Living the dream

Today was Saturday, which to some is their first day off of the week but usually to me is just another day. I tend to teach a lot of my private classes on Saturdays although for the last couple of months I’ve been saying no to people on account of the move to the new gym and the arrival of the new son. But today I did work. Well, some might call it work, but I enjoyed it.

Today’s job started yesterday with the delivery of the upstairs cage wall. Here’s one of our neighbours in the business park unloading the posts:
It’s a big yoke. 6 steel pillars with A frames welded on for support, 5 box steel cage sections with rubberised steel mesh, a whole heap of padding, ties, post covers all served on a sesame seed bun. So it’s a damn good thing I had lots of help this morning. Work began at 10am with the initial set up. All of the 6 posts had to be bolted to the mezzanine floor and reinforced with steel plates beneath the timber.That stage of the operation took the guts of four hours, mainly due to us having to bang a hole in the ceiling (concrete ceiling I might add) of what will become The Athlete’s Lounge so we could access the timber above to brace one of the posts. But finally, we finished and found time to pad the posts and wire sections.
And so we have a finished product. The piece of plywood on the wall at the end of the cage is the first section of a padded wall that will run from the cage to the opposite wall. The dirty floor below will be matted on Monday to make a 112 square metre matted area with the best mats available on the market (which we also dragged up the staircase today). It will be unbelievably cool.

But what is actually REALLY COOL about this matted area is that in our gym, it won’t be anything special. I’m sick of saying this but it’s the reality. This gym will be by some distance the best gym I have ever walked into, and if you walk into the gym when it’s finished I think you’ll agree. Some will have fancier paint (we may not even bother painting), some will have steam rooms and plunge pools (we’ll have showers, they’ll have to do) and some will have metrosexual personal trainers saying cheery hellos to you as they gel their hair (I don’t have hair, and Will is hardly blessed either). We’re going to be about results, not fancy pastel paintwork and juice bars. We will get those results by investing in the very best equipment that we will need to do our jobs, by being the best at what we do, and by hiring the best at what we can’t do.

For too long now fitness has been taken over by the profit driven, ultra cheap versions of what we are told gyms should look like. But gyms shouldn’t look like that. They shouldn’t look like anything in fact, they should be about getting results.