ES business – Might done right

Mira Costa alums Al Ediz Basol, left, and Al Brown opened Gate 14 earlier this year, and have built up a devoted following. Photos

Mira Costa alums Al Ediz Basol, left, and Al Brown opened Gate 14 earlier this year, and have built up a devoted following. Photos

It is approaching 7 a.m. Inside El Segundo’s Gate 14, everyone has collapsed onto the rubber mats that cover the gym’s floor. Some people are stretching out their hips, bowing their heads with the resignation of the penitent. Others sit up with their arms extended behind them at acute angles to their back, leaning into the position with a blank-faced satisfaction that suggests they have found the one group of muscles with enough strength left to support them. And still others lie flat on their backs, the occasional head nod the only evidence they have not simply passed out.

Meanwhile, Ediz Basol and Al Brown, who are both owners and trainers for Gate 14, lead a post-workout discussion. It is part technique overview, part pep talk. They bring up tweaks to certain exercises, and emphasize that form is just as important in isometric holds as it is in the more explosive moves. There is some talk of psychology and motivation, about how to approach challenging sequences. But the most striking thing about the scene is the way Basol and Brown refer to people, including some who were not even there, by their first names.

In the narrowest sense, this is possible because the two track the progress of everyone who comes to the gym, putting times, weight and number of reps into a detailed spreadsheet.

“It keeps our…clients — we don’t like that word a lot — it keeps them accountable. It lets us know where everybody is at. But it also keeps us accountable,” Basol said.

Kevin Halcomb, a former Mira Costa High School classmate of Brown and Basol, started showing up at Gate 14 around the time they signed the lease. He was tired of being out shape, but disliked conventional gyms. On the occasions he did make it there, he often found himself unsure of what to do. “I’d feel stupid and then just leave,” he said. Gate 14 makes him feel as though he is part of something. “For a group workout class, it’s about as personalized as you can get. It’s almost like having a personal trainer,” Halcomb said.

Looking around at those post-workout pow-wows, though, it was not just the two owners who knew first names: almost everyone on the mats nodded in recognition when another person was mentioned. The technique of tracking progress helps ensure that the competitive forces stirred by intense exercise are directed entirely at oneself. The other people in the gym are there for community, not comparison.

Women often outnumber men in Gate 14’s classes.

This is helped along by the fact that the workouts are so challenging that there is little energy available to scope out how fast the guy next to you is moving, or how much weight the woman across the room is pushing. But to say that the workouts at Gate 14 are hard is not so much understating things as it is missing the point. Every workout these days, regardless of the style, seems to emphasize difficulty. Google “fitness” in the South Bay, and this is what you find: “Boot Camp.” “Core Power.” “Afterburn.” “Beastie.” It is as though the old Jerry Seinfeld joke about the American mania for extra-strength pharmaceuticals has been extended to working out: figure out what will kill me, then dial it down just a bit.  Among the downsides to this outlook is that it can intimidate even more than traditional gyms, and make it seem as though fitness is only for a certain type of person. Gate 14 takes the intensity of these workouts, and make them relevant and doable for just about anybody.

Robin Espinoza is a teacher at El Segundo High School. Before joining Gate 14, she estimates it had been 10 years since since she had been to a gym. Today, she goes at least three days a week. She said that classes almost always include people of wildly different fitness levels, from Division One athletes to out-of-shape moms. Once they step inside, she said, the differences disappear. And by the end of the workout, everyone finds themself in the same place: collapsed on the floor, soaking in what Basol and Brown have to say.

“There is something in it, something about the gym, that is not gym like. It’s a community of people willing to push their bodies to the limit,” Espinoza said.

Breaking down, building up

The gym is located in Smoky Hollow, on a steeply inclined portion of Center Street. Climbing Center to the south leads straight into the Chevron Refinery and an entranced marked, yes, Gate No. 14. (Basol and Brown claim to hate fitness “gimmicks” like the “shake weight,” but I did spy one during the workout I did: the default setting of the three treadmills in the gym, used in bursts between other exercises, is an upward grade of 14 percent.) In its former life, the space was one giant machine shop where, post-flight, parts of space shuttles would be disassembled, checked, and put back together before being returned to Edwards Air Force Base.

Gate 14 typifies the industrial chic vibe that has come to predominate in the architecture of fitness over the past decade. The sparse interior is mostly brick and metal, with racks, boxes and not much else. Basol and Brown, along with ample help from friends and some of the people who now work out there, did the buildout themselves. They held their grand opening ceremony the weekend after Labor Day. But the roots of Gate 14 go back far deeper, to Brown’s willingness to push himself as far as he can.

Gary Smith, the head coach of the Mira Costa High School varsity soccer team when Brown attended, recalled that Brown did not make the frosh-soph roster his first year of high school. Brown, Smith recalled, was “a typical little freshman whose skill level was not the greatest.” But Smith immediately recognized an “exceptional spirit and competitive nature.”

“I just kept Al in the program. I told him, ‘This year, maybe just be a part of program, help the coach.’ It took a lot of nerve for him to do that. As a sophomore he came back. and tried out. I thought, ‘I’ve gotta keep this kid.’

