About three years ago, I started doing CrossFit workouts, following the free routines posted daily on the crossfit.com website. They were brief, they were intense, and they worked. I made faster progress in far less time than with anything else I had tried. I was hooked.

About two and a half years back, I started getting together with a couple of other idiots who had tried this CrossFit thing, for monthly workouts in Central Park. Misery loves company, and I quickly found I had more fun, pushed myself far harder, when working out with a group.

When the weather turned cold, we found a small gym on the Upper East Side that would let us, for ten bucks a head, use their space for our group workouts. A few more people heard about it and joined in, and they, too, made fast, significant progress. People would walk in the door unable to do a pullup, and six months later they’d be doing sets of twenty. Other clients at the gym, who over the same stretch of time might have moved up one notch on the lat pulldown machine, would leave their private trainers to work out with us instead. Then, fairly predictably, the trainers would get the owner to ask us to leave.

Lather, rinse, repeat. We lived through that find a place, grow the group, inadvertently steal clients, get kicked out cycle five times. After which, we were just bright enough to start seeing a pattern.

So, back in January of this year, we opened up a space of our own, the Black Box, just below Times Square. It was only 1500 square feet, up on the fourth floor of an old building. I cash-flowed the place myself, unsure whether it was a really dumb idea to have just opened a gym, unsure of whether anyone might actually show up.

But show up they did. And so did their friends. People would get results and brag about it, and now, ten months later and with zero advertising, we have more than a hundred members and nowhere near enough space.

My brother David very kindly took some time out of running his real estate development company to play unpaid broker, and helped find us a new space. We’re still trading lease documents back and forth, but by December 15th we’re hoping to be in our new home.

This second Black Box is nearly six times the size, and on the ground floor (which is good, as we inadvertently knocked down part of our downstairs neighbors’ ceiling in our current space with all of our jumping around). This time through, the stakes are higher. And so is the rent. I’m equally unsure whether opening this considerably larger space will turn out to be a really dumb idea.

But, as they say in CrossFit: get some, go again.