BY LISSA PHILLIPS | If you’re hanging around near E. Ninth St. and Avenue C, chances are you’ve seen them — a crowd of athletes dodging pedestrians at top speed, entering and leaving a garage boldly painted in black, red and white. The artwork on the otherwise quiet block loudly proclaims: CrossFit East River.
Entering the facility is a different kind of chaos. There is the clanging of barbells echoing within the 2,500-square-foot “box” (CrossFit lingo for “gym”); a voice booming from the speakers instructing athletes to begin their workout in “3, 2, 1 — Go!”; the encouraging cheers of athletes to their last-standing counterparts; and then near silence as athletes collapse to the floor with no more than the sounds of heavy breathing.
A quick scan of the box yields little equipment that gyms typically feature: no treadmills, no ellipticals, no bikes and no lifting machines. Instead, barbells, weights, rowing machines, gymnastics rings and pull-up bars grace the box, sending a message as clear as day straight from CFER’s Web site: “We are the machines.”
In early 2013, what is now CFER was an abandoned garage sporting a “For Rent” sign. The door was cracked open just enough for Eric Leon to crawl under. The former warehouse with pink walls lined with cartons of wine certainly didn’t scream sweat and squats back then, but Leon knew it was just the spot they had been looking for.
“Eric looked in the space, ran back to the truck and said, ‘That’s going to be the gym. You have to go look,’ ” Melissa Leon said. “We ended up signing the lease in May 2013 and opened a month later in June.”
Melissa and Eric Leon are the owners and operators of CFER. They recently celebrated their two-year anniversary of converting the abandoned wine-storage unit into a fully integrated affiliate of CrossFit, a fitness program designed for athletes to perform functional movements that are constantly varied at high intensity.
The couple met in 2009 while Melissa was working as a reporter in New Jersey and Eric was entering his senior year at New York University. Before finding Melissa, Eric found CrossFit by perusing the Internet. He began teaching himself the movements from the then-underground fitness program’s Web site to train for the U.S. Army Airborne School. Eric eventually joined official affiliate CrossFit 516, on Long Island, in 2010. What became a natural workout fit for Eric took Melissa a bit of convincing to convert to.
“I always thought, ‘Eh, I don’t care for this CrossFit thing,’ ” Melissa said. “I didn’t even know what it was.”
She reluctantly surrendered to CrossFit in 2011 after her previous workouts failed to yield the results she was seeking for her approaching wedding.
“It was humbling to say the least,” Melissa said. “I’m a competitive person, so that brought out the competitive ‘me versus me’ factor and I just fell in love with it.”
As Melissa’s affinity for fitness and health intensified, Eric opened up the nonprofit CrossFit affiliate CrossFit Salerno at a NATO base in Khost, Afghanistan, while stationed in that country in 2012. This ignited the idea of opening up a box with his newly CrossFit-converted wife. After a few continents-spanning e-mail exchanges, the couple decided they would pursue opening their own affiliate when Eric returned stateside.
Eric’s research uncovered what they felt was a lackluster presence of fitness facilities in the East Village, fostering the Leons’ decision to set up shop in Alphabet City. The couple instantly felt that the neighborhood’s sense of community directly correlated with the goals they had for the box.
“The East Village feels like a community and a neighborhood to us,” Melissa said. “Whereas you go to some other neighborhoods in the city where there’s definitely community there, but it’s not as apparent as when you come to the East Village.”
Two years and 250 members later, the couple have created their own community consisting of five CrossFit-certified coaches and classes exceeding the regular WOD’s (workouts of the day) that most affiliates solely adhere to. These include SweatRiver (just as the name implies — an hour-long metabolic conditioning session designed to make you sweat), yoga, running classes, open gyms, the Beast River Weightlifting Club (BRWC), and required foundations sessions for beginners.
CFER has also started making more appearances at local weightlifting meets as a team, which Eric highlights as a wonderful means of connection to build CFER’s community outside of the garage’s confines. The East Village affiliate also hosts events such as “WOD and Wine” ladies’ nights and parties at local neighborhood hangouts, bringing members together beyond the barbell.
“We really pride ourselves on having a community,” Melissa said. “We’ve heard feedback from visitors and current members that it’s just a nice community vibe here, and that’s what we’ve always wanted. That’s the type of CrossFit we love and that affected us.”
Community continues to ring true as the Leons look to the future for the box. With two years under their belt, one goal remains constant for the couple in the next two years — ensuring outsiders that this CrossFit community can be anyone’s community.
“We want to make sure we keep CrossFit, as it was intended, accessible to anyone,” Eric said. “Even though CrossFit is an open-source model and everything is online for free, I think it’s invaluable to have a set of eyes watching you do the movements and being involved in a community that cares if you are doing them correctly.
“There’s not a price on that.”
