Starter Pack Entry #1

Rebecca: Today we meet David Osorio, who has always been inviting people to work out with him.

David: So when I was growing up, I didn’t play a lot of team sports. I played a little bit of ice hockey and roller hockey and stuff like that—not very well. But I was always sort of intimidated by team sports. It’s not something that I naturally gravitated towards.

And then when I got into high school, I wanted to start getting in shape. I wanted to start working out. I didn’t really know where to start. So I’d start going to the weight room in my high school. And basically a lot of the teams would be working out and I would just kind of like mirror what they were doing in the corner and try to figure it out on my own.

I just really enjoyed it off the bat. I started to see some changes in my body and just felt better about myself. And then pretty shortly thereafter I started trying to bring my friends into the gym. A lot of my friends were the music kids, the art kids, etc. who weren’t working out as much. So really from the outset I was like: I want to share this with other people and I want this to be more of a communal experience.

So in high school, my junior year, I made this decision. I was like: I’m gonna start a gym one day.

Pete: But David didn’t want his gym to be one of those where everyone was together…working out alone.

David: That kind of standard commercial gym model where everyone just comes in, does their own thing, they’re on machines, headphones in, and they go home—I knew that wasn’t it.

And then I was introduced to CrossFit in late 2003 and I absolutely fell in love with the methodology. One of the things that attracted me to it was that in the early days — and this was prior to YouTube — they would post videos of people doing their workouts. It was a handful of people throwing down in the garage. It had this cool element that I had never seen in fitness before, where it almost reminded me of skate videos growing up. It had that DIY aesthetic to it. Like: Hey, we’re out here, we’re just doing this thing. We’re putting it out to the world. It’s us and our friends throwing down.

So in the beginning, I had no money. I was in New York City, I wasn’t about to take a lease or a loan out on a giant facility. So I just thought: Let me just start this thing in a park.