Denver-Born DEKA Wants 3,000 Gyms Hosting Races and Says Most Affiliates Earn $5,000 to $20,000

• DEKA began as a 2019 test inside a rented, abandoned Kmart in downtown Denver, and its founders now want 3,000 gyms hosting 10,000 events a year.
• Morning Chalk Up reports that affiliate gym owners pay $159 a month and that most earn $5,000 to $20,000 from DEKA events.
• Newcomers can start with DEKA Strong, a ten-zone test with no running, at a local gym before they try an arena race.

The Plan to Turn Every Neighborhood Gym Into a DEKA Start Line

Yancy Culp set out to build a race that people at very different fitness levels could finish side by side. He had spent six years at Spartan Race and has about 30 years in fitness, and in 2019 he pitched the idea to Spartan founder Joe De Sena. The result was DEKA FIT. Before it launched, Culp and his team tested the format for three and a half months inside a rented, abandoned Kmart in downtown Denver, Colorado. The volunteers ranged from CrossFit Games competitors to people who had not trained in years. Culp described the target as a “globally recognized sport designed for all levels,” according to Morning Chalk Up.

Seven years later, DEKA operates in 14 countries and says hundreds of thousands of people have raced in the years after its 2019 launch. The company, part of Boston-based Spartan, now puts most of its attention on a quieter product than the big arena weekends: events held inside ordinary gyms. Culp told Morning Chalk Up that about 90 percent of the company’s focus sits on gym events, and that the goal is more than 3,000 gyms hosting 10,000 events a year.

What a DEKA Race Asks of You

The flagship DEKA FIT is a 5K built around ten functional zones, with a 500-meter run before each one. Athletes work through 30 alternating reverse lunges, a 500-meter row, 20 box jumps or step-overs, 25 medicine-ball sit-up throws, a 500-meter SkiErg, a 100-meter farmers carry, 25 calories on an air bike, 20 dead-ball overs, a 100-meter sled push and pull on magnetic-resistance sleds, and 20 burpees. Racers can enter alone, as a pair, or in a team of four. The company calls a racer’s finishing time a DEKA Mark, and every Mark lands on a global leaderboard.

Gyms rarely run the full arena version. They pick from a menu of shorter formats:

• DEKA MILE: the same ten zones, with a 160-meter run between each instead of 500 meters.
• DEKA STRONG: the ten zones with no running at all.
• DEKA ATLAS: a ten-event strength test.
• DEKA ULTRA: five DEKA FIT races back to back.

Speed benchmarks give new racers something to measure against. A DEKA FIT under 30 minutes counts as elite for men, and Morning Chalk Up calls a sub-32-minute women’s time elite beyond elite. Sam Briggs, the 2013 CrossFit Games champion, once held the DEKA STRONG world record, and HYROX World Champion Lauren Weeks holds the women’s world record. Most people at a gym event never chase those numbers. They want to finish, and the format lets them.

A Fort Wayne Gym Shows What an Affiliate Event Looks Like

Georgetown Square Anytime Fitness in Fort Wayne, Indiana, shows the model at work. In March 2025 the gym held a DEKA day that its co-owner, Rachele Jordan, said was the first event in Indiana to run both DEKA STRONG and DEKA ATLAS on the same day, according to WPTA. Ricardo Mullinax, a Spartan DEKA Roadshow affiliate, coordinator and coach, helped the gym put it together. Local businesses donated giveaways.

Seventy people took part, and their ages ran from 14 to 73. Some drove in from Indianapolis. That mix is the point of the affiliate pitch. A 14-year-old, a 73-year-old and a CrossFit regular can all stand in the same room, do the same ten zones, and post times to the same leaderboard.

For an owner, the other half of the pitch is who walks through the door. Culp told Club Solutions Magazine in 2022 that about 40 percent of event participants had never been inside the host gym. A race day doubles as a free trial for hundreds of strangers.

What Owners Pay, What They Say They Earn

Morning Chalk Up reports that affiliate gym owners pay $159 a month and keep a share of the registration fees from the events they host. Spartan supplies T-shirts and finisher medals and gives access to the worldwide leaderboard. Affiliate events typically draw 50 to 100 people, compared with about 2,000 at the large arena weekends. Culp said most affiliates earn $5,000 to $20,000 from DEKA events, and that one gym made $11,000 from the registrations for a single event. Those figures come from the company, and I could not verify them independently.

The size of the network depends on which count you read. Morning Chalk Up puts it at about 600 affiliated gyms hosting roughly 8,000 events worldwide. When DEKA announced its Gym vs Gym competition earlier this year, the company said its network held more than 1,000 affiliate gyms. In March 2024 DEKA reported more than 300 US affiliates and planned more than 750 US events for the year as it signed on as the exclusive event host for CAMP GLADIATOR members nationwide.

Gym vs Gym, held October 2 to 4, 2026, shows where the company wants the network to go. Affiliate gyms ran heats of the DEKA MILE in their own buildings, and members and non-members could both enter. Scores fed one global leaderboard, with gyms ranked by the average DEKA Mark across age-group and team categories. Gyms that reached a minimum participation level competed for two titles, Fastest Gym and Highest Participation, and the winners receive the Golden RAM Trophy. I found no published results yet.

The gym events feed the arena weekends. At DEKA FIT Florida in Fort Lauderdale on September 12 and 13, 2026, 1,477 people raced at the Broward County Convention Center. Of those competitors, 57.9 percent were first-timers and 54 percent were women. The average age was 39, and about eight in ten came from Florida. Atlanta is next on the US calendar, with a DEKA FIT weekend planned for November at the Georgia World Congress Center.

How a Newcomer Could Start

The easiest way in is a local affiliate. Search the DEKA affiliate list for a gym near you and ask which formats it runs. DEKA STRONG suits anyone who does not run. The ten zones need no mileage. DEKA MILE adds short 160-meter runs, which most people can handle after a few weeks of jogging. Both give you a DEKA Mark on the global leaderboard, so you can compare your time with racers in Fort Lauderdale or Fort Wayne.

Training can stay simple. The movements are lunges, rowing, carrying, pushing, pulling and burpees, so a few sessions a week that cover those patterns will cover most of the race. A coach at the host gym can show you the zone standards before race day.

For the sport, the affiliate push is a bet that hybrid fitness will grow through hometown gyms as much as through convention-center weekends. If Culp reaches 10,000 gym events a year, a first-time racer in most US cities would live a short drive from a start line. If the earnings claims hold up for owners, those start lines will keep opening.