Connecticut Couple Turned Garage Workouts Into a DEKA Podium Gym

• Kevin and Jess Gregory started coaching clients out of their garage in Wallingford, Connecticut, when pandemic closures shut down the big-box gym where they worked, then opened Underdog Fitness in 2021.
• Underdog Fitness now regularly sends athletes to the podium at the DEKA World Championship, drawing racers from across New England to train for the sport’s Fit, Mile, and Strong formats.
• DEKA racing tests ten standardized fitness zones broken up by running, and the sport offers three formats so newcomers can pick how much running they want before they ever line up.

A Two Car Garage Turned Into One of New England’s Busiest DEKA Gyms

When the pandemic closed the big-box gym where Kevin and Jess Gregory coached, the couple did not stop training people. They moved it into their garage. Clients kept showing up for one-on-one and group sessions in a space built for a car, not a barbell, and the demand kept growing past what two garage bays could hold. In 2021, Kevin and Jess opened Underdog Fitness in Wallingford, Connecticut, with a plan to run personal training and group classes for anyone chasing a healthier routine. They did not expect what came next.

Underdog Fitness has become one of the more recognized gyms in DEKA, the indoor fitness racing series built by Spartan. Kevin, known across the sport by his online handle Bubbles the Clowne, and Jess have built a roster of athletes who regularly finish on the podium at the DEKA World Championship, the sport’s season-ending event. Racers travel from across Connecticut and the wider New England region to train there, drawn by a coaching staff that has produced results at the sport’s highest level while still running the kind of walk-in classes the gym opened with.

What Racing DEKA Actually Involves

DEKA is built around ten standardized stations, called DEKA Zones, that test strength, power, and endurance in roughly three-minute bursts each: sled pushes, rowing, farmers carries, ski erg pulls, wall balls, and more. The format is identical at every DEKA event worldwide, so a finish time posted in Wallingford means the same thing as one posted in Fort Worth or Orlando. The sport offers three ways in. DEKA FIT adds a 500-meter run before each zone, for a full 5K of running mixed into the circuit. DEKA MILE shortens that run to 160 meters between zones, for a mile of total running. DEKA STRONG drops the running altogether and runs the ten zones back to back, a pure strength test that gives newer athletes, or people still building their running fitness, a way to compete without a running background.

The qualifying calendar builds toward Fort Worth, Texas, where the 2026 DEKA World Championship runs December 10 through 13. Athletes earn their spot through sanctioned events held across the country all year, with the final qualifying weekend for DEKA FIT landing in late September. That structure means a gym like Underdog spends most of its year with one eye on a local Tuesday night class and the other on a national leaderboard, coaching the same athlete through a first DEKA STRONG and, a year or two later, a qualifying FIT run.

A Gym Built Around Community First

The Gregorys have said the goal at Underdog was never just to build a training facility for competitive racers. It was to build a place where members feel like they belong the moment they walk in, and where a win counts the same whether it happens on a world championship stage or in a Tuesday class. That approach has carried the gym past its original scope: what started as personal training out of a garage now trains members for Spartan obstacle racing, HYROX, and DEKA all under one roof, with the competitive results functioning as proof of concept rather than the whole point.

New England’s DEKA Pipeline

Podcasters and race organizers who cover the DEKA circuit regularly point to Underdog as one of the sport’s deeper benches of talent, a gym whose athletes show up event after event and frequently land on a podium. Obstacle Running Adventures, a podcast that has covered DEKA racing for years, has interviewed Underdog athletes on multiple occasions and named the gym one of a handful it consistently returns to for coverage, citing the number of Underdog racers who make it onto a DEKA World Championship podium in a given year. That kind of depth does not happen by accident in a sport still building its US footprint. It takes a coaching staff willing to run the same zone drills over and over with someone who has never raced, plus enough of a competitive culture that a first-timer training next to a national qualifier picks up habits just by watching.

The gym’s growth mirrors what has happened to DEKA more broadly across the country. Sanctioned DEKA events now run nearly every weekend somewhere in the United States, from a DEKA STRONG and MILE double-header in Cordova, Maryland, to a DEKA FIT weekend built into New York City each fall. Age group and Elite divisions race side by side at most events, so a first-timer can watch a qualifier attempt a fast lap through the same zones, minutes apart, on the same floor. That structure, borrowed loosely from road racing, is part of what has let gyms like Underdog build a training program around racers at every level rather than chasing a small pool of elites.

What It Takes to Start

For someone who has never tried DEKA, the entry point is simpler than it looks from the outside. A newcomer can walk into an affiliated gym, start with DEKA STRONG to learn the ten zones without worrying about pace, and add running distance once the movements feel controlled. Every zone is coached and standardized, which means the same farmers carry a first-timer learns in a Tuesday class is the exact test they would face at a world championship. Underdog’s own path, from a two-car garage to a gym with a national reputation, is a reminder of how much of that sport in the United States still gets built by people who started with nothing more than a client list and a folding mat.