THE PROBLEM WITH DISCOUNT CULTURE FOR GYMS AND RACES

Everyone has a story.

Some stories involve addiction.

Some involve divorce.

Some involve bankruptcy.

Some involve losing a business.

Some involve burying family members.

Some involve watching a friend nearly die in the back seat of your car while you race to the hospital covered in his blood and vomit.

Still another may be sitting down to dinner as a young child, only to wonder why your father just walked through the door with half of his face missing after a failed suicide attempt. 

Trauma is not rare.

It’s common.

Yet somewhere along the way, we’ve created a culture that increasingly treats hardship as currency.

If you’ve suffered, you deserve a discount.

If you’ve struggled, you deserve special treatment.

If life has been unfair, someone else should absorb the cost as if that someone else has been free of any hardships or difficulty themselves. 

The problem is that eventually somebody has to pay for all of those discounts.

And more often than not, it’s the small business owner.

It’s the coach.

It’s the gym owner.

It’s the race directors and builders putting in hours upon hours and dollars upon dollars of marketing just trying to remain relevant.

It’s the person already working sixty hours a week trying to keep the lights on.

It’s the person whose prices are already lower than they should be because they genuinely want to help people.

I see this in fitness all the time.

Organizations partner with gyms and ask them to offer discounted memberships or services to people who are rebuilding their lives. The mission sounds wonderful, and often it is. Fitness absolutely can change lives. Community can save lives.

But there’s a question that almost nobody asks:

Why is the gym expected to carry the burden?

Why is the small business owner—the person who likely sacrificed everything to build that facility—the one expected to subsidize someone else’s recovery?

Why is their struggle less important?

I’ve slept on the floor of my gym while trying to save it from complete collapse during a divorce happening right in the middle of COVID and losing over half of my income because at that moment fitness wasn’t as “essential” as keeping the liquor store and weed dispensary open.

The situation wasn’t unique. I’d had numerous experiences with when I’ve watched my entire world collapse around me and had to completely start from scratch. 

I’ve paid child support while making a fraction of what my ex-spouse earned.

And though I’d battled my own demons with drugs and alcohol, the worst of it came being on the receiving end of someone else’s addiction, being punched while picking them up once again from a bar they couldn’t drive home from or waking up covered in their urine. 

I’ve spent years wondering how I was going to keep not only a business but a sport alive in an industry that decides who matters most by proximity, popularity and politics instead of raw unfiltered dedication. 

I’ve watched opportunities disappear, ideas get stolen, and athletes that did not support our mission or people, leave only to subvert our culture and begin to destroy it.

I’ve watched people I trusted walk away, say nothing when their voice could’ve definitively changed a scenario or opinion, or plot to set me up to get killed, only to have them decide to brutally attack an uninvolved friend as collateral to send a message. 

I’ve experienced enough hardship to fill a book and people keep telling me I should write one. 

Maybe one day I will.

Yet I never once thought the world owed me a discount.

I never believed my struggles entitled me to someone else’s labor.

Instead, I made a decision.

I would invest my time, energy, and whatever money I had into becoming something better than the circumstances I was facing.

That doesn’t make me special.

Millions of people have done the same thing. Most of them far more successfully than me. 

The construction worker waking up at 4 a.m. busting their ass through the summer not quite sure how winter is going to look financially. 

The single mother working two jobs and watching half of her income go to child care.

The veteran rebuilding his life after defending a country that barely acknowledges they even exist because they were lucky enough to survive, but unlucky enough to carry the guilt of doing just that, when many of their brothers and sisters did not.

The small business owner trying to make payroll because they know that their family’s mouths are not the only ones they are responsible for feeding. 

Their stories matter too.

The uncomfortable truth is that adversity is not unique.

It’s universal.

And if everyone receives special treatment because life has been hard, then nobody is actually receiving special treatment at all.

What we’re creating instead is entitlement.

A mindset that says my hardships should reduce my responsibilities while increasing someone else’s.

That isn’t resilience.

It’s dependency.

Real growth happens when we stop asking what the world owes us and start asking what we’re capable of becoming despite what happened to us.

Fitness taught me that.

Obstacle racing taught me that.

Life taught me that.

The obstacle doesn’t care about your trauma.

The mountain doesn’t care about your excuses.

The carry doesn’t get lighter because you’ve suffered.

You either overcome it or you don’t.

And while compassion matters, so does accountability.

The goal shouldn’t be to create a society where everyone receives discounts because they’ve struggled.

The goal should be to create people who are strong enough to overcome those struggles without expecting someone else to carry the load.

Because the strongest people I’ve ever met weren’t the ones who demanded the most accommodations.

They were the ones who endured the most hardship and still found a way to contribute.

Everyone wants to be treated like they’re special. At HartFit, we think everyone is. That’s why we don’t play favorites with pricing. Every athlete earns the same respect, and receives the same commitment from us.