Gainesville Health and Fitness (GHF) is nearing the grand opening of a new outdoor fitness pavilion, Echo, located at the brand’s main campus in Gainesville, Florida.
The 6,000-square-foot pavilion will be the largest outdoor training facility in the area, and will feature a roof, outdoor fitness equipment and programming such as boot camps and HIIT.
“Obviously, what we learned this past year is there are a lot of people who like training in an outdoor-type environment,” said Joe Cirulli, the founder and CEO of Gainesville Health and Fitness. “I wanted to be able to add more programming to the club, and this adds a really nice element to our center. It gives us the opportunity to add new things and experiment.”
According to Cirulli, outdoor fitness has bloomed in popularity, with people paying top-dollar for access to similar facilities in the area. As a result, the pavilion is a great value-add for GHF members looking to participate in outdoor programming while retaining access to the many other amenities the fitness facility offers.
“They’ll have access to what would be a very expensive offering anywhere else,” said Cirulli.
Although the outdoor fitness pavilion is close to completion, it required out-of-the-box thinking to come to fruition. Because the facility was short on space — despite being 80,000 square feet in size — the pavilion will sit on top of a 10,000-square-foot retention pond on campus. GHF worked with Rudy Fabiano on the project.
The outdoor fitness pavilion’s name, Echo, is also significant, said Cirulli.
For one, Cirulli likened the space to an “echo” of the main campus, similar in shape. In addition, the facility’s acoustics have an echoing quality.
When Fabiano heard the proposal of Echo as the name, he was inspired to write the following:
“Our life is a series of echoes, what we say, do and act upon leads to the next one. The same is true of a company. Its guiding principles, its actions, its why, its people leads to the next echo. The echo is what created GHF. The words of a mother repeated over and over. The lessons of a father learned over time. From our humble beginnings to a business recognized across the globe, it has been a continual echo across time. This is our newest echo. It represents all of our thinking and of our actions and ‘why’ we even exist: To give you, our members, what you need to get the most out of your life. The Echo is not just an abstract, but as real as its source, only in another time and place.”
The Echo project is expected to be complete at the end of this month, August 2021.
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Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.