Brown played rugby at Princeton, where he came to love the pace of workouts: constantly moving from hitting drills to running to bodyweight exercises kept him from getting bored. Several years ago, back in Southern California and pursuing his PhD in literature at USC, Brown approached Smith about helping with the soccer team. He took over the JV team, then started assisting the varsity team, and is now the day-to-day head coach with Smith. Juniors and seniors on the team now come by the gym one day a week. (During the gym’s construction, two dozen Costa soccer players got their workout in by rolling out the gym’s heavy rubber mats, which weigh 400 to 600 pounds a piece.)

Last year, a friend approached Al and asked him to help him get in shape for walking the John Muir Trail. Brown had no plans to charge, but the friend insisted. At the time, USC had just cut funding literature grad students, and eventually Brown relented, and brought the friend in to the makeshift workout space in the garage of Brown’s El Segundo apartment building.

Brown’s intense, quirky workouts began attracting more people. One of the early visitors to Brown’s garage was Rainy Smith. (No relation to the Mira Costa soccer coach.) Rainy, a physical education teacher at El Segundo High School, had played volleyball in college, ran and did yoga. But she became discouraged when her doctor told her that her triglyceride levels were high and that she needed to exercise more, which seemed neither fair nor possible.

Brown, a longtime family friend, caught her on a down day, and convinced her to come by his garage. It was, she said, “the hardest thing I had ever done. I didn’t throw up, but I came close.” But she kept at it, and it quickly became an irreplaceable part of her life.

“I’m 46 and I feel like I’m in best shape of my life,” she said. “I don’t quite know how to explain it. I feel alive. I’m feeling alive again.”

Rainy brought in several friends from El Segundo, and eventually as many as 15 people were working out in Brown’s three-car garage. Basol, who had been living in the Bay Area, returned to Manhattan Beach where he grew up after his wife was accepted into nursing school. He left his job as a product manager for a video game company and, while looking for work in the same field, called up Brown to try to get in shape. After several months, he was convinced of the impact Brown’s workouts could have. But he also saw that they were outgrowing the constraints of Brown’s garage.

“I’m a believer in taking opportunities that fall into your lap. Saying yes usually leads to good things,” Basol said.

Gym goers say they value the sense of community they find at Gate 14.

Ambition

The optimism that Basol describes could also be called uncertainty. The interplay between these two is at the heart of Gate 14’s workouts.

“If you go into workout feeling confident, knowing you can do it, it’s probably not a good workout. You want to put yourself in that zone where you’re not quite sure you can finish,” Brown said. “We want to be in that mindspace because it’s far more interesting than, ‘Well, I’m going to run two miles on the treadmill today.’ You already know you can do it. Why even do it?”

On the day I attended, the workout was written on the board, but none of the instructions made much sense. What, for example, is a “Sisyphus Run?” The names and the opportunity to explain them are one of the ways Brown works in some of the influences on the gym’s philosophy, from Black Flag to Donald Barthelme.

Like everyone else, I was paired with a partner. He was 10 years younger than me, and had the physique of a lumberjack. Exercises came in sets, and each set of exercises contained two components. He did one while I did the other. Because each part of the pair worked different groups of muscles, there was the opportunity to “recover” even while continuing to work.

At various times, I found myself out of breath. Brown and Basol know how to push, and there is little forgiving about the attitude. But they can also intuit when a person is simply tired and might benefit from a push, as opposed to being genuinely spent and in need of a rest. And surprisingly, the partner arrangement actually made things more doable. There’s  a curious sense of responsibility in the arrangement that trumps any thought of peacocking. It’s the way I imagine two climbers tied together with rope might feel while scaling a mounting.

And, crucially, each exercise is scalable, in this case by reducing the weight. Basol and Brown knew exactly how much weight to give him, and made a pretty great guess about how much to give me. By the end, my “Timber!”-shouting partner and I both had the same exhausted grin on our faces.

Despite the devotion of the adherents, Basol and Brown aren’t fooling themselves about the difficulty of what they have set out to do. Regulars continue to grow in number, and they have developed partnerships with a number of businesses in the area, who send in their employees. But the South Bay is one of the most competitive fitness markets in the country, and there are other gyms and CrossFit studios within walking distance of Gate 14. And while the idiosyncratic workouts tend to win over those who try them, they also scare plenty of people away.

“We get a lot of, ‘I need to get in shape before I come in,’” Basol said. (At the grand opening last month, I spoke to several people who, eyes flitting nervously among the stacked wooden boxes and sharply angled treadmills, said this very thing.)

There is a risk, in other words, that Gate 14 could suffer for its ambition. Basol and Brown speak in lofty terms about their goal of changing how people relate to physical fitness. In another field, this would come off as a marketing ploy, but in today’s fitness world, in which so many businesses find success promising a mindless and anonymous sweat, it is almost an obstacle. Gate 14 asks something more of people, and it’s not something everyone is willing to give. The maneuvers may be similar, but one is unlikely to find a bootcamp peppered with Albert Camus references, or a spin class that ends in a discussion about community building.

“It’s hard to be a new business. It’s really hard to be a new business in a crowded market. And it’s really, really hard to be a new business in a crowded market doing something that’s hard for people to define,” Brown said.

For now, they are getting by on the energy of those who keep showing up. Halcomb recently attended another high-intensity exercise class, just for comparison’s sake, and related the experience to Basol and Brown. After a few months at Gate 14, it was simply not what he was looking for.

“I didn’t know anyone. No one looked at each other, no one gave each other hi-fives,” he said. “You went into a dark room, and, yeah, you got a good workout and sweated a bunch, but then we just left. I want to be in a place where people hang out after class.” ES

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