S.F. CrossFit is closing. Here’s what Bay Area fitness culture is losing

When San Francisco CrossFit co-founders Kelly and Juliet Starrett reopened their gym outdoors this summer, they had to adapt the handshakes that usually start each class for the pandemic. Handshakes were verboten, of course, but members of the city’s first CrossFit gym — one of the first two dozen or so worldwide — would tap elbows or wave before the workout began, a small gesture that spoke to a larger culture of inclusion and community.

Before people began squatting or sprinting, the ritual was a way of forcing them to see each other. “People are looking for reasons to belong to each other, but they need a catalyst for that,” Kelly Starrett said. “Our gym gave us that opportunity to do that.”

But the challenges of operating in 2020 — the reopening fits and starts, the strict limits on capacity, the dramatic drop in revenue as people left the gym or left town — proved too much for the couple and their business. On Sunday, Nov. 15, the gym will hold its final WOD, or workout of the day, then close permanently.

Before CrossFit was a household name and the CrossFit Games aired on CBS, Kelly and Juliet Starrett started doing deadlifts, burpees and thrusters in their Richmond District backyard. Both are former competitive whitewater paddlers (Juliet was a two-time world champion), and Kelly, a physical therapist, was interested in re-creating the coaching and training environment he’d experienced as an athlete.

Soon a few neighbors and friends had joined in, and the 5:30 a.m. workouts were drawing some unwelcome attention. When a guy yelled at them from the window of an adjacent building to shut up, using an obscenity, they decided it was time to move.

Kelly Starrett was a manager at the Presidio Sports Basement, and in late 2005, the owners agreed to let him use their parking lot. For its first seven years, the pioneering San Francisco CrossFit gym was essentially a shipping container, some canopies and a portable toilet on the asphalt.

But to early adopters, it offered something new.

“If you wanted to exercise besides biking or doing an outdoor sport, it was 24 Hour Fitness, Club One, Equinox, the big-name gyms,” said Juliet Starrett. “But boutique fitness did not exist. Everybody takes for granted on every corner there’s a Barry’s Bootcamp and a SoulCycle … but it did not exist.”

Working out in the parking lot, she says, felt like being part of an emerging phenomenon. CrossFit offered a new way of looking at fitness focused on functional movement, group classes and high-intensity workouts, but it also felt like joining a cultural movement, one that said your gym is your community.

Diane Fu was a fitness professional who started taking classes in the parking lot, then was coaching within a year. “It felt like home,” she says. “I’ve been with the gym for 13 or 14 years now, and I’ve made my best friends. I’ve traveled with these people, I’ve been to their weddings.”

“Without really trying, we kind of created a megachurch in San Francisco CrossFit,” Juliet Starrett said. “A lot of people don’t go to church. People need an actual live place to go to make connections and meet their spouses and create a community. That’s what San Francisco CrossFit has been for them. The fitness side is a sideshow.”

But fitness was also a powerful draw. The gym has become a destination for professional athletes and serious amateurs, and a home for specialized coaching dedicated to endurance sports, Olympic lifting and adaptive fitness. On any given day, Kelly Starrett said, you might have an NFL player dropping in for physical therapy or former UFC fighter Georges St-Pierre training alongside a mom from San Francisco.

As the gym’s fame grew, so did the couple’s. Kelly Starrett became a star of the CrossFit coaching world and an evangelist for mobility, publishing the New York Times best-seller “Becoming a Supple Leopard” and appearing on “60 Minutes.” With Juliet, he created virtual coaching service the Ready State, working with branches of the military, professional sports franchises and Olympians.

“He’s more than a celebrity, he’s an icon,” says TJ Belger, owner of TJ’s Gyms in Marin County. When athletes today use lacrosse balls as a part of their daily recovery routine, that came from Kelly Starrett, he said.

Kelly Starrett encouraged the coaches who gravitated around him to go down the rabbit hole of their personal interests and build their own businesses. What Belger described as the Kelly Starrett “vortex” produced coaches like Adrian Bozman and Fu, who’ve reached their own fitness-celebrity status.

“We refer to our gym as a teaching hospital where people come and learn,” said Kelly Starrett, who taught coaching clinics and a free class for trainers.

Nate Helming joined San Francisco CrossFit reluctantly in 2010 as an injured triathlete, “intimidated by these very large people lifting weird-shaped weights outside.” But physical therapy wasn’t working, and someone suggested he seek out Kelly Starrett: “There’s this crazy tattooed guy who we think is a physical therapist who may be able to help you.

“It kind of changed everything for me.”

Helming went on to teach a class for endurance athletes at the gym and founded the Run Experience, an online training program for runners with half a million YouTube subscribers. He sees his success linked closely to the gym, calling it a “slingshot (for) my coaching career.”

Juliet Starrett said about 20 Bay Area gyms and coaching businesses trace their roots to San Francisco CrossFit. Fu created Fu Barbell, dedicated to making Olympic weightlifting more accessible. Before the pandemic, she taught all her classes out of the 5,500-square-foot space in the Presidio.

But 2020 has been cruel to small businesses and perhaps gyms especially. Before the pandemic, San Francisco CrossFit had 325 members and more private training clients. In the 90 days leading up to shelter-in-place on March 17, 700 visitors came through the doors.

“The success of our business was dependent on volume,” Juliet Starrett said.

The past eight months, the Starretts said, have been a roller coaster through constantly changing health orders. They’ve done Zoom classes and lent equipment for members to use at home. They’ve cut capacity and moved everyone outside — back to the asphalt.

Membership was down around 70%, and they’ve been losing money every day. Operating a brick-and-mortar gym in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country with some of the toughest coronavirus restrictions ceased to make sense.

“If the city of San Francisco said, ‘No matter what, by Jan. 1, barring a giant surge, you’re going to be open at 50%,’ we could have run some numbers, maybe done some advanced planning, maybe decided if we could make a go of it,” Juliet Starrett said.

But the uncertainty has been crushing.

“We certainly don’t blame San Francisco for the closing of our gym,” Kelly Starrett said, but he felt it didn’t have to come to this. “This is the cost of the choices that we made as a community and as a culture and as a society. … What Julie and I feel is, we’re beyond anger. We just feel lost.”

Without the coronavirus, Belger said San Francisco CrossFit would have gone on forever. “It would take a worldwide pandemic to take this thing down,” he says. “Imagine if Yankee Stadium just overnight ceased to exist. … It’s not the Florida Marlins; it’s not some expansion team.”

There’s a map of the world on the wall of San Francisco CrossFit, covered in pins where visitors have marked their hometowns across the globe. With the exception of a few blank spots on countries like North Korea, it’s packed, a visual representation of the community the Starretts have created over barbells and mats.

If the gym were closing outside of the pandemic, they would’ve thrown a big party with a taco truck and music. Probably 500 people would’ve come to break bread and reminisce, Kelly Starrett mused.

“It would be a lot easier if we could process,” he said, “if we had some closure.”

Sarah Feldberg is a The San Francisco Chronicle’s Culture Desk editor. Email: sarah.feldberg@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sarahfeldberg