Ten years of training under the expressway, rain or shine. Ten years of new friends, finish lines and a lot of laughing between sets. Here’s how we’re celebrating, and we want you there.
A once-in-a-decade celebration, and everyone’s invited. RSVP by Nov 8: send “I’m there!” on LINE or RSVP on Meetup, and we’ll add you to the party group with all the details.
Using our fitness for good. We’re spending the day helping out at Sanba Farm, a vegetable farm we’ve known for a decade. Expect fresh air, real work and a very satisfying kind of tired.
Chris co-founded TokyoFit with Allan; Gabe helped relaunch it as Intensity Matters; Allan has led IM since.クリスはアランとともにTokyoFitを立ち上げ、ゲイブはインテンシティ・マターズとしての再出発を支え、以来アランがIMを率いています。
Chapter 1 · 2012 to 2016
The seed
はじまり
Intensity Matters, formerly TokyoFit, started with a small fib at a Japanese-only party. Chris tells it best.インテンシティ・マターズの前身はTokyoFit。始まりは、日本語だけの飲み会でのちょっとした見栄でした。語り手はクリスです。
By Chris Colucci, who co-founded TokyoFit with Allan文：クリス・コルッチ（アランとともにTokyoFitを創設）
This is the story of TokyoFit, the scrappy outdoor gym that came before Intensity Matters, told by one of the two guys who started it.
One evening in September of 2012, I was invited to a Nihongo Nomi Kai at an izakaya. Normally, a nomikai is a drinking party, but this one was a play on words: nomi as in “only.” Japanese only. For the entire evening, any language other than Japanese was off the table.
I was sitting next to a robust Spanish man whom I had never met before. This gentleman loved to talk, which made him the perfect partner for a Japanese-only evening.
Somewhere between robots and tapas, he asked me about my job. At the time I was working as a high school teacher at an international school, and that is what I said any time someone asked about work. In that moment, though, I chose to answer differently, and in my second language, no less.
“I’m a personal trainer.”
Now, it was true that I taught P.E. classes as the school’s athletic director. At any rate, I said it. And now it existed in the universe as a fact. I was more than surprised by his response.
“Oh, really? I’m actually looking for a trainer. Can I hire you?”
“Let’s start on Monday.”
And with that, my career trajectory pivoted. Sometimes you are the only person who can give yourself permission. It helps to do it in a second language, where you don’t have the vocabulary to talk yourself out of it.
Read the full story ↓
To be fair, the fitness instructor in me had been warming up for a while at the international school. The school had no weight room, no turf, and no fancy sports facilities of any kind, so my P.E. classes became exercise classes. I borrowed liberally from my years training for competitive hockey. I also borrowed from Min Hur, my childhood Taekwondo master, who used to walk around the dojo stepping on our stomachs while we held leg raises. At nine years old, I thought this was absolutely brutal. Fast forward twenty years, and I was doing the exact same thing to high schoolers in Tokyo.
Some of the students actually enjoyed it. They wanted more and more, and pushed me to deliver not just great workouts but to do them alongside them. One student, Gabe, set the standard for what honest, hard work looked like. He led by example and gave me someone to point to when other students were slacking off. Remember that name.
Meanwhile, I studied, earned my NSCA-CPT, drank the CrossFit Kool-Aid, and fell in love with the work. By the time I met that robust Spaniard, the only thing I hadn’t done was get paid for it.
After that first client, I told anyone who would listen that I was taking on clients. But one client is a hobby. If this was going to become something real, I needed help, and I knew exactly who to call: my friend Allan. We had met six years earlier in Nagasaki Prefecture as two young English teachers in the Japanese countryside. He was also the most relentlessly positive person I knew. He came on as my partner from day one and designed our first logo. I didn’t know it yet, but one day he would take what we planted and grow something entirely his own.
The early days: gear laid out under the expressway.
The name came out of a long brainstorm at a Starbucks in Hiroo with Dave Gutteridge, by far the most tenured TokyoFit and Intensity Matters participant. We burned through a pile of names that really did not work, including Edo Fitness and Samurai CrossFit, before TokyoFit popped into existence. Surprisingly, the .com domain was available.
Our home was a park in Shirokane, tucked under the Shuto Expressway. If you train with Intensity Matters, you know the spot. It hasn’t moved. In a lot of ways, neither has the grit.
We trained during typhoons, in below-zero cold, and in the type of Tokyo summer heat that melts sneakers. Allan had a playlist ready for any occasion and always sang along, whether the rest of us could still breathe or not.
The police visited so often we should have charged them a drop-in fee. One evening, a TV crew filming nearby politely asked us to keep it down. We tried to politely explain that it was a physical impossibility.
Behind the curtain, it was absolute chaos. All of our equipment lived outside the front door of my apartment building, a mere 50 meters from the workout spot. My building management did not appreciate this. First came the warnings, then the notices, then notices about the notices. The simple solution was to rent a storage unit, but none were available, so I put our name on a waiting list.
With nowhere else to go, the gear moved inside my apartment, giving a whole new meaning to “home gym.” Every evening we emptied it into the park, and every night we hauled it back in. In a moment of creative desperation, I slipped notes written in Japanese into the mailboxes of neighbors with garages, asking to rent a corner. Unsurprisingly, none of them took up a foreigner’s strange offer to fill their garage with kettlebells. Then, at long last, our name came up on the waiting list. The gear moved into its new storage unit, and I returned to a regularly furnished home.
Kettlebells up, TokyoFit era.
Word spread, and soon we were training more than just the crowd under the highway: teachers at another school, Tokyo International School, the Tokyo Goannas Aussie Rules football club, even a group of Filipino martial artists practicing Kali down in Yokohama. Our biggest gig came from a participant who worked at Google. She invited us in, and at our peak we ran classes there up to twice a week for 30 people at a time.
By 2016, TokyoFit had become two different animals: the corporate classes and the community under the highway. With my first child on the way, I couldn’t feed both. So Allan and I sat down and split it in two. I kept the TokyoFit name and focused on the corporate work. Allan took the community under the highway and, with Gabe, the standard-setter from my P.E. classes, pitching in on ideas for the IM logo, gave it a name and an identity of its own: Intensity Matters.
Then Allan made it his own. He kept the grit, brought a sprinter’s obsession with Olympic-level form to every movement, and built a community around it. Intensity Matters became more than a workout: weekend hikes, park picnics, beach cleanups, board game nights, retreats, and race days the crew takes on together. By now, plenty of members have been training with Allan longer than TokyoFit even existed. And through it all, Allan has stayed the most relentlessly positive person I know.
TokyoFit was the seed. Intensity Matters is what grew. It’s still the same park and the same highway, but the music is much better.
To everyone who has ever trained under that highway, through typhoons, cold, and sneaker-melting heat: thank you for showing up, and for bringing your friends. You’re the reason it’s still there.
