The History of FitTRAC

By C.J. Easter, Founder and CEO

FitTRAC was officially incorporated in the state of California as D1 Performance Science LLC on February 25th, 2009. I decided to take a risk and build a business by combining my degree in Management Science & Engineering with the love for strength and conditioning I had developed as a football player at Stanford.

I was joined by my co-founders Kenneth Easter and Darren Moore later in the year. We moved in together to a house on Pine Street in Menlo Park and turned our living room into an office with mismatched used office furniture. We called this our ‘world headquarters.’

Don't tell the city of Menlo Park, but I kept the street sign as a reminder of our humble beginnings.

Our history can be divided into 5 distinct eras of the business.

The D1 Performance Science Era (2009-2010)

This was the 'naive hustle' era of the business.

We started as a sports performance training business for youth and teen athletes, so we advertised by attending local youth sporting events and putting flyers on windshields. I also coached football for Gunn High School and the Palo Alto Knights to help build relationships in the community and get access to fields for training.

Our speed & agility camps in the summer of 2009 were the first major success for the business. At the time, it was a unique offering and allowed us to partner with existing sports summer camps and use their customer lists as distribution for our services. After the camps, many of the athletes continued training with us, so we maxed out our schedule hustling from whatever field or track we could get access to across Palo Alto.

This era ended in summer of 2010 when we received a cease & desist letter from a company called D1 Sports. When we googled the business, one of the investors was Peyton Manning, so we sat in our living room world headquarters wondering what we did to get sued by Peyton Manning. It seemed like the end of the world to us at that time, but now, we can look back and laugh because we just had to change the name of the business.

And with the name change came a new era of the business…

The Performance Science Training Institute Era (2010-2018)

Under the pressure of Peyton Manning trying to sack our business, we changed the name of the business to the Performance Science Training Institute. We went by PSTI for short.

(Yes, we were terrible at coming up with business names)

This was an era of expansion for the business. As young inexperienced entrepreneurs, we tried a lot of different stuff. Some things worked, others didn’t.

A pivotal decision that did work during this era was to change the focus of the business from sports performance training to adult training. We found that sports performance was very seasonal, so this shift would allow us to grow the business year round.

And fortunately, fate was on our side as we made this pivot…

As part of our marketing efforts, we sponsored a little league baseball team in Redwood City. It turns out that one of the parents of a kid on the team was Erica Meitz and she happened to be opening a gymnastics studio in Roosevelt Plaza. On top of that, my dad (Dr. Wayne Easter) was her kids’ pediatrician AND her kids were named T.J. and Kenny. (if you didn’t know, I’m C.J. and my brother is named Ken)

So with the stars aligning, we partnered with Erica and Bayshore Elite Gymnastics in 2010 to sublease space and open our first adult training location. And when Erica decided to move her business to a larger location in 2014, we took over the lease and built out our Redwood City gym as you know it today, the ‘World Headquarters 2.0’.

Our Menlo Park location is another example of fate being on our side. After 2 years of driving past Bulldog Gym on my way to our Redwood City location and noticing it wasn't being utilized to it's full potential, I decided to reach out to see if we could form a partnership. And it turned out the owner was my freshman year high school football coach, Lawrence McNeil. So we signed a partnership with him in 2012 and this has been our Menlo Park home since.

Some of the things that we dabbled in during this era that didn’t stick:

• We opened subleased locations with morning-only training sessions in Foster City, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and San Carlos. However, these satellite locations stretched us thin, so we eventually closed them to focus on our Redwood City, Menlo Park, Burlingame, and Santa Clara locations, where we could offer training all day.

• We created two online training products for coaches called the XFT Speed System and the Athlete Training Formula. Overall, these products were a success and we sold thousands of units to coaches across the county, but we ultimately decided that it was a distraction from our core business and sunsetted these products.

