robin and co-workers (I was firefighting in Saskatchewan at this time) started to notice and show some interest, these workouts didn’t look normal. Sometimes, they actually looked like fun? That interest led to a local basement fit club, which led to seeking out education and certifications. The basement also got full, and so in 2007 we looked at a small commercial space which became CrossFit Regina, the first CrossFit gym in that city and one of the first in the western provinces. Our motto was Run Jump Squat Lift Throw!
The people who came in our doors back then were both curious and brave, and also just regular folk who had found something in their lives they wanted to see change. They had something they were dissatisfied about and improving their physical fitness was a way to tackle fixing it.
Moving back home to Steinbach in 2013, it seemed that sharing fitness was a hard habit to break, as Robin and I again found ourselves with a little basement fit club that refused to stay little. Or in the basement! And here we are 10 years later, looking at another week of training within our gym walls. Another week seeing about 150 people with something in common, doing something a bit uncomfortable and challenging to make themselves a little bit better. What do they have in common? They identified a part of their lives they were not satisfied with. And then did something about it.
You don’t have to be a super-athlete to start, or even very athletic at all. I certainly wasn’t, I started working out in my teens because I was a weak and chubby middle-schooler who didn’t feel confident in how I looked. So I started lifting weights with the old cement-filled barbell set from Sears in our basement. I “started” a number of times until it finally took.
You just have to stop putting off starting and instead put off stopping.
That is why our coaches meet with nervous people for the first time and chat about what’s going on for them, what are they looking to change? What are they dissatisfied with? Together we identify it and discover a way out of it. That is a starting point to making things better. Fitness is freedom, it really is!
Are you needing to make a change in your life? That feeling of dissatisfaction is like an alarm clock sounding in your mind. It’s telling you that it’s time to get up and go! Putting off doing something about it is like repeatedly hitting the snooze button. Don’t do that! Talk to one of our coaches and see what is possible.
Come sweat with us, life is better fitter!