I don’t know if I would consider myself a particularly emotional person. I cried when my son was born, I also cried when Mufasa died in the Lion King. I get excited when my athletes PR and frustrated with myself when my Athletes get injured.
Yesterday started as a normal day as I went to the gym for my 5am client and turned into a really special day as we had the biggest attendance over all our classes that we’ve ever had! Seeing each class fill out at 6am 930 am 11 30am 12 30pm 4 pm 530 pm and 630 pm made me get a lil emotional as I left to go home. I drove home reminiscing about how we started and when we opened the 6am and 1 or 2 people would show up and yesterday we had 15. I thought about the doubts I had and how people would tell me how many gyms go under every year. I thought about the people who have followed me from Basement gym to garage gym to garage gym to FAILED gym to Radix as you see it today and honestly I cried. I don’t know why I cried, maybe I was just tired from coaching 7 personal training clients and 2 classes and getting the WOD in, maybe I’m just so beyond grateful for each and everyone of you who have put your trust in me to help you be a better person, maybe I’m living a dream that 5 and half years ago was shattered into pieces and I had no idea how I was going to recover. To see so many of you in here yesterday, having fun, working hard, making yourself a better person made every single horrible experience I had a long the way worth it. To see ALL of you who show up on a regular basis, to make yourself a better person, it makes it worth it.
Some of you know this and some of you don’t but 5 and a half years ago I went to Open my first gym at Trafalgar and the North Service Rd. I had spent 4 years training people out of basement then garage gym to build a pretty awesome client base and following and saved a lot of my money so I could open what would be my dream gym. I found the space, signed the lease and started to do the build out. I was on cloud nine as I spent my WHOLE adult life training people and dreaming about what this gym would look like. I got about half way through the build with permits pulled and everything setup to be finished when I got a call from the City saying I owed a Building development fee. I didn’t think to much of it so I went to the town to see what it was and why and how much was owed. Well what I wasn’t told during the leasing process was the town was going through a process of changing bi-laws and zoning and the building I had leased out was zoned properly under the old zoning but as they transferred to the new zoning the building wasn’t zoned properly and there was a fee to have it re-zoned. My heart sank, I started to sweat and my heart rate was through the roof… “how much is that going to cost?” “$150,000 sir” I almost puked all over that lady. They wanted to charge me $150 000 to change some papers on a building I didn’t own and obviously couldn’t afford to do. I remember not being able to sleep, trying to figure any way to make it work. In a constant state of anxiety, didn’t eat much or train much, kept training the people I had to keep moving. The other problem was with all the work we had already done, first and last months rent, materials, contractors etc. I was $50,000 invested. That was everything I had saved plus borrowed from my Dad. That might of been the worse 3 month of my life. I couldn’t open up, I was threatened by the landlord that she was going to sue me if I didn’t pay rent, the town didn’t help me resolve it in a cost effective way and neither would she. I prayed a lot, I reflected a lot. My girlfriend at the time who I was in love with moved to California and dumped me. After 3 weeks of not being able to barely talk never mind function normally I had a peaceful feeling of there was a reason for why this happened, there was a purpose for the timing, that this is what I was meant to do just not in that time. So I shut it all down and I trained people out of my garage and I dreamed of a gym where I could impact so many more people in a positive way.
Fast Forward a bit, I start dating Rach, we have a passion for helping people together (F California) and she’s been coaching CrossFit for over 5 years. We find a building and get the town to sign a certificate of zoning (I couldn’t go through it again) we lease this building, I propose on the grand opening,we get married, we have our lil man Malachi and so many of you have been walking right beside us the whole way and some of you have come alongside us over the last few years and months joined this community of like minded people who not only want to be fitter but want to be better human beings and it’s turned Radix into something I dreamed about from my basement when I first started training people.
I’m not sure why I needed to share this today but I did and maybe you have a dream that’s been trampled and you need to dig deep and make it work and I just want to thank you for being a part of this journey and my life! This is not the end but just the beginning of where my dream starts and Radix goes and man I’m excited that you are here with us!
THANK YOU
-Coach Dan