And some of the other successes from this era include:

• John Mack joined the team in 2012 and went on to lead our locations in Burlingame and Santa Clara. He helped us build thriving communities at these locations until they were forced to close during the pandemic. John was a vital part of FitTRAC leadership team for 12 years, until he took a leadership opportunity at his church in 2024.

• We had a lot of early success with Groupon. In our first launch with Groupon in 2014, we sold over 700 units of our promotional offer in 24 hours and had to figure out how to handle the unexpected influx. We made it work and some of our members to this day came from those promotions over a decade ago.

We were also early adopters of email marketing, text marketing, and Facebook ads. Most of our members today learned about us through Facebook ads.

• We ran our first Burpees for Boobies event in 2012. We’ve held this fundraiser annually since 2012 and have raised over $38,000 for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation through the Melodi Gheno-Barri Memorial Breast Cancer Fund.

The FitTRAC Coaching Era, Pre-Pandemic (2019-2020)

In 2019, after 10 years in business, we decided to make another name change. This time by choice.

We chose FitTRAC. The TRAC is an acronym:

T- Training

R- Recovery

A- Accountability

C- Community

(People still spell it wrong all the time, but I think we did much better than the first two names)

Also, during this period, we developed our culture statement. You've probably seen it on the walls at the gym:

FitTRAC is a fitness community working together to make the world a happier, healthier, & stronger place.

We are diverse yet we are one family.

We embrace who we are, while striving to get better.

We welcome new challenges & bounce back from adversity.

We make time for our priorities.

We trust the process & enjoy the journey.

We communicate openly & honestly.

We take ownership of our decisions & accept accountability.

We seek progress, not perfection.

We celebrate the small wins & support the success of others.

We are happier, healthier, & stronger together!

This was an era of becoming a mature business who knew exactly who we were, what we stood for, and where we were headed. We had 4 locations (Redwood City, Menlo Park, Burlingame, and Santa Clara) and were saving money to turn our 2 subleased locations in Burlingame and Santa Clara into independent locations.

But the world had other plans...

The Pandemic (2020-2022)

This was the most challenging era of the business, but also the period I am most proud of.

At the lowest point, we lost 60% of our revenue, but these challenges also forced us to be more creative than ever.

On March 16th, 2020, the first shelter in place order was announced in the Bay Area.

After a little panic and a lot of planning, less than 18 hours later, we delivered our first live virtual training session. We used a unique format with a ‘hype coach’ who narrated the workout and gave form corrections and another ‘demo coach’ who demonstrated the exercises. This format provided as close as you could get to an in-gym experience in the comfort of your own living room. We ran regularly scheduled live virtual sessions from that point until September 2024.

During a stressful time, many of our members told us that we were the beacon of consistency and positivity in their day. To be able to provide that despite the turmoil our business faced, I will be forever proud of our team from this period.

Some other success that emerged from the challenges of this era:

• We built the Burn & Earn app. Members of the app earn rewards for exercising from home. I took a shot at raising venture capital for this concept, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to attract enough investor interest.

The app is still going strong today, but we shifted from live virtual fitness to an on-demand model with asynchronous personal coaching.

• We launched the Rebecca D. Thomas Brown Fitness Scholarship for Black Women. The scholarship fund, named after the grandma of FitTRAC founder Darren Moore, improves health outcomes in the Black community by providing 1-year full scholarships for personal fitness coaching for Black women.

Modern Day FitTRAC, Post-Pandemic (2022-Present)

The modern era of FitTRAC has been a time of refocusing and rebuilding.

In 2024, we were finally able to reach our pre-pandemic revenue levels with 2 fewer locations. With fewer locations, our coaching team is not constantly stretched thin, which allows us to develop deeper relationships with our members and deliver a better, more consistent training experience.

As we approach capacity at our existing locations, we are currently working on documenting the 'FitTRAC Playbook' in preparation for future locations.

So stay tuned!

And if you read this far, thank you and I look forward to sharing another 16+ years of history with you in the future.