Happy Sunday everyone, and Happy Mother’s Day to all of our Mother’s in the gym, both the ones that have dealt with our non-sense for decades as well as all of the amazing new Mother’s who we have in the gym that have decades of non-sense ahead of them 🙂 I hope all of you Mother’s have the best day you can and can enjoy some time with your families and loved ones.

Where We Are

As I’ve been doing each week I’ve been trying to keep everyone up to date on where we are at and what lies ahead for CVCF. I won’t lie, this last week has been a tough one. It’s probably the first time since we closed that I have personally have really struggled with the current situation at hand. I’ve tried to be super positive with myself over the past almost 2 months, and focus on what I CAN control and what I CAN do. Having spoken with a handful of other small biz owners that call CVCF their home, we all seem to be in similar spots and dealing with similar issues. We continue to hear little or nothing from our State government and elected officials, and it seems like the Federal government has already started to move forward with things going back to normal. While I don’t want to get into the politics of re-opening businesses, how, when, the simple reality is that we are being left with almost no information, and very little assistance from the government, while still being expected to pay all of our bills. While we did receive our PPP loan, the unfortunate situation is that it really doesn’t do much for us. As a business with an extremely small staff and payroll relative to the size of our building, we have a monthly payroll and rent that are almost equal. From the get go, our biggest hurdle with this entire process has been our lease, as is likely the same for most service based businesses. After continued discussions, our landlords have made it clear they have no intention on offering our business any sort of break on our lease, either for the months of closed business we’ve had, or for the coming future once we are able to open. We will be able to go on a payment plan, but this of course only increase what our monthly rent will be when we are actually open. This is where the huge crux comes for all of the small business owners out there, the lease of their business, and where neither the Federal or State governments has offered any real relief aside from halting the option to evict. Many of your favorite small businesses are essentially at the hands of their landlords. We’ve heard of some business owners being fortunate enough to have landlords who have completely waved their rent while they’re closed, while others are in the same situation as us, where they are expected to pay every penny owed per the lease agreement. Since closing CVCF on March 18th, we have lost 50% of our business, but are still in a position to pay 100% of our bills outside of payroll, but with 2 of our 3 full-time employees being in the same household it has definitely made things slightly tricky.

I tell you all this information because I’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible with the CVCF community because you truly are like an extended family, or in many cases a lot closer than much of our actual family. We know CVCF plays a big role in many of your lives and we feel it’s important to let you know where we are at. And for the moment we are fine, but we become more and more unsure about the future as each day passes.

As we continue marching forward we can’t thank you all enough who have been able to continue to support the gym and we don’t want, nor will we take anything more from any of you. We already feel like we are getting more than we are giving, and while many have offered to help support us in additional ways we can’t and won’t take anything more than what is already being generously paid to us for what is certainly a diminished service from the norm.

My personal troubles this past week haven’t been so much because of where we are at the present, but because of where we may be in the future. With little to no information from the State government we can only take what little tidbits we’ve received from others in similar industries in the area and look to what is being instituted in states around the country, especially looking to those states who seem to follow “similar” societal tendencies with their policies and beliefs. What we do know is that as all businesses in our industry, and more or less in the service industry, will be in a position of a forced reduction in business traffic all while having to take on additional expenses, which while we won’t make any finite decisions until we know exactly what our limitations are, we will likely be forced to re-structure our basic business platform to remain open.

Immediate Updates

As we continue to move forward through our quarantine and follow the approach of hurry-up and wait, below are a few things we know are happening in the immediate future.

  • Zoom Classes – When we originally shut down CVCF Dani and I made the decision to focus on programming and demo videos instead of Zoom sessions. Whether we made the right decision or not, we’re not sure, but we hope we did. We felt, and which we’ve seen, many of you went home with your gear packages with tons of enthusiasm to train solo. We’ve definitely seen and heard that that motivation has started to dwindle, pretty significantly after the first month which is why we started adding some Zoom sessions. We also made the decision to train with you, to help provide some motivation and fun instead of attempting to coach you through 2×2″ screen on a laptop. Many of you have enjoyed the EMOTM’s of the Day, so we will be expanding on that. Instead of trying to teach a class of programming, we’ll have someone to train with you and lead you through the class. These will be kept simple, but we’ll also be adding a warm-up for you guys to perform as a group. The EMOTM’s of the Day will range from 20-40 minutes, movements will be taken from the programming laid out for the day in the full programming structure. We will be posting these the night before. Please be mindful that many people are on tight schedules, and we can’t wait around for people who “show-up” late. Classes will start promptly at the designated time with a quick review and answer of questions followed by a Warm-up and then right into the EMOTM of the day. Lastly we are going to ask that those who have and will continue to participate in the Zoom sessions who do not have a membership use either a Punch Card or pay a Drop-In fee for these sessions. Going forward we will be signing all athletes into classes in Push Press for the Zoom sessions just as if they were normal classes. So with that in mind, heading into this next week, we’ll be adding the following…
    • 7:00 AM Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – EMOTM of the Day w/Laura
    • Noon Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – EMOTM of the Day w/Dani or Jade
    • Saturday Power Hour w/Jade or Dani
  • “Murph” – We know many of you look forward to our giant yearly “Murph” workout which we do on Memorial Day every year. Always a grueling and awesome time with typically 100 people or so we know that absolutely won’t be happening this year. In fact, even if we were able to open and accommodate that many people we wouldn’t. Why, because we’re thinking about your health and longevity. Many of you have been training as hard as ever, while others have not, in addition we know most athletes have not been doing any or much upper body bodyweight pulling movements. Because of this is would not be in the best interest of your safety to just jump in and do this on minimal training. So we will be planning to move “Murph” either to the 4th of July or possibly Labor Day depending on what our restrictions are.

Re-Opening Process

As mentioned above we truly don’t know when we will be able to open. Our State unfortunately has been incredibly secretive with any information and doesn’t seem to be making any broad long-term guidelines for people to follow or schedules for businesses to be aware of in terms of opening. We are seeing in places like California that gyms might not be able to open until as late as August. Our current, and only information we’re working off of is that Child Care facilities are allowed to start preparing for a June 1st opening, which leads me to think we will likely be behind that, likely looking to the middle of June, or maybe even July. We have not taken the time to make any finite decisions regarding this as we don’t have any concrete information, however there are some general themes that you will likely see throughout the Fitness industry in Vermont and which we are already seeing across the country where Fitness facilities are starting to open. Some changes you can expect to see…

  • Class Size – We will obviously be limited in our class size/client traffic. To what degree we don’t know, but given our main hours of business 5:30 – 10:00 AM, and 3:30 – 7:30 PM typically see an average of 40+ people in the building, we know we won’t be able to have nearly that many people in the space.
  • No New Members – At least for the immediate future after opening we will not be taking any new clients in the gym. We will also not be allowing any Drop-Ins to the gym. We also may be looking at introducing a membership cap based on the number of bodies we can get in the door.
  • Class Reservations – All athletes will be expected to sign-up in advance for the class time/training session they would like to attend. We will likely set the classes to open 24 hours before the actual class time. In addition because of the limited business we’ll be able to provide, we will also have to institute a Drop-In charge ($20) for any sessions where someone reserves a spot and does not show, or cancels within a given window of time.
  • Staggered Class Times – While a lot of our classes are already staggered, we will be having to further stagger to be able to follow cleaning protocols and and social distancing protocols to get athletes in and out of the building.
  • Dedicated Training Space – Each athlete will have a dedicated training space when they come. We are fortunate to have invested an enormous amount of money over the years into providing the most robust training space in the area. This means we’ll be able to create training spaces for people that have all equipment needed outside of specialty equipment to do whatever they want within their training space. When athletes come in, they will go to their designated training space, and bring all belongings to that space. These spaces will be setup for either class or for Open Gym training. We understand some athletes may be looking to just do their own thing, so these spaces will be able to be reserved and used as desired.
  • Bathrooms – Initially there will be no use of the showers, and bathroom use will be limited to one person at a time.
  • Cleaning – Each individual training space will have it’s own set of cleaning items to sanitize equipment used, and we will be doing additional general cleaning in between classes/sessions.
  • Class Structure – Because of limited traffic we will likely be changing class structures, and shortening classes to 45 minutes so that we can provide ample time pre and post class to clean and get people in and out of the building. Athletes will be expected to be on time, if they’re late the doors will be locked, and there will be no waiting around for people to show-up to start. We will be extremely prompt about our class time and runnings, there will be no wiggle room here.
  • Entrance/Exit – We will likely be looking at having athletes enter through the front door and leave out the back garage doors.
  • Outdoor Training Space – Based on whatever guidelines we have we will be making an effort to setup an outdoor training space. This space may be setup as staging area for athletes coming to the next class so they can warm-up, mobilize, or we may try and run additional classes outside if that’s allowed. However we know how temperamental the weather can be in Vermont, so we aren’t counting on this as a dedicated space.
  • Hands Off Coaching – Coaching will all be done from a distance. We will not be physically helping correct people, only verbally.
  • No Sickness What So Ever – While some of you might find this obvious, we will not be letting anyone in to train who has a cough, runny nose, anything along those lines. We’ve always asked people to stay home when they’re sick, now it will no longer be an option. If you’re showing any signs of sickness we’d hope you won’t try to come in anyway, but if you do you will not be allowed to train.

The New Normal

As we look to the future we know the unfortunate truth is that things will just not be the same, and may not be for a while. Part of what makes CVCF such an amazing place is our community, the conversations, the laughs, and cries, and unfortunately some of that is going to have to be put on hold as we’ll no longer be able to gather and hang out in the gym, it will strictly be a place to come exercise and provide a boost to your mental and physical wellness for the immediate future. Like many we are a bit taken aback by what the new normal means for CVCF we truly hope to continue to create a place with the best community, coaching, facility, and equipment in the area, and are already looking forward to and hoping we can see the days when we can run our business as normal again.

Thank you all so much for the support you’ve been able to provide us with. We look forward to seeing you all as soon as possible. And while we’ve heard this from many people, about numerous different items in their lives, we hope this restriction on services, goods, activities for all of us, does, in the end help us all create a greater appreciation for the items important in our lives and the opportunities to be able to participate in these different mediums that help us all enjoy and make our lives what they are.

Jade + Dani