Grand Rapids Gym Owner Joe Cebulski Went From Two Members to 600 and Added Hyrox

• Joe Cebulski opened 8th Day Gym in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2010 with two members and now runs a 30,000-square-foot facility with more than 600 members.
• He added strength endurance classes at the end of 2025, bought 10 turf lanes and 20 SkiErgs, and now hosts half-day Hyrox simulation events.
• A single simulation day is expected to bring in $7,000 to $9,000, and Cebulski says it is easier to run than a CrossFit competition.

Fifteen Years of Adding One Room at a Time

Joe Cebulski started 8th Day Gym in 2010 in a small rented room inside a Grand Rapids community gym. He had two members. A year later the host gym closed, and Cebulski, a former decathlete, found an abandoned tire shop on the edge of downtown and rented its upper room: about 5,000 square feet of floor and 2,000 square feet of office space. Thirty members followed him there.

He bought the building in 2014. Today he owns all 30,000 square feet, split into five separate spaces that each carry their own revenue stream. “Every time we add a new space, we add a branch of revenue,” he told BarBend’s Emily Beers in 2025.

The gym holds 500 to 600 members depending on the season, with four full-time coaches and 20 part-time coaches. The equipment list reads like a Hyrox shopping list before Hyrox arrived: 60 Concept2 rowers, 44 SkiErgs, 24 Concept2 bikes, 40 Echo Bikes and 60 barbells. A team from the gym, Team 8th Day, also qualified for the 2024 CrossFit Games.

Hyrox Was the Next Room

In early 2025 Cebulski told BarBend he planned to add Hyrox training as the gym’s next service. He followed through. At the end of 2025 he launched strength endurance classes, a Hyrox-flavored format built around endurance and strength. He also invested in 10 turf lanes and 20 SkiErgs.

Membership has grown with the program. The gym went from 500 to 550 members to more than 600, according to an October 7 Athletech News report. Cebulski also coaches Alyssa McElheny, the Grand Rapids marathoner who won the 2026 Hyrox Elite 15 World Championship in her first appearance, and McElheny trains at 8th Day.

Hyrox is the fitness race that pairs eight 1-kilometer runs with eight workout stations: SkiErg, sled push, sled pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, farmers carry, sandbag lunges and wall balls. Every course in every city follows the same order, so a time in Grand Rapids compares with a time in Boston. Organizers say about 1.6 million people raced worldwide in 2026 and expect more than 2 million in 2027.

The Half-Day Simulation Model

The business move to watch is the simulation event. A simulation is a practice race a gym runs on its own floor, with the same stations and distances as the real thing. Cebulski runs his as a half-day event. A few hundred people had registered for the latest one, and he expects it to gross $7,000 to $9,000 in one day.

He compares it with the work of a CrossFit competition, which asks a gym to run judging, heats and scoring. “It only takes up half a day and it’s way easier than running a CrossFit competition,” he said.

For a person curious about trying Hyrox, a simulation offers a low-stakes first look. You pay a gym entry fee instead of a convention-center ticket, race against neighbors, and learn how a sled pull feels after a 1-kilometer run. Local gyms across the country now run them as a bridge to the official races in cities like Chicago, Boston and Tampa.

Other gym owners report similar results. AJ Schrag, a Hyrox Level 1 coach who runs camps at a Stamford, Connecticut gym, saw his first camp gross $15,000 in October 2024, and a later seasonal camp reached $30,000. Schrag’s advice applies to Cebulski’s approach: “You have to build a community around it. You can’t do it as an after thought or a one off.” Larry Reeves of CrossFit Liberate in Athens, Georgia, calls Hyrox “a retention tool” for current CrossFit members whose bodies start to wear down.

The numbers also explain why gym owners across the country keep copying the model. Cebulski’s simulation requires no outside venue and no travel for his members. The people who sign up include regulars, curious friends of regulars and runners who have never lifted a barbell. Each of them leaves with a time they can compare against any official Hyrox result from the same season.

What a Gym Owner Learns From Building Slowly

Cebulski’s path suggests a pattern. He did not start with a big building. He started with two members and a rented room, moved when the room closed, bought the property four years after opening and then filled it one use at a time: CrossFit classes, bootcamps, personal training, open gym and now Hyrox. Bootcamps account for 18 percent of revenue, open gym memberships bring in $6,000 to $8,000 a month, and coaches keep 100 percent of their personal training income.

The equipment he already owned made Hyrox cheap to add. Rowers, SkiErgs and bikes covered several stations, and the new turf lanes handled sleds and carries. A gym with a floor of that size can run a full simulation without renting a venue, which is the cost Sisu Fitness in Minnesota had to cover when it moved its first simulation to a high school stadium.

Members benefit as well. A CrossFit regular who wants a race goal without learning Olympic lifts can join a strength endurance class, run on the turf and enter the next simulation. A newcomer who has never touched a rower can start at the same place. Cebulski told BarBend in 2025 that he could leave the gym for weeks and the business kept running, a sign that the systems he built in each room work without him.

Grand Rapids now has a world champion in training, a gym with more than 600 members and a half-day race that fills on its own. Other owners with a few spare rowers and a patch of floor can see what Cebulski sees: the next room in the building might already be sitting in the gym